I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, and there’s a good number of responses so maybe I’m up in the night, but it seems to me Manjaro’s philosophy is somewhat counterintuitive to Arch’s. Arch pointedly obfuscates system internals as little as is reasonable to “keep it simple” from a system perspective. Manjaro simplifies things for the user but creates additional obfuscation. I can see some people who value Arch’s approach being less than amenable to that.
But that’s not a reason to not use it. If Manjaro’s approach appeals to you, use it.
Can you explain what mean by multi seat? As far is distros go I would stick to mint as it is much more stable and user friendly. (Source: I’m a Fedora user)
Edit: are you talking about having to separate monitors and keyboards? If so it may not be the best answer. More information. What I would do is install Proxmox and then setup vfio (PCIe pass though) to pass though the GPUs. You will most likely need two USB cards so that each station can have its own USB.
Assuming you get the hypervisor and hardware setup you will likely need to configure some way to keeping everything updated. You can use ansible and a file share or you can just setup automatic updates manually.
a few reasons I think, the QT bindings are split between cxx-qt and qmetaobject-rs . Neither of which are super great IMO, but even if they were, we have UI frame works like slint and egui which are already becoming quite good, slint has a good native look that resembles QT so people wanting that design can use that instead.
NOTE: When Qt is installed on the system, the native style uses Qt’s QStyle to achieve native looking widgets.
I’m not that familiar with KDE’s styling, but if I remember well it should just be a Qt style, so it should work.
Regarding rewriting Dolphin, I think in theory you could do that, in practice it’s probably pretty challenging given the amount of features Dolphin has.
It’s worth stating that QT is an optional backend and is only used for native styling, even the pure rust, Native styling still looks close to native. QT is fully optional and is not a dep even for linux apps
I feel like 300GBP might be a bit high. I got myself a Surface 3 in 2015 for about 500USD. It hat an Intel Atom with 2GB RAM and 64GB ssd. I used it for just under six years. I ended up using it with Windows 10 and OneNote mostly and it was pretty good.
C bindings and APIs generally work much better in Rust because the language works a lot more like C than it does C++.
Qt depends a lot on C++ class inheritance, and even does some preprocessing of C++ files to generate code in those classes. That’s obviously not possible when using Rust. And it looks like you need a fair bit of unsafe there and there to use it at all too.
Meanwhile, GTK being a C library, its integration with Rust is much more transparent and nice.
So if you’re making a GUI Rust app, you’re just kind of better off with GTK at the moment. It’s significantly easier and nicer.
Having made the choice to use GTK for a Rust project years ago - before a lot of the more Rust-friendly frameworks were around - this is exactly why I chose it. Nothing to do with DEs or any of that, just looking for a better coding experience. Now I’d probably choose one of the several Rust-focused solutions that have popped up though.
For a DE to succeed it just has to succeed over lots of alternatives in some features.
GNOME
is widely developed and protected, as it is the default on Fedora (with Redbat) and Ubuntu (Canonical). It is kinda fancy but its main focus seems to be a new “material-ish” simplified and streamlined Desktop.
Just not with transparency, thin animations, blur, 3D Backgrounds, an actually working, goodlooking and existing panel/dock, Apps that actually use your huge top bar used for decorations. Compared to macOS or something.
So you could say its design philosophy is inspired by macOS, but with many different ideas like that “Virtual Desktops or die”. But its basically macOS but less fancy, with a material-ish design like Android 13. I hate both hahaha.
KDE
Then there is KDE, which is really at the edge to look like the extremely outdated look of Windows 10 with these ugly rectangles everywhere, this no-round-corners fetish back in the day, “rectangles are elegant and good UI”. Such a completely weird step back in Style from Windows7, with less colors everywhere.
I have to say though, that Windows11, apart from a lot of stuff like their new design framework for Apps that wastes space, while also in part just already look really fancy, looks way better than KDE 5.
So KDE is now in the position to develop own ideas, but they pretty much go in the same direction as in windows, their new panel changer applet by Niccolo is veery similar to that, and it looks awesome! So I am certain the KDE6 will improve in Design a lot, even though I think I havent yet tried a KDE6 Plasma where projects like Dolphin where already ported to KDE6.
Projects like Dolphin are just great. I found it so strange and new back then to use a file manager with a name XD but funny, that Dolphin, Nemo and Thunar all come from the sea. Dolphin, Ocular, Spectacle, Ark, Kfind, KDE-Partitionmanager, Gwenview (something like Gimp but just for light editing, while still being in an unsafe language with security holes everywhere). These are all just great and unique software projects.
XFCE, MATE, Budgie, Cinnamon
Afaik these are all using GTK, so you could see them as outdated GNOME forks. Maybe thats very mean though, I see that Budgie will soon have Wayland, so I consider it an actively maintained Desktop.
I honestly can’t say much of the other environments, although I guess XFCE is based, had an okayish Design language that is at a solid base between Windows7 and some old Android.
Maybe if you tweak it it gets really modern, but I have looked enough Linux Scoop to know that every DE can look fancy with the amazing Community Designs. Actually Desktops should let random nontechnical Designers that dont understand Git make their Design. Like, no Code touching at all, just images please.
LXDE, LXQt, Window managers
Okay so these are basically energy saving DEs. They dont support lots of stuff simply, with their Design being at Windows XP or earlier. If you dont even have a menubar, that doesnt have to be styled.
