I don’t have much to comment on native installs that hasn’t already been said, but if you go with a VM, please don’t use VirtualBox. It’s a pile of hot garbage that pales in comparison to the already existing, kernel-level virtualization offered by KVM/QEMU. Use a package like virt-manager for KVM/QEMU based VMs and your experience and performance will be infinitely better. The Linux kernel has KVM built in for a reason, so take advantage of that.
Otherwise, Distrobox is a great recommendation, as are many of the other install methods listed in these comments.
For maximum performance you probably want to skip virt-manager, virt-viewer has a hardcoded FPS cap.
If you use QEMU directly and use virtio-gpu paired with the sdl or gtk display, and OpenGL enabled, you can run Ubuntu at 4K144Hz no problem. The VM is near imperceptible, and it works out of the box, that’s not even touching the crazy VFIO stuff.
Perhaps I was a bit vague with the word “performance”, but given that this user only seems to be interested in running ROS, there is absolutely no reason they need anything above the FPS cap (hence my recommendation of virt-manager, as it is quite user friendly). The “performance” aspect of it boils down to CPU utilization and efficiency more than anything.
I’m a professional and hobbyist C# .NET dev and I recently made the switch to a full Linux environment at home. I’ve gotten a great workflow setup with just VSCode and some extensions. I’ve actually found some ways to improve my workflow with VSCode vs Visual Studio and I’m glad I made the switch. The only thing I really miss is the phenomenal diagnostics and profiling I would get with a full Visual Studio install, but I’m getting used to using cli dotnet tools to replace that as well.
If you’re going the VSCode route, feel free to ask me more questions on useful extensions or workflow tweaks!
I haven’t really distributed any binaries yet, everything I work on is just FOSS at github.com/MattMckenzy.
However, I did look into packaging my HomeCast project in my own debian apt repository. It’s still unsigned at the moment, but when I get to it I imagine I’ll just use dpkg and gnupg2 however I need to.
The patches are from CodeWeavers, and some of their work is cooperation with Valve, so hopefully proton gets those changes quickly. It usually takes a while before proton is based on a new wine release.
When distros make it the default DE, that’s forcing it on them. No different then Microsoft bundling a specific browser. I also disagree that it works well on desktops. It lacks features, and tweaking it to resemble and behave like a more common desktop design is cumbersome.
And? Who’s making you use them? Use one of the other distros that doesn’t use Gnome, or install a different DE after installation.
“It’s like Microsoft forcing Edge!!”
No it isn’t. For almost all PCs, Windows is installed by default with no other option.
If you’re using Gnome, it’s because you went out of your way to install it, or you went out of your way to purchase a Linux laptop and chose one with Gnome, which is far from the only option even in that space.
And you can disagree that it works on desktops all you like. All the people who use it on desktop would disagree with your opinion.
Just because something doesn’t work like Windows does, doesn’t mean it’s not for desktops.
You can just download the app from Flathub right now and it should hopefully make its way directly into GNOME in the future. At least some work was being done to implement this directly into it.
It seems stable enough already TBH, at least from my small testing with the app. It’s more about getting things ready to be exposed in the settings app and in the system.
I’ve wanted to buy an upgrade to my RX580 for years now, but I’d really like AV1 encoding support. With OBS finally supporting AV1 on all platforms (?), this actually makes sense. But I’m once again reminded how bad the used market for GPUs is in my country atm, so I’ll wait for a while longer.
Got a 6700XT second hand about a year ago when the price finally came down from astronomical ridiculous crypto bubble crazy, to almost reasonable. Just looked and they’re still going for the same price. Thought this would have dropped a bit by now, but I guess not.
Yes, I’ve also had an eye on the 6700XT, but I made the bad decision to wait for the new gen and hopefully a price drop for older GPUs. The stable used prices are probably because of people who bought at exorbitant prices who don’t want to sell their GPU for nothing, combined with the new gen having the same price to performance ratio.
Now with the 7600XT having 16GB VRAM, I’ve thought about buying until I noticed it only supports PCIe 4.0 x8, which is half the bandwidth on my PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. It’s a B350 board I want to upgrade to a 5800X3D and use for years to come. This means I’m basically forced to either go with a 7700XT, or go with an older 6700XT.
