Appimages do not have repositories, unlike Flatpaks and Snaps. It’s harder to install or update them since there isn’t a package manager for the Appimages.
I don’t know about Snaps, but Flatpaks are sandboxed, which basically means more security, since apps won’t get access to your system without permission. It’s kind of like Android where apps have to ask for permission to things like camera access, filesystem access, etc.
While I do use Appimages, they remind me of Windows and having to go to websites to download stuff.
Personally, I prefer just installing software with my distro’s package manager and resort to Flatpaks or Appimages when it’s not available in the repos.
what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?
Appimages are great for what they do. They’d be even better if we had convenient means of distribution. It’s easy for an intermediate-to-advanced user to go find the thing on some website, download it then chmod +x it.
A regular user, in contrast, finds comfort in centralized software repositories, where you only have to enter an app’s name and click install. Gnome and KDE, with the help of Appstream, provide Flatpaks for your convenience through Software and Discover, respectively.
It’s worth mentioning that Alexander Larsson (Flatpak) took some inspiration from Simon Peter’s (Appimage) klik when he was developing the precursor to xdg-apps and Flatpak, glick… What a mouthful :) Cheers!
On Neon in Wayland it moved the application launcher and notifications to the center of the screen. I saw an issue opened for it just now, so hopefully it will be fixed soon. But I’m expecting it will likely just be a thing until Plasma 6 because that is likely where 100% of their resources are right now.
And yes, Plasma6 is usable now, it seems like everything is just working and I am close to rebasing. There is a Fedora Kinoite variant which is in my experience way better than Neon Unstable
I generally aim newbies at Mint, but ubuntu derived distros are pretty easy and stuff often ‘just works’. That’s why my daily driver is xubuntu.
All over the place, really. Another advantage of ubuntu derived distros is you’ll find a lot of the tutorials and stuff will assume you’re using ubuntu. I just hit a search engine if I need help with something.
As pointed out, in Windows defence, it’s actually faster where it matters. And none of it is going to matter in adoption until every thing is supported 1-1.
The only reason we’re behind on adoption vs Windows as this point is that people who write software for Windows, don’t do it for GNU/Linux, or even publish specs in the case of drivers.
It’s not the OSes problem. It hasn’t been for a long time. It’s stubborn developers (mainly corporations like Broadcom, Nvidia and Epic). We shouldn’t need to write compatibility layers for completely foreign software to run, or write drivers to drive a megacorporation’s hardware, and those are both a monumental task, but the community continues to achieve it anyways.
A lot has been done and continues to be done by the community, and that’s great, but the real problem is the corporations who refuse to invest a little bit of their time in GNU/Linux support (and those who have an irrational vendetta against it).
Causes are a part of the reality. And when people go online and complain about how “lInUX SuXxx” because their proprietary Nvidia drivers didn’t work, and blame the OS instead of the company who is meant to be providing proper support for their devices or at least documentation for other developers to use, it plants the idea in people’s minds that the OS itself is simply inferior, which has connotations of it just being a bad system. Instead of “it will work perfectly when drivers are actually released by the manufacturer”. It tarnishes it’s reputation even after that particular device gains support, and that is another reason why adoption is low.
Hell, nVidia was actively working against having a working opensource driver reverse engineered by Nouveau. Linux is a thorn in their side and the only reason they somewhat support it today is that GPU compute works so much better on Linux.
The true year of linux is not any specific year or a userbase percentage but when linux is widely preinstalled on consumer hardware without nerds needing to recommend to people to install it themselves
In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.
In any case, as an old-timer, it’s very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the “Year of Linux Desktop” is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.
I’d recommend Alpine and running it headless. Realistically you’d need 4GB+ of ram to run a modern desktop session so that’s not ideal. However running Alpine headless will leave you with 800M to run programs.
You can still run a GUI desktop on it but I’d recommend having a nice sized swap partition/file to make up for it. It’ll be slow as soon as you hit the 1GB memory and starting swapping out.
It’s not the desktop that needs 4 GB, it’s large apps like modern browser or office. The desktop will run fine on 1 GB. May want to look into Midori and Abiword as alternatives.
The cautious approach for LMDE5 users: If your system is working fine and there are no especially must-have features in LMDE6, there is almost certainly no rush to upgrade. Take your time.
Make backups. Test backups. Play games. Work. Do things entirely unrelated to the distro.
You could even almost (aaalmost) completely forget about LMDE6 (but do keep an eye on the LM blog).
The Mint team haven't announced an EOL date for LMDE5 yet, but if past dates are anything to go by, it'll be at least 18 months before they pull the plug. Even then, LTS updates might still filter through from Debian proper.
[How many people will actually see this message and how many it actually applies to out of them might well include me and literally one other guy somewhere else on the planet, but if you're that one guy, breathe friend. No rush.]
I’m not super familiar with the goals of the mint project. But this is generally a bad approach to take with project development. Even if you plan on offering LTS, it is always preferable to have users on the most up to date version. Going through the pain of supporting multiple versions of commercial software at work has taught me that lesson the (very) hard way.
To some extent I think they're thinking of people who are in the Windows/Mac situation of wanting a stable OS that doesn't require getting hands dirty (so to speak) every 5 minutes to do basic things, and who generally call in a relative or friend who knows what they're doing (and is almost certainly the person who installed Mint in the first place) when things really need changing.
There's never more than two LMDEs active at any one time, so while they are giving themselves a little extra work, they're also managing the main Ubuntu-based Mint derivatives at the same time so they're bound to have some kind of streamlining at their side.
As for 5-to-6 upgrades, they've provided an official tool that will work for most people and will require very little admin user interaction once it's off and running. A sensible sysadmin would like to have a backup anyway, just in case.
My initial comment was aimed at the odd rare case like myself who isn't always up for sysadmin work (it's why I'm on Mint after all), or doesn't have the time. There's no immediate rush to use that official tool. Take your time. Make your backups, etc.
If you want bleeding-edge rolling updates, Mint is not the distro for you (though LMDE is a little closer to that than regular Mint).
Do they keep up with security updates and patches, though? Yes. Very much so.
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