Since it’s your first time, my first suggestion is to try Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE desktop) or Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE desktop and generally more popular than Xubuntu). Both distributions are lighter on resources and they have an Ubuntu base which means there’s a ton of documentation online so if you run into problems, you will have plenty of resources.
Alpine is small for sure but it is more niche and it doesn’t use systemd which most major distributions use which means if you happen to run into weird issues, your pool of resources will be smaller. Don’t get me wrong, Alpine is great but I wouldn’t recommend it for new users. I don’t know anything about Puppy Linux; maybe it’s fine?
If your machine can’t run Xubuntu or Kubuntu, then worry about trying more niche distros like Alpine or Puppy.
If you run into issues, feel free to ask questions. The community is generally nice but you’ll want to try fixing it yourself first and then including what you tried in your post to get a better reception.
Embrace the terminal. It’s daunting at first but it’s such a powerful tool. Don’t use sudo with every command. Don’t paste random command in the terminal without doing a little research to understand what they do. Again, ask if you need help, you won’t learn everything overnight.
Good luck!
Edit: Linux Mint is also probably a good choice. Never used it myself but I’ve heard good things.
I struggled with Kubuntu as newbie (coming from Windows) - Mint was easier for me and I sticked with it (Cinnamon in my case, but my laptop is more powerful)
I appreciate what KDE is doing with their DE, I’m glad it exists but it’s not for me either. I only suggest it because it’s surprisingly light on resources for the amount of customization options you get.
Why is the unity is underrated when its what i use right now with Ubuntu Unity and its actually really great experience for my 2021 HP Stream 11 Laptop and i hope you all to share your experiences using the unity de in Debain Ubuntu Arch Fedora Gentoo Opensuse Etc thanks for your Amazing community my Wonderful Friends
A lot of people are saying its the best. Perhaps they are right. I don’t kmow. And I hear it all the time. “It’s the best! It’s the best!”. Who knows. But a lot of great people are saying it. Maybe the best people. That’s just what I hear.
Now that you mention it, Trump sounds a bit like the way FreeBSD people talk about Linux.
“When they send us Linux distributions, they are not sending their best. Linux is an unplanned, undocumented, unusable, crashy mess. Some, I assume, are also good distros.”
Yeah, it’s a terrible thing that you have to do this to get your city into the weather app, but I simply love the fact that you can do that, whereas on some proprietary system, you might wait months for the fix.
KDE is very receptive to community help! I can only think of one specific example in KDE history where a developer dragged their feet in the mud about a change the community wanted/submitted pull requests for, and thats the vertical HTML indicator bar in kmail.
The issue with gear lever is that not many people know that it exists. I only started using it a few months ago and I’ve been on Linux for the better part of the last decade.
If you as a developer wanted a non-technical user to test a thing you fixed for them, you could ask them to try an AppImage from your CI pipeline and they would easily be able to install it. They’re great for that.
Also, trying out a package can leave unwanted system state around in traditional imperative system package managers. AppImages OTOH are self-contained and user-installable.
I tried AM some time ago, and I was extremely confused about the documentation and how to use it. I even watched a YouTube video from DistroTube on how to use it, but I still couldn’t figure it out. I don’t exactly remember the issues, though, and I hope it’s better now.
I am using AppMan as it does not require root and it does install the files into my home directory. It uses query parameter instead of search, but the install, update and remove are similar to the apt commands for example. I use AppImages when there is no package in the repository (or only older version) and it is not available as a Flatpak.
Unfortunately Apple seems to be actively working to make sure that the only way an iPod can be loaded with music is by using iTunes which is only supported on Mac or Windows.
You have a few of options on how to move forward:
1: Make a Windows virtual machine, install iTunes onto it and pass the iPod though to the VM.
2: Install Rockbox (if able) onto the device to enable it to act as a USB mass storage device allowing drag n drop loading of music.
3: Sell the iPod and get one of the many different digital audio players available on the market as most are OS agnostic (they show up as a USB mass storage device) and most use MicroSD cards to store the music meaning you can move the card to a new player as you upgrade later (so you are not locked to one vendor).
Wanted to say that I’ve used Rockbox on an old ipod classic with much success. Would recommend. You can even install user created apple-ipod-like themes to get closer to the original look N feel
The sense of entitlement in some of the replies on that post are absolutely awful
As for me personally, I want to love Wayland. It has great performance on ALL my devices, (except one with a nvidia GPU) and is super smooth compared to X11!
However… the secure aspect of Wayland makes it very difficult, if not impossible to easily get a remote desktop going. Wayvnc doesn’t support the most popular desktop environments depending on how Wayland was compiled, and the built-in desktop sharing on distros that have switched over to Wayland often require very specific Linux-only VNC and RDP clients, otherwise you run into odd errors.
I really hope the desktop sharing situation improves because it’s a pretty big showstopper for me. On X11 you just install & run x11vnc from a remote SSH session and you have immediate session access with VNC from Linux, Android, and Windows. If you want lockscreen access too then you run as root and provide the greeter’s Xauth credentials. But Wayland’s not so simple sadly AFAICT…
Waypipe is something I’ve found out about recently though, so need to check that out and see how well it works at the moment. If anyone has any helpful info or pointers please share, I’m completely new to Wayland and would appreciate it!
Looked at it. It seems GNOME are doing dirty hacks, since AFAIK they don’t have tearing control in their compositor.