Anyway, waiting years for a new gen isn’t an option either, so I’ll stay frustrated for a while longer.
Fun coincidence, 16 lanes was one of my concerns as well when I got mine. I’m also on an old AM4 motherboard. Currently have a 3900X CPU which is plenty for my needs for now, but it’s good knowing I still have an upgrade path to an X3D. AM4 has been an awesome platform in terms of upgradability :)
That’s because H.265 is patent encumbered. Firefox doesn’t support H.265 at all and Chrome only supports it if the hardware does. In order to support accepting H.265 input from streamers, Twitch would basically have to pony up the compute resources for full-res realtime transcoding for every H.265 stream to H.264 – either that or put up with a lot of bad press surrounding people not being able to stream at full res anymore.
AV1 would introduce a similar hardware requirement because not everyone even has AV1 Decode, and even fewer have AV1 encode. AV1 encode would only be available on people on gpus using the latest generation, blocking anyone buying previous generation stuff (so no AMD 6000 or older, or Nvidia 3000 or older, and non Intel Arc products).
All (recent) major browsers I’m aware of have software AV1 decode as standard, so the receiving end wouldn’t be a problem apart from higher CPU usage. As for encode, obviously this wouldn’t be universal – just streamers who had the computing power (hardware or software) for realtime AV1 encode would be able to take advantage of that on Twitch.
the browsers have the software, but not the hardware decode step.
software decode, especially for mobile, would be battery draining and no streaming service would realistically would use it without the userbase having hardware decode support.
for pcs, av1 hardware decode is amd 6000 or newer, amd phoenix apus, nvidia 3000 or newer gpus, 11th Gen intel cpus or newer.
for mobile, its only like a small portion of the phones released in the past year and a half or so.
for iphone, the list is the iphone 15 pro max. and for the other devices, things using the M3.
as long as the world is a mobile first mindset, theres no way theyre going to ask evwryone on mobile to take a significant battery loss just for a higher resolution stream.
Bitwig was created by some of the people that built Abelton Live. Bitwig is considered by many to be the best of them all and easier to pick up by beginners. I plan to try it on Linux before I decide if I make the jump from Abelton.
You may be interested in reading this post about the process of packaging Steam.
tl;dr: It’s mostly an annoyance reserved for packagers to deal with. Dynamically linked executables can be patched in a fairly universal fashion to work without FHS, so that’s the go-to approach. If the executable is statically linked, the package may have to ship a source patch instead. If the executable is statically linked & close-source, the packagers are forced to resort to simulating an FHS environment via chroot.
I would say it’s actually easier in many cases. Nix has really fantastic packaging tooling. You do have to learn a bit of the nix language, however (not become an expert).
The issue comes when trying to build from source. In most other distros, ou just follow the readme. In nix, you have to package it.
If I am packaging software for gentoo, all I have to do is translate the build instructions from the project’s documentation to gentoo’s package recipe. In nix, it seems that it is not that simple and you’ll have to do some exploration. Am I wrong?
It’s just that most (if not all) build system in the source code package would assume some level of FHS compliance.
For example, they would install:
executables under /bin /usr/bin
libraries under /lib or /usr/lib
sysconfigs under /etc
manpages under /usr/share/man
and so on…
These build systems would include options to change these, but you’d then have to change all these values to adapt to nix structure. While it’s all been done by the nix package maintainers, you’d have to do all that if you’re to come up with a new package.
In the FHS compliant distros, the maintainers wouldn’t need to change anything since these values are already set to the values they want (there are actually minor details they’d change, but that’s another topic).
If I am packaging software for gentoo, all I have to do is translate the build instructions from the project’s documentation to gentoo’s package recipe.
It’s the same for Nixpkgs.
In nix, it seems that it is not that simple and you’ll have to do some exploration. Am I wrong?
In well behaved build systems, it’s likely easier to package than most other distros. If it’s not as well behaved you will have to do some “exploration” and the complexity can get quite out of control if the build system is exceptionally terrible.
Here is the package for the GNU hello program which uses a well-behaved build system:
If you ignore the optional passthru.tests, this is very simple. You provide metadata, sources etc. to the generic mkDerivation function and that’s it. The most complex non-standard thing this derivation does is enable the build system’s tests.
