I’m really enjoying Fedora (just switched from Ubuntu and previously Debian). More current than Debian, doesn’t have Ubuntu’s canonical baggage, and more stable than Arch (nothing wrong with Arch, it’s just more bleeding edge than I want for anything other than experimenting. YMMV. And Arch documentation is fantastic - I use it to help unravel issues/find solutions on other distros after a bit of translation and sanity checks).
Fedora is well inside the Gnome camp but it’s basically unaltered so you feel freer to tweak and make it your own. (you can obviously run any environment you want).
Not sure if Red Hat’s nonsense will infect Fedora down the road but I can switch it up if I feel like it later. (for a server, I’d just do Debian or possibly Ubuntu.)
Unfortunately, my main machine remains Windows with WSL. Too many things (of what I need) just won’t run on Linux…
I recently started using Fedora 39 KDE Spin as my main driver. It mostly just works out of the box. You’ll need to add some repos to get media support etc. but that is just a quick Google-search away.
I have been using Debian for a long time for my home server and to be honest, and it never once failed me. In my experience, Debian on a server is just rock solid. When I made the switch from Win11 (I don’t like a snooping AI in Notepad) to Debian (stable) I wasn’t that happy. Apps were outdated, Wayland was f**king things up, etc. So I switched to Debian testing (trixie) and installed KDE the manual way. That way I hoped to get a really ‘clean’ system, leaving some of the standard apps (that I wouldn’t be using anyway) behind. Although Debian testing seemed really stable, the ‘manual way’ left me with some quirks that left me unhappy. For a reason I can’t remember, I decided to try out Fedora 39. And I have to say, it has been great. Up to date apps, no unexpected errors or crashes, etc.
It’s a miracle we have wine at all, reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy. Be grateful for what we have (which is already enough to run a ton of software really well)
reverse engineering an entire operating system isn’t easy
Have you noticed the the NT / Windows XP source code was leaked years ago. There’s isn’t much of a need to “reverse engineering”, it’s just about reading their implementation and providing an alternative implementation that doesn’t copy code…
Didn’t companies have to set up ethics walls to protect against lawsuits for things like that?
What are you talking about? There’s copyright infringement that when you copy the leaked Windows source code into something like Wine or ReactOS and then there’s reading it to understand what Microsoft did and coming up with an alternative implementation that will provide a compatible API for programs to use. There’s no “gray zone” or ethical BS - it’s either copied or not.
See the bit about examples and IBM. While you could probably look, the easiest way to defend against a giant tech company’s legal team is to do the clean room setup
Guess that rule was in place because some people would look at it and proceed to copy it. The rule should be “if you copy code from Microsoft you’ll be kicked from the project and the code removed”. While I see why this is place and what it protect the project from this is also a very big roadblock to the project’s evolution and a clear example of what’s wrong with it and why we still have compatibility issues.
Nope, because if you write code and they can prove you were influenced by leaked proprietary code in any way then they will sue the shit out of you and shut you down.
Also see Halt and Catch Fire for a show with this as a plot point. It’s very real though.
Well at least I’m not here perpetuating the delusion that desktop Linux desktop is as user-friendly and productive for every use-case as Windows and macOS are. If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.
Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.
It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.
Just buy a windows license next time.
Here’s the thing, I can get a legit Windows license by various means. I don’t need to go into microsoft.com and get it for 300$, a second hand windows machine with an old i5 CPU will sell for 50$ and that includes a valid Windows license. Computers selling on retail stores also include a Windows license, students can get them for free etc. what else?
Well at least I’m not here perpetuating the delusion that desktop Linux desktop is as user-friendly and productive for every use-case as Windows and macOS are.
Wait, are you saying Windows and macOS are user-friendly and productive for every use-case? That’s hilarious!
Oh yes, I value and like Linux a LOT… just not for desktop as it doesn’t deliver as everyone says it does. To be fair I believe that only someone who values Linux as much as I do would be comfortable to criticize what’s wrong with it.
Well I can’t spend all my time trying to fix ridiculous issues that would’ve been fixed by now if people had the balls to look at Windows XP source code…
You’re doing something worse, complaining about something that no one really does. The average Linux user doesn’t want the average computer user to install Arch Linux. Stop spamming this garbage.
Instead of leaving snide comments like this, you can use your head to open up an IDE, implement the features you want, and make a pull request. Keep it to yourself
My vote is Fedora. It offers fresh yet stable packaging, and a polished experience that you can rely on. You can then use flatpaks for even newer apps, or opt to run Arch in a container with distrobox/toolbox and play with as many cutting edge apps as you want, all as if they were installed on the host.
Finally, if you like what you see in Fedora, consider trying Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, or any of their other immutable distros.
Use openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling release distribution with the best a great KDE Plasma implementation.
Now, your specific question boils down to choosing between Arch and Fedora, since, arguably, Endeavour OS is actually Arch Linux. Now, as you’re willing to use a Qt-based DE, specifically Plasma, I’d say none of your options are ideal. That’s why I mentioned openSUSE Tumbleweed, but, for you, I’d say Arch Linux, however, you currently use Arch Linux, hence, you should just switch to the Plasma DE.
All modules that call a Unix library contain WoW64 thunks to enable calling the 64-bit Unix library from 32-bit PE code. This means that it is possible to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation. This is called the new WoW64 mode, as opposed to the old WoW64 mode where 32-bit applications run inside a 32-bit Unix process.
