Big problem here is that Microsoft seems to have given up on sleep states, and just does S5 and then hibernates (which is horribly slow), so S3 on newer machines is often horribly broken in the firmware and can’t really be used. I’m not really interested in my system going to S5 - I want it in S3.
I don’t get it. Why on earth are ASUS, MSI, Asrock etc paying AMI when they could literally get the FOSS community to write it for them with a little help?
Because software development in a corporate environment relies on milestones, deadlines and guarantees. Open source, which relies on volunteer work, doesn't do this well.
Blame modern standby (s0i3). S0i3 is a huge mess honestly, really hard to debug from what I’ve heard and so is full of bugs and unintuitive behaviour on both the hw manufacturers side and on windows side. However if it worked as advertised, it would be a strict improvement to s3.
Hibrrnate (S4) is still alive and well but they hide it in the ui, I don’t understand why because in my experience, it is by far the most stable.
Bazzite. It’s based on Fedora uBlue so it’s technically Fedora, but being an immutable OS, it works quite differently enough that it counts as its own distro. For instance, you don’t use dnf or yum to install stuff, you’d use Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix. Updates are done using the rpm-ostree command, and it’s effectively a rolling release model, but atomic in nature so you get none of the instability that you’d get in a typical rolling release.
Linux is kinda like a 3d printer. You can end up tinkering and tuning more than printing.
2d printers are just cursed and have been since the dawn of mankind though. Go to openprinting.org/printers/ and see if your printer is in there and if it is which functionality header it is under. I’m assuming it isn’t capable of driverless if debian didn’t work and the other distro just happened to have something preinstalled. Unless debian doesn’t handle driverless printing out of the box. I’ve only used debian headless for server stuff so I’m just making assumptions.
Arch maintainers recommend against aur helpers but for quite some time I just did exactly that and got the drivers for whatever jank ass printer I had at the time that way. Most of the official ones I have encountered are rpm and I hadn’t used fedora or other rpm distros until recently, and the aur pkgbuilds would unpack the rpm and install the drivers the arch way. Incidentally, last I tried silverblue/ublue/kinoite etc can’t install the brother printer rpms via rpm-ostree so having a driverless capable printer was lucky considering it was just randomly given to me by a friend that moved away.
If you share the printer model, someone here can probably also figure out what needs to be done without you having to go through a bunch of troubleshooting too.
VM: doesn’t give you the “real” experience. Often feels sluggish.
Installation via package manager: really clutters and messes up your system. There are many dependencies, and then you’ll have 5 different file managers for example.
Ventoy: the second best option, or the best, if you just wanna take a look at each. If you really want to try the DE for a few days, it isn’t suited of course.
Fedora Atomic (immutable variants like Silverblue): there’s a project called uBlue, that provides images for all DEs. You can install the vanilla Silverblue, and then rebase to each according image. Your custom installed programs and personal data stay intact, but everything else gets swapped out cleanly. Each rebase would take ~5 minutes and one reboot, but it feels like you reinstalled your OS and changed the flavor.
Linux Mint is where I always go crawling back to. I have hopped so damn much. Mint sometimes needs a newer kernel installed, but I’ll be damned if that Ubuntu base doesn’t help with printers, graphics drivers, and scanners. Getting that to work on Arch was a blast and a half, on Mint I literally just turned my network printer on and it found it. IDK, you can do anything and there is always some issue eventually.
I’m a recent Linux convert I started with Debian testing and that worked out of the box for everything except Nvidia drivers. I hopped from Debian testing over to Pop Os because Debian testing wasn’t supported for a bunch of random things I wanted to use. I stopped using pop os a couple of weeks ago because it would crash all the time and was going to jump to Ubuntu just so pretty much everything would be supported. That flash drive install was corrupted so I ended up on nobara and have loved it with no issues so far.
It’s a thing with certain laptops, where their secure boot certs are outdated or something. Not really anything you can do to fix, but it doesnt mean anything in practice - I never had issues with it after running linux across multiple distros about a year on my Acer nitro 5.
only thing you might have issues with is using secure boot in certain distros but if you don’t have problems then no need to worry
Well, if you are new to Linux, it is better if you just install new distros to try them, I would go to Arch Linux as it’s the cleanest distro, I could install multiple DE without issues, but then it’s a bit mess of packages, also it’s harder to install, you need to type archinstall and understand their options. I have a desktop and laptop and I always use the laptop for testing, if you copy the ~/.config folder, you can restore all your applications settings (just copy the app settings you are using), ~/.mozilla to restore your browser as you had it before the wipe and some more settings are under ~/.local. I also copy my ~/.zshrc because I have a custom prompt, configs, add-ons, alias…
I have a Mobian community edition PinePhone with postmarketOS and it is my daily driver. It suits my humble needs, but these few years have been a mixed bag. Especially with Mobian I’ve had periods of it working great, punctuated by periods with annoying issues. I stopped using the phone for a while when it suddenly stopped taking calls but I didn’t notice since there was no indication of trouble. My family reported me missing when they couldn’t reach me after a few days. Luckily that was then sorted out, but it wasn’t great. This hasn’t happened since.
postmarketOS has been pretty solid and seems to perform better than Mobian.
After a few years I’m starting to think I need a new battery, but the official store has been out of stock for a while. I’m not sure if they will ever get more parts. Communication from Pine64 has also slowed down to a crawl, which is not great. At least their official monthly blog was last updated in august. At the moment I’m somewhat skeptical of their future. We’ll see.
Be warned though: the PinePhone can browse the web and banking probably works, but watching, say, youtube is not going to be a great experience. You’re probably better off using alternative solutions like Pipeline. The PinePhone is not a powerful machine and you will have tinker every now and then.
Having said all that, if you set your expectations correctly you can probably get along with a PinePhone as your daily driver. I’m not sure if I can recommend it because there are many caveats, but in the end you know your needs and what you’re comfortable with better than I do. I like my PinePhone and I surely wish more people get Linux phones and that the ecosystem evolves.
I could not find an official support branch of postmarketOS for the PPP.
Other than that, as you say, Pine64’s interaction has waned greatly and I wonder what is going on behind the scenes. This is no FP5, certainly, but availability of parts is a requirement for me
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.