So the Desktops maybe for old hardware and energy saving. If they have Wayland, so they can easily be used as the Window Manager of a Desktop, some Distro, Budgie or so, is looking to use an existent Windowmanager as their own. Just not with their own big Design Language, so they can make it “the Budgie Window Manager” without much problems.
I tried Fedora Sway and that was basically broken? My mouse was deduplicating and spamming the screen full with mouse symbols, meanwhile I could look at that… modern and colorful Titlebar, no Viridis or whatever actually thought through Color pallet of child crayon colors on a rectangle Bar with Terminal Font? Who wouldnt love this much “basedness”? But it broke, so yeah uninstalled that.
Cosmic, Hyprland
Now here come new projects, that actually have Designers working on them. Aaand in the Case of Cosmic it is entirely written in a damn safe language.
Okay its fair to say that Hyprland is a cool looking Window Manager, but Cosmic is doing something insane here.
Nearly all these bullshit old buggy File managers are in some C/C++ code, that just always breaks.
These are often 15 years old projects, they said “they cleaned up the packages” just by porting them to Qt6! Imagine what background changes they just left, because they would actually need to cleanup everything?
So Rust. Slint is said to be Qt-like, but not relying on C++, making it an incredible pain to write in Rust as you need to do some OOP translation that I dont understand because I am not in IT.
So Cosmic is doing something crazy and kinda new. Their interface was starting basically as a GNOME extension, quite literally. And there are many people layering just that package on their Fedora Silverblue (or future secureblue?)
But it is still basically imitating GNOME, with GTK support being one of the first GUI Framework integrations to come. They are doing nice material android-y things with their apps, and I imagine they are going in some direction here. Much like Android actually.
So COSMIC is a great beginning, but I think Rewriting something similar to Qt, with loots of frameworks and GUI Interface creation tools would be a statement. Like the Qt Creator, its crazy, a bit like this stupid TinkerCad but actually working and not being Windows-only and blocking Adblockers without even displaying Ads.
It would probably be “Qt stuff + Rust + Translation”, as the Qt people will likely not switch to Rust just like that. But having the core Apps, Kwin, the panel rewritten in Rust, that would be incredible.
Kwin is already working kinda well, but now there is the Cosmic Desktop with whatever WM and they could just reuse that and adapt it a bit.
So yeah, its a big deal for Interface Frameworks to rewrite all their stuff in another, extremely different language.
people who insist on using windows should just run it in a VM, it has suprisingly low overhead these days, you can even game with it if you insist, but i’m hearing wine/proton is getting good enough that it doesn’t even matter
Siege is honestly awful these days (not complaining about the sci-fi ops, reality is lame as shit why not spruce it up a bit) but what they have done to the UI and the queues (bring unranked back please) is honestly unforgivable and makes the game hard to play. (It isn’t all bad, but more bad than good)
You're still stuck when it comes to anti-cheat in multiplayer games. Some do allow it to work on Linux, but a significant number don't. Hopefully the tides slowly start to change thanks to the Steam Deck.
I mean I do that currently and it is okay, but file transfer is still not working. The rest is, and I think it even was pretty much ootb, but the SPICE drivers are a real hassle to get installed, while it could be a one click solution?
(This “insert spice CD” thing has no option to download the driver ISO, right?)
Also windows11 is a bit bloated. Bulk crap uninstaller and ChrisTituses Winutil really help making it less fancy but more performant, or just usable.
But yes, VM is way better than hardware. If your Laptop supports that.
I hate that most Linux brightness controls assume that humans perceive brightness linearly for some reason. I don’t want a flash bang in dark surroundings when I forget to use the slider. I don’t want to press my brightness up key a thousand times or resort to the slider in bright surroundings.
Just windows, I had windows 10 installed on my laptop and was constantly fighting with windows update so when the system broke (wouldn’t boot) I finally installed Ubuntu. These days I use arch BTW.
I tried it briefly, but it doesn’t/didn’t support disk encryption. For my laptop this is a must, so I’ll wait until it is implemented and out of alpha.
I’ve been waiting for a beta of the Debian-based version. The Ubuntu-based version seemed to run reasonably well on my old Thinkpad T460, but I didn’t try too much serious stuff on it that I don’t already do on regular Debian with Distrobox.
It sounds really cool, but I’ve honestly had issues installing it on two PCs now on two separate occasions separated by a couple months. Issues I didn’t have installing Ubuntu. The installer would fail to complete. I’m not a Linux power user, and while I tried debugging for a few hours, I gave up.
Why don’t you chill out about your Linux setup a bit, and instead of doing stuff to your Linux system, do stuff with it.
Open Source software lives from the contributions of the users, and there’s plenty to do everywhere.
You could use your free time to actually make a difference and help out other Linux users!
I meant alternatives to systemd-homed, systemd-machined and the likes. Since I’m on NixOS, I’m restricted to most of the systemd stuff. I’m not even sure if I need all of them.
Now I’m being dragged into the anti-systemd ideology. I have a bunch of CLI utility that I have never ever touched since the three years I’ve been on Linux. I just came across homectl, machinectl and timedatectl, and I’m convinced that the part about “bloat” does make a lot of sense now.
I don’t really care either way. I like things to be more minimal, but I’m not really anti-systemd or anything like that. I’ve just been using openrc for a few years now, and haven’t used systemd enough to learn about the homed stuff I guess
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