You don’t even need to run the provided build instructions because Nixpkgs’ stdenv abstracts those away. If it finds a makefile, it’ll automatically run make and make install with the correct flags for instance. Same for other standard build systems; if you pass cmake into nativeBuildInputs, it’ll attempt to build, install, check etc. using cmake’s standardised interfaces.
If the build system is poorly behaved however (like for instance Anki’s), you will have to get into the weeds and do some rather advanced things:
Ubuntu. They’ve managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It’s the old-and-busted distro that I’m routinely told is “the only Linux we support”.
If Debian is not great as a desktop distro, it’s at the very least remarkably stable as a server distro. The sentiment extends somewhat to Ubuntu LTS. It could be better, but in terms of uptime and just working I can’t fault either distro.
Nothing at all, the main issue is that with graphical applications developers have an hard time to package things for all the useless distros out there and some other distros like Debian on stable will only haver older versions of software. Flatpak solves both of this issues.
I just now discovered why people are hating on Ubuntu pro by receiving a note that Ubuntu will not provide security updates for some apps it came with unless you activate Pro.
I think I’m done with Ubuntu on any personal machines.
Yeah I didn’t offer much input on personal devices because I did use Ubuntu for awhile as a personal environment and it’s fine, but could use work. I think personally I like Debian better, but if I want a clean GNOME experience Fedora is probably the move.
Currently using Bookworm and KDE as my desktop right now. Works really well! If I need more up to date software I use Distrobox and run whatever distro’s version of software I want. I have both Debian Sid and Arch Firefox versions installed on my machine right now just to see if it worked and it’s flawless. I mostly just run apps from SID container and it exposed the app to my desktop wonderfully. Really the only way I will fly these days.
Don’t forget that Ubuntu was the first distro to both sell user data to Amazon, and show you ads in the terminal. But it seems like everyone forgets about it as soon as canonical goes “whoops, our bad, we didn’t think you’d mind, it’s opt in/out now”.
On top of that I’ve seen allegations that they’re illegally collecting data from Azure Ubuntu users to send them spam about Ubuntu enterprise.
I was an Ubuntu fan many moons ago. Then I fell in love with Mint when it was just all around a better version of Ubuntu.
Then I ended up with a new Windows laptop for years and forgot about Linux entirely. But this year, I’ve actually returned to Ubuntu. I like how it has a fresh and different look and it still performs well on my now aging laptop. Mint is always my go to recommendation to others, but I just wanted a different look than your standard Windows-like look that Cinnamon has. I was initially turned off way back when, when Ubuntu switched to Unity, but now a difference in look appeals to me. We’ll see if I get annoyed with Snaps or not. So far, everything has been running smoothly.
If there was a GNOME fork of Mint, I’d likely be using that. I get that you can technically install whatever desktop environment in whatever distro you want, but for compatibility sake, it’s best to roll with what your distro comes with.
If you decide later to test other distros I would highly recommend using a virtual machine in virtualbox. Saves the hassle when it comes to testing distros 👍
KVM is indeed a much better hypervisor, but it does require some setup with the terminal.
Since he is a beginner I decided to recommend virtualbox since it just works after installing. But if he doesn’t mind setting up things via terminal then KVM is definitely the way.
@agr8lemon The other person mentioned virt-manager, but there’s a much more easier app: Gnome Boxes. It uses the same backend (libvirt/KVM) but it’s much more easier to use - in fact, I’d say that it’s even more easier to use than VirtualBox. For starters, Boxes automatically detects OS ISOs on your drive and allows you to just click on them directly to install it - or you can even choose to download and install a distro directly from within Boxes. Also, when you consider the post-setup phase: there’s no need to install any guest modules/drivers because it’s already built-into Linux distros.
I’ve worked extensively with both virtualbox and kvm/qemu. While I prefer kvm since it’s open source, I could never reproduce the video performance of virtualbox. I’m not even trying to game, just use regular applications that I cannot run under Linux.
oh, sorry about that, I didn’t realize this could be bad for mobile users. All I needed was a command that could display all system info like distro name and version, kernel version, DE version, etc, I didn’t necessarily need the distro logo and some other useless info in there.
the little effort involves taking the piss, just taking ourselves less seriously, we’re only messing around online. And btw no info in neofetch is relevant :P
I guess maybe I don’t understand what workspaces are? Because I’ve been operating under the assumption that I’ve been using multiple workspaces with GNOME for a* long* time now.
