Geary has so many bugs and going to Gitlab to report the bug, you’ll find matching issues for the same bug dating back multiple years.
Geary also doesn’t offer a option for user to pull/refresh emails. Getting a 2FA code via email and waiting minutes to get the email to show up on Geary was painful.
The only thing I liked about Geary was it’s notifications integration in Gnome
It used to be a buggy mess, but it has become pretty stable in recent years. I’m using it daily and can’t remember the last time I encountered a severe bug.
The video is clickbait and a few of the distros are in categories just for dramatic effect. I personally share Chris’s criteria for “pointless” distros however, and I hope that his main “clickbait motive” was trying to stop people from hopping around from gimmick distro to gimmick distro when the real magic has always been with the Debian/Arch base underneath the hood. I don’t care to give Chris the attention he wants so I’d rather answer your questions instead of talk about the video directly:
I agree that Debian and Arch are “S-tier” distros. Not that they’re better than everything else for every usecase but they are very high quality community-run distros with large package bases, and they accomplish their mission statements with ease. If you’re a Linux power user for long enough you may eventually settle into one of these two distros because they give you a lot of room to mold your configuration without being opinionated by downstream distro maintainers.
Linux Mint is very good, and it’s probably the only “fork distro” that I recommend people use because it makes Debian/Ubuntu very simple and usable for new users, and it’s done so for many years with a great track record. I currently run Debian Stable but if you put a gun to my head and said “you can only run Linux Mint from now on” I’d be fine with it. Specifically, I prefer the LMDE edition but the normal version is good too.
You can run cutting-edge gaming stuff on Debian Stable and Linux Mint by using Flatpak Lutris/Steam, which uses its own cutting-edge Mesa package instead of the system’s, and you can also install a cutting-edge kernel on these stable distros by using Debian backports or e.g. XanMod. I prefer using stable distros like Debian Stable and pulling cutting-edge versions of your important packages through Flatpak or other means, which gives you a “stable base and rolling top”.
I think the general usecase for Arch has diminished from half a decade ago due to Flatpak’s popularity, and IMO a stable base setup makes more sense if you can get everything important that you need from Flatpaks. With Arch, not only are the programs you care about bleeding-edge, everything is bleeding-edge, and you may end up with annoying bugs from packages you didn’t even know existed.
If you want a more modern version of the Linux desktop without the bleeding-edge of Arch I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great cutting-edge distro. They have extensive automatic testing that ensures high system stability even while living near the edge of package freshness. The main downside is OpenSUSE’s smaller package base compared to Debian/Arch-based distros.
thanks for the explanations. I only used Ubuntu like 5 years ago and since then never again. From what i understand flatpak is a linux command to install applications. Ubuntu uses apt / apt-get (whatever the difference is there). Why does this guy shit on apt so much? I dont know whats wrong with it and why is flatpak so good?
Flatpak is like an alternative packaging system that exists outside of your distro’s normal packaging model, e.g. apt/dnf/pacman etc. The killer features are that Flatpaks work on any distro with a single universal package, and that the software versions will be cutting-edge without needing cutting-edge system dependencies. Flatpaks run in their own dependency network and generally don’t rely on anything from the host system - this means that you can have arbitrary software on your machine that your distro/repo maintainers don’t need to compile/quality-control/stability-test/etc. It also comes with an easy sandboxing framework out of the box as a bonus.
In my case I usually use Flatpaks to get more current versions of software without totally messing up Debian’s “Debian does not break” stability model - Debian is meticulously maintained so that its “Stable” branch only has ultra-stable versions of software, at the expense of those packages being older and frozen. If you use a distro with smaller package repos (e.g. OpenSUSE/Fedora/etc) you’ll probably appreciate finding Flatpak versions of software that you’d normally need to manually compile.
Flatpaks are cool, and they have a specific use. They’re not the end-all be-all of packaging and they’re (hopefully) not going to replace apt/dnf/pacman. As for why they hate apt I have no idea. apt is good, and you can even make it a little nicer by installing nala and using that instead of apt.
