Real talk, Pop_OS! is just nice. Besides Blackbox and like 3 Gnome Extensions I hadn’t had to change or add anything. It’s a great experience and I recommend it to everyone.
I tried it. Had a bunch of issues with it, like freezes, forcing me to manually reboot. Then I tried Fedora. It’s been great. Still using Fedora. Don’t like the opt-out (rather than opt-in) telemetry they’re planning to add though, but honestly not enough to make me switch
I’ve been using nobara, it’s fedora based and has made me swith from windows to it full-time. I’ve had zero issues with it. You may want to check it out?
(Also iirc it’s made by Glorious Eggroll, the guy who made GE-Proton)
Well, we have a Pink Ubuntu (Hannah Montana Linux), a Red/Black Ubuntu (Satanic Edition), a Salmon Pink Ubuntu (Uwuntu), a White/Gray Ubuntu (Elementary OS), a Blue Ubuntu (Zorin OS), a Yellow/Black Ubuntu (Linux Lite) and an Teal Ubuntu (POP! OS). And I think that KDE Neon could be Purple Ubuntu, but I’m not sure.
Here comes Arch Linux with the parts for a steel chair! Now they’re pulling out the instructions for putting it together! Uh oh, the instructions say what kind of bolts they need, but not how many! Arch is trying to fit it all together anyway! Hmm, looks like some of the assembly steps are missing… ok, Arch has got something that looks like a chair constructed… now they’re going to test it by sitting down… oh, and the chair frame has held together but the seat has fallen off. Arch forgot about not breaking user space again!
And now here comes Gentoo with a… a coal forge? Oh my God he’s forging a steel chair from a metal blank! But what’s this? Hes pulling out a smaller forge to forge a hammer for the bigger forge! The humanity!
The bit about the small forge forging a forge is skewering the Gentoo concept of toolchain bootstrapping.
Problem: how can you claim to have compiled the entire system on your own local machine if you need a compiler to compile a compiler? Where do you get that compiler from?
Solution: Use an external compiler to compile a compiler. Then use that compiler that you just compiled to compile itself again. Then use that second compiler to recompile the rest of the system.
I briefly experimented with it ages ago. And I mean ages ago, like 20+ years ago. Maybe it’s changed somewhat since then, but my understanding is that Gentoo doesn’t provide binary packages. Everything gets compiled from source using exactly the options you want and compiled exactly for your hardware. That’s great and all but it has two big downsides:
Most users don’t need or even want to specify every compile option. The number of compile options to wade through for some packages (e.g. the kernel) is incredibly long, and many won’t be applicable to your particular setup.
The benefits of compiling specifically for your system are likely questionable, and the amount of time it takes to compile can be long depending on your hardware. Bear in mind I was compiling on a Pentium 2 at the time, so this may be a lot less relevant to modern systems. I think it took me something like 12 hours to do the first-time compile when I installed Gentoo, and then some mistake I made in the configuration made me want to reinstall and I just wasn’t willing to sit through that again.
Compiling your own kernel was often useful or even necessary back in the day. I think it was the only package I regularly compiled for myself back then, and I think I was on red hat
And oh my god, here comes Windows with a steel chair! Its a fine chair that almost anyone can sit in, as long as its updated regularly and paid for, or else they take off two of the legs. She whacks you with it, but only with the long end of the chair by default, which really stings. If you prefer to be hit with the flat of the chair, she desperately tries to convince you that being hit with the Edge is better.
Good to hear! My main computer is my desktop, running Mint. (I’m using it right now.) But I also have a Surface Pro 4 that I use for work. It has no problems and works fine on Windows… but I have been wondering if I can move that away from Windows as well. So its encouraging to hear that it has worked for you.
Does Mint have good support for the stylus and touch-screen on the Surface 4? (I imagine the Surface tech might be specialised to Windows a bit, so I wouldn’t be confident those would work immediately in Linux.)
My surface pro 4 still works great with windows also and even though I ran mint on the laptop I used before it I have no intention of replacing windows on the SP4 at least until support for 10 is done.
Even though I don’t use the touchscreen often, it’s not a feature I’d be willing to sacrifice either.
I don’t know about this specifically, but in my experience with Mint, it’s very plug and play with this kind of stuff. I’m always really impressed by just how little setup Mint needs.
Nope, it does not. You can install a kernel made just for surface devices and you’ll get mouse emulation via touch, but Mint doesn’t have Wayland yet and it’s my understanding that Wayland is where all the good things, like gestures, lives. So, I’m waiting for that but it honestly works fine without the touch. I’d use it if it was there, but it’s fine honestly.
That said, I’ve been using Linux/osx as my primary at work for a lot of years now so I’m super unfamiliar with even basic sysadmin stuff on Windows, so I’m happy that the surface is now on Linux. Need to move my desktop to it one day, but I honestly almost never use it.
Ubuntu was my very first distro and I used it for a year. Maybe it was harsh to say that it sucked ass. When they pushed snaps on me, I started using them and towards the end, my computer got very slow. I’m now on arch btw
Arch is awesome. I use Arch on my laptop. I’ve been thinking about changing my Pop desktop to Arch, but the GFX driver management for Pop is super convenient and I have steam all set up exactly as I want it. I don’t really want to go through all the set-up again.
I also used it, and liked it, then Plasma, made it look like Windows 12 (looked like a combination of Windows and macOS), but I’m now on GNOME again. I might use something else in the future tough.
What are your problems exactly? For me, it was that GNOME was more stable and had some trackoad gestures. And on Plasma, something just felt small. I tried changing the text size, but it was still harder to read.
Weird I always have the opposite feeling with KDE: everything is big. Mostly the icons and bar at the bottom. However tbf it might be because I am used to Xfce4 and only recently went back to KDE
I’m sure Arch and Manjaro are worth a try, back in the day I tried RedHat/SuSE/Slackware/Debian/Ubuntu and ended up with Mint Cinnamon.
The closest to Arch I tried was using Debian Sid, but got annoyed when I one time had to battle with getting it up and running after a dist upgrade. I really hope Arch handles those upgrades better.
The most annoying with that upgrade was that the UI changed to an early version of Gnome Shell, I think that prompted me to switch to Mint MATE
From my limited understanding it’s based on Debian instead of Ubuntu (which is based on Debian). The purpose is to have a fallback in the event Canonical snaps Ubuntu out of existence.
Add comment