Just a note: there are a few on-screen software keyboards for X out there that aren’t tied to a specific DE, like xvkbd and svkbd. They might be worth trying if you find some distro that works well except that the default on-screen keyboard sucks. (No idea if there’s any equivalent for Wayland.)
Tuxedo computers could be a good fit I think? It’s like system76, but from Germany. You can pick from a few OS including an Ubuntu fork they made ( tuxedo os ). You can tweak the laptop yourself ( different you/CPUs/disk sizes/… ) to fit your use case.
As someone who frequents the laptop market, I’ll throw in my two-cents.
If you’re looking for value, don’t compromise on performance, buy refurbished.
While I’m certain it is definitely different from country to country, a refurbished laptop typically has more life to give in them.
I’d recommend business laptops, such as the Dell Latitudes or the Lenovo Thinkpads, but an M1 MacBook Air provides an absolutely shocking amount