If the basis of this thread is that you’re digging for distro recommendations I’d personally steer you towards Linux Mint and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for their ease of use. Debian is a little more difficult to set up than Linux Mint but not tremendously so. Arch is more of an “intermediate” difficulty distro where the main challenge is that your system packages are fast-moving and can break/change in small ways from day-to-day. If you aren’t comfortable with Linux you might get frustrated with minor bugs that you don’t know how to troubleshoot. Conversely, if you want to learn Linux then dealing with Arch’s shenanigans will help expose you to various parts of the system naturally.
Distrobox was always stable for me. Autocomplete only in bash but that doesnt matter much. Waaay more images by default but not as curated, also many are maintained by Fedora people and not the Distrobox people, so its not like they actually support more but just ship.
This is a big difference, Toolbox also supports these images.
But featurewise distrobox is brilliant, love the app icon export, the binaries are maybe a bit bloated.
Thats the way on Fedora, debian packages are called a bit differently, Ubuntu again, but that method works.
Also for packaging an app that just works, why not flatpak? Especially if its a GUI app, this would highly improve availability on many Distros not covered by RPMs and DEBs. Also RPMs can have dependency conflicts between Opensuse and Fedora because naming, probably similar with Ubuntu and Debian.
I use Brave pretty much just for that purpose, while I use Firefox to browse everything else.
There isFirefox PWA, but it feels like such a shitty hack (don’t get me wrong, it’s not badly made, but they’re forced by the circumstances to make a setup process that is one big headache) that I’d rather have a browser that has official and solid support and it also doubles as my browser to test web content on Blink, so it’s a win-win for me
Yea, I tried with Firefox PWA, but as you have told, it was not usable for me. Most PITA was, that I had to install my plugins on any PWA again and again… I would love using a browser which is not chromium based but has nice PWA features.
Problem is that Webapps require a very unhardened browser. Complete caching, cookies saved, serviceworkers in the background, so if Firefox got the feature hardening would break it
I’m actually using Ardour as my daily daw, very powerfull (check my profile if interested in libre music). Consider I made electronic music for many years with proprietary software.
I mean…you’re mostly right, but I don’t know how setting a few flags like -H,-W,-h,-w is that big of an issue. I agree lutris and maybe heroic (I don’t use) have frontends for these,but I would hardly that “way better”.
it’s incredible how out of touch this community is with the average end user. I’d wager that MOST people don’t know how, much less want to set custom flags for every one of their games. Believe it or not people actually like using nice GUIs and rely on simple intuitive frontends, and it’s a massive failure on Valve’s part considering they’re the largest, most mainstream PC gaming platform.
Nobody running a FOSS third party launcher is an average end user. Also, people routinely add flags to typical games even on Windows (e.g. -skiplauncher)… It’s really not that big a deal.
Yeah. I don’t know what those flags are… Yet.
The moment a game launch fails in that particular way, I will be diving all the way into that particular deep end.
Linux Cast is…okay. The long form conversation format episodes are usually better than when its just Matt.
Brodie should definitely be at the top of this list. He works in tech, devotes himself emphatically to the subject of Linux, has some really amazing guests on his Tech Over Tea Podcast, and is imho THE Linux YouTuber atm.
Chris Titus Tech is more an honorable mention, as his channel focuses equally on Windows and Linux, but he has some amazing scripts for iptables configurations, and optimizing gaming on Linux, amongst other related topics.
The Linux Experiment is great for quick recap of Linux News. Learn Linux TV is great for Linux sysadmin tips.
I don’t care for Distrotube, I won’t go into details except to say I don’t support Trump. Similar sentiments go for the Bible thumper, Luke Smith, whom doesn’t really post much Linux content any more afaik. I will admit they did post useful bash scripts from time to time though.
Trafotin and Bugswriter are interesting channels in the Linux Youtube space that I think are worth checking out.
Overall though, if you’re looking for quality Linux content on Youtube that keeps you informed and up to date. You can’t go wrong with Brodie Robertson, The Linux Experiment, and Learn Linux TV. That’s all you really need imho.