Are you saying the GNOME update in April will each workspace to have it’s own unique desktop folder?
How is the state of tilig WMs? Last time I ried Wayland, mixing and matching WMs and status bars was really flakey, with font scaling and rendering issues. There are certain things I will no longer compromise on in a WM, and if I wanted to be forced to use a specific desktop to get a working graphical environment (functioning scaling, for instance), I’d use a Mac.
Herbstluftwm hasn’t been ported - is there a similar configuration file-less tiling WM? On X, I could also settle for bspwm; both WMs are completely configurable on the command line. How about bars? I’m using polybar right now, but there are a dozen to choose from under X, any of which I can use with whichever WM (and have it function properly).
Again, mere months ago, trying to get font scaling to work properly with the same scaling in all applications was messed up. Under X, if I set a font and size in any program (that supports font selection), I get the same apparent font size - because programs get fonts from X and the same code does all font rendering which makes everything consistent. How is that on Wayland, now, because that was a major deal-breaker last a couple of months ago.
I used sway for a long time(months to a year?) and it was very stable. I’m currently messing with plasmas tiling option ATM and it works okay… Not as fluid but well enough that I haven’t switched back.
Hyprland is one of the ones I tried, and it may be closest to what I’m looking for. I’ve heard the community is extremely toxic, though. Software projects having “conmunities” is a relatively recent thing, for me, so it’s not a big deal, but what’s been your experience?
Me too, mostly, but popping into a forum to ask questions is a thing. I stopped using bspwm largely because the one responsive person in the Matrix channel was a first-class self-righteous turd; that alone wouldn’t have been so bae, but none of the admins called them on it, and, well, herbstluftwm turned out to be better software anyway. The hlwm community has avoided being toxic mainly by not existing, AFAICT.
Using wayfire (disabling the fancy resources eating plugins) + waybar + plus a bunch wlr utilities (some from sway).
I’m using integrated intel gpus. There’s a laptop with both the integrated intel gpu and a nvidia discrete one, but I had to configure the bios to only use the inegrated one, both the binary nvidia drivers, and the open source nvidia drivers fail to set fbdev=1 (the external hdmi monitor is the one associated to the nvidia gpu, and it gets a blank screen), which is required for enabling KMS, which is required for wayland, so no luck. Nouveau actually works, but it’s not stable enough, after some time of use the monitor turn off and there’s no way to turn it back on, and it feels slow or lagging compared to the intel gpu, although it should be the opposite. So I gave up on nvidia on that laptop, and any other box only has the integrated intel gpu anyways. I’ve read of successful stories with nvidia, both with the binary and the open drivers, but I think it’s not a generic thing that all nvidia gpus will work well on wayland with nvidia drivers. The noveau drivers are the only ones working for some gpus, but not stable enough. So I stick with the recommendation to stay away from nvidia if using wayland…
I guess although WM still applies, on the wayland jargon they’re called compositors, and the wayland compositors are not as light as the Xorg WMs, since there’s no Xorg server, and part of the responsibility of the server goes to the compositors on wayland…
There’s labwc, which is the compositor I would have chosen, but the developer decided to stick with xml configuration equivalent to the the openbox one, and also with the openbox themes/styles, which I never liked. On Xorg I used fluxbox + tint2 + …, and I tried openbox, but totally disliked it compared to fluxbox… But other than config and theming, I like its idea of being a light compositor.
Actually by disabling the plugins I am on wayfire, it’s pretty much labwc but with new decent config (I really like its config BTW), and using the gui toolkit theming, so no specific wayfire theming at all, which is nice, as opposed to the labwc own theming… Still, labwc is also an option for some.
Wayfire and labwc are not tiling compositors as most of all others, :)
I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.
Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.
The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.
It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.
And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.
I don’t think surface would make for a good work laptop, but I have amazing experience so far with using it for the ocassional traveling, or just as a carry-on.
I just Parsec into my desktop at home, and can comfortably work without having to deal with performance, and Surface is amazing for that.
I also really like the pen support, so I can make notes or draw bascially anywhere.
And I also use it for DJing, where it works pretty well and is compact enough to not be a bother carrying it around.
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