And game fps is not directly translated to perceived performance on wayland. For example in Xonotic 90-95 fps on wayland feel laggy, but if enable glFinish, I’ll get 80 fps in same area, but game will feel much better. But it causes game to run in 20-30 fps in places and cause more lag there, where it would run 30-60. For context runnung game in X11 without glFinish gets me 110 fps in same area, which feel like 110 fps. Running game in kmsdrm gets me 120 fps in same area.
I know this is not useful for most use cases, but if you login to the desktop on the ‘remote Wayland’, locally first then RD will work as expected. So if you can change the behaviour of the remote desktop to stay unlocked (IE its in a secure place where others cannot just access the device), then and RD will work with Wayland.
I use NoMachine (since I manage all sorts of devices, and its nice that there is a client and server for everything including phones/arm) and it works for me because many of the machines are actually VM’s and I can keep the desktops unlocked and logged in. NoMachines solution for Wayland - is to disable it and use X11 !!
But I wish many of the RD developers would just embrace Wayland and add/rewrite code to support it (If it is in their scope, I don’t know) It might not be, since I am aware of Waypipe and Pipewire, but I’d assume that RD devs would still need to include support for that.
I don't know what's worse, that this is real or that it appears to be relatively serious and not just taking Ubuntu and doing an UwU text transform on every localized string.
Oh, I have no issues with pony people. I was more disappointed that UwUntu wasn't as UwU as I really hoped it would be after I discovered it was a real thing.
At some level I just wanted it to commit to the bit, even if it's at the cost of usability. Maybe only on 1 Apr or something.
I haven’t done this in years but I’ve always found open source solutions to this to be quite clunky and usually barely worked. What always just worked fine for me was Teamviewer. Yeah it’s proprietary and has crappy licensing but it’s mostly a smooth ride.
Do try the open source options first tho, it’s quite possible they got way better in the last few years since I’ve done this.
Not to be that person but I’m curious what made you go with AppImage over Flatpak, given that you already mentioned using the Flatpak as an alternative ^^"
If you love it so much, then you can use Flatpak, Snap, Guix or Nix - there are user-level package managers that will give you the required choice. But why Brave? Aren’t there better Chromium alternatives out there?
Also I see “Red Hat” thrown around a lot. There’s no Red Hat anymore, it’s IBM, and IBM’s target user is a RHEL customer.
I’m willing to bet most people commenting on Mastodon (and here for that matter) have very little in common with a RHEL customer. IBM, like Valve with the Deck, have very specific use cases in mind and can afford to support a Wayland-based desktop for those particular circumstances.
But does IBM care about the desktop needs of the average Linux user? I doubt it.
Great point. IBM has a long history of squeezing every penny from their customers. At one corner job, IBM had to come onsite a few times a year to perform system updates. We were not allowed by IBM to upgrade the OS ourselves.
I don’t get the issue with “maintaining Xorg”. Like, I get that it has a “cost”, I just don’t understand why that cost would be an issue since it’s basically fixed, marginal cost (and has been since like 2015): the software is already mature, so it’s unlikely to see relevant changes, or even minor changes (if that’s what we want to mean with “dead”). That means, it can be affixed to a specific toolkit and environment to build (if this isn’t being done already - which any mature project like RedHat should be!) basically guaranteeing it’ll build forever. You can just set a virtual button or a yearly crontab to do it. Fixed, marginal cost.
Contrasted to that, what Wayland is doing is kinda a representation of the worst ways of capitalism: centralize the profits, socialize the costs and the externalities (redesign, recode, rebuild), and blame society (the Linux communities) for it, all for a variable cost that is unbounded in time and space because you never know what’s gonna cost a small project like a text editor to reimplement the entire desktop stack “just” for Wayland.
I think he explains it pretty well, he even gives some examples and mentions there are many others. For a company to support such a large component for its commercial customers has a lot of work and verification we wouldn't consider as end users. His comment also explains why you can't just maintain a status quo with it and make an automatic build and forget...
As a third party, my understanding is that both the implementation and the protocol are really hard, if not next to impossible to iterate on. Modern hardware doesn’t work like how it did when X did, and X assumes a lot of things that made sense in the 90s that don’t now. Despite that, we cram a square peg into the round hole and it mostly works - and as the peg becomes a worse shape we just cram it harder. At this point no one wants to keep working on X.
And I know your point is that it works and we don’t need too, but we do need too. New hardware needs to support X - at least the asahi guys found bugs in the X implementation that only exists on their hardware and no one who wants to fix them. Wayland and X are vastly different, because X doesn’t make sense in the modern day. It breaks things, and a lot of old assumptions aren’t true. That sucks, especially for app devs that rely on those assumptions. But keeping around X isn’t the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.
But keeping around X isn’t the solution - iterating on Wayland is. Adding protocols to different parts of the stack with proper permission models, moving different pieces of X to different parts of the stack, etc. are a long term viable strategy. Even if it is painful.
The problem is, that’s always used as an excuse to force people to be gratis beta testers. I’ve been around for the wrecks that were (and still are) Pulseaudio and Systemd. Wayland is even worse: it doesn’t even fully start a session in my machine. If as devs you want to “iterate”, sure, go ahead; but leave it in the dev branch; as a user, don’t try to sell me Wayland again until it’s actually over.
The problem is, that’s always used as an excuse to force people to be gratis beta testers
If as devs you want to “iterate”, sure, go ahead; but leave it in the dev branch; as a user, don’t try to sell me Wayland again until it’s actually over.
it’s opensource software, don’t like it? go ahead, don’t use it. They don’t owe anyone shit
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