Does this change run the 32-bit .exe using x86_64 instructions? From the description it just sounds like it allows 64-bit Linux libraries to be used in place of 32-bit ones, but that the Windows layer still operates in native 32-bit mode. This means there is still a need to emulate 32-bit x86 instructions which I don’t think box64 can do at this time (x86_32 translates to arm32 with box86, x86_64 translates to arm64 with box64). If box86 could translate x86_32 to arm64 then this might work as Wine would handle the conversion between 32 and 64 bit addressing and argument passing into the libraries but I’m not familiar with the inner workings there.
Old Proton builds probably won’t backport this (unless it’s completely isolated, idk the code layout of Wine). But are old Proton builds still necessary? Occasionally there’s regressions, but are there really any games that require like a 2 year old Proton build?
There are, but it’s complicated. Doom (2016) for instance - it doesn’t handle the very large Vulkan swap chain that’s possible on some modern graphics cards, crashes on start-up. Someone patched Proton around that time so that Doom would start; the patch was later reverted since it broke other games. Other games based off of that engine - couple of Wolfensteins, Doom Eternal - have the problem fixed in the binaries, and so run on up-to-date Proton, but depending on your hardware, only a few specific, old, versions of Proton, will do for Doom.
Regressions get fixed - that’s okay. Buggy behaviour which depended on regressions that got fixed - that’s a problem.
If you meant onlyoffice, then I think it promises better compatibility with ms office stuff and also itsinterface is closer to it, compared to libreoffice.
Collabora is a company, they funded some work on OnlyOffice which is a FOSS office suite like LibreOffice. I think they also worked on making it web hostable like Google docs (through nextcloud?)
Edit: Apparently now there’s also collabora office suite?
OnlyOffice and LibreOffice are both very good. The former promises better compatibility with ms office files and has an easier interface imo. LibreOffice seems way more featureful
As for why fewer distros have onlyoffice in their repository, maybe because it’s relatively newer? Anyway, it’s available through flatpak and that’s how I use it. I haven’t tried Collabora online stuff
Is abiword foss?
It is the most reasonable of editors/wp I have found, LO gives me a headache looking at 1000 menus/items.
The gtk2 version is stable as a rock, despite of some bad wrap it got last few years.
How about this then. While your neighbors are using wine, it attracts more commercial attention to develop the open source projects that you do actually use. It’s so impactful that you measurably benefit directly from its contributions, like optimizations to the Linux kernel.
You don’t have to agree with it, but you cannot deny the increased investment in open source projects it causes.
For a painfully blatant example see: Steam Deck.
Also for the binary blob purists, how do you feel about all that closed source firmware underpinning your pure world? Isn’t it practically impossible to get completely open source firmware down to the silicon? And even then, do you trust the silicon? Are you running everything on FPGAs?
Hi! “Binary blob purist” here! Yes, it bothers us that so much firmware is proprietary, but we are working to fix that :).
It is possible to have fully free firmware on certain select devices.
The silicon is unchangeable, much like a chair is unchangeable. So being concerned about changing it isn’t really productive. But, RISCV looks promising and a good remedy to the issue of not knowing what it does.
FPGAs would be nice but they aren’t powerful enough yet.
But, at the same time, unless the silicon can make outside connections itself or modify behaviour (a la Intel ME), or has been updated with what is essentially software baked into it that can change it’s behaviour on the fly, I’d say it can be trusted to do the computing you tell it to do and nothing more (again, excluding those processors where we know that it doesn’t like those with the ME).
I looked into this a bit more and here is the summary: This is meant to show off a candidate kernel feature that allows for running different schedulers in userland.
Task scheduling has become much more complex as CPUs have grown in size and have had new developments in architecture, so the need to develop more complex and robust schedulers is steadily rising.
The kernel feature is meant to lower the barrier of entry for anyone who wants to try getting into schedulers, as well as enable quicker development iteration, by removing the need to completely recompile the linux kernel every time you want to test your code.
Not quite running in userspace. To the best of my own understanding:
The new kernel feature is to allow writing schedulers in eBPF, a “language” the kernel runs in kernelspace that is heavily restricted.
For example, all eBPF programs must complete in bounded time, and the kernel’s static checker must be able to verify that before the program can even begin executing. eBPF is a rare language that is not touring complete.
“For scx_simple, suspending the scheduler process doesn’t affect scheduling behavior because all that the userspace component does is print statistics. This doesn’t hold for all schedulers.”
So, it may be that eBPF also makes it easier to write a truly userspace scheduler, but that’s not the primary purpose, and it’s not what is being done with scx_simple.
Just friggin’ install it. People spend so much time debating “which distro should I install”. Toss a dart at a board and pick one. Install it. Get your hands dirty and go. You’re not naming your first born you’re trying a new OS.
Fedora is indeed a pretty solid option its very stable and you are still up to date when it comes to packages.
One distro that I personally use and I’m going to shill is void. Its bleeding edge but its surprisingly stable. If you don’t mind reading documentation and researching similarly to arch you shouldn’t have a problem (since you are accustomed to endeavourOS).
I absolutely love void. Second to that I would say endeavour, it’s just arch with zfs, a wm and an installer.
If you’re interested in learning more try , I use oddlama’s installer. With binary packages, distrobox and flatpak, the small amount of compile time is a much smaller issue.
Alternatively, if you’re thinking about Fedora maybe play with Silverblue, it forces you to learn a bit of containerisation which is handy
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.