I got to be on the Tech Over Tea podcast! I really enjoyed talking with Brodie and would definitely recommend his main channel as well as Tech Over Tea. There is another podcast I sometimes watch called Linux Game Cast too.
Yeah I kinda lost interest in Distrotube when he started randomly pulling out guns in videos…
Like, I don’t care what your political views are as long as you make good content and stay on topic, and keep your views and work separate yaknow. Like hell, if you want to make separate videos about that then by all means, but I’m watching a tutorial on how to set up openbox I don’t care about your guns and freedoms
I like to think of (and recommend) three of the channels on the list based on one’s experience and how “deep” they want to go with Linux:
Linux Experiment is great for the “average desktop user” (like myself), someone who’s not too interested in programming or development and just wants to keep up with Linux-related news that relates to the average user and find cool tools to use with whatever distro or system you’re running.
Brodie is “mid-level”, I’d say, he looks at some of the more technical stuff but presents it in a way that relates to how a more average user would be interested in the thing he’s talking about. He talks about a good amount of dev stuff, but It’s still useful information generally for most Linux users out there, from folks who are just above " beginner level" to more advanced users.
DT (DistroTube) is for “power users” mainly, I think. He says he doesn’t really do development or programming, then makes a bunch of scripts to change up a bunch of window manager settings and goes hardcore into writing stuff for Emacs. He says he’s not a distro maintainer, then goes and takes his scripts and makes them into his own distro. For most of his videos, even if he takes you through what he’s doing step-by-step, you kinda have to know what you’re doing with the tools he’s using to know what’s going on. He talks about a lot of things like window managers and development and configuration tools the “average user” who just wants to do basic stuff on their desktop probably won’t know a whole lot about.
Desktop replacement gaming laptops are a mistake. You can buy a normal laptop and the parts to build a gaming desktop for the same price and the laptop will be much more practical to carry around while the desktop will perform better and last longer.
But desktop builds won’t use less electricity. I use a desktop replacement gaming laptop at home, without taking it anywhere, because it consumes less power
Not necessarily. Sure it doesn’t perform as well as a high-end crypto miner, but it performs better than a lot of desktop PCs that use way more power than it.
I mean that’s fine if that’s your opinion. But while they may be a mistake for you, I’ve found them to be a great compromise and enjoyed several of them for the past 10 years.
I have a normal laptop, a ThinkPad X1 Nano, which I love. I also have a desktop with an RX 6800, but I can only use that in my office, a cramped space which has poor Internet and is in an inconvenient spot in our house.
I’m looking for something that I can keep in the living room, and set up on our living room table to play some games with friends. I’ve had that desktop for almost 3 years and yet I’ve done most of my gaming since I had it on a 2013 Alienware laptop with an upgraded MXM graphics card.
And you will be able to upgrade a desktop computer. You could at some point swap the GPU or buy another stick of RAM for $60, whereas most things are soldered in laptops nowadays. Oftentimes they even solder the RAM to move it closer to the CPU and make the laptop a bit cheaper since it now requires less mechanical brackets/parts.
Also a laptop will almost never get the same performance because it’s more difficult to get all the heat out and it’ll switch to a lower clockrate once all the heat builds up in that small form-factor.
But it can be worth it if you need one device that can do both gaming and be carried around. Desktop replacements are quite popular. But they come with exactly those downsides. And it may be or might not be cheaper than buying one ultrabook plus a pc that’s tailored to gaming. It’s always a compromise, though.
I switched to Linux and have no issues with gaming. There are a couple of settings that need tweaked in steam, but it doesn’t take a computer genius to figure it out, just follow a guide or video.
For a beginner something like Mint might be the easiest transition. I went with Garuda myself, and it’s worked well, but I feel it’s probably a little less intuitive that something like Mint.
For gaming, look into proton, and how to have your games run with it and you’ll probably be fine. Keep your windows key on hand in case you decide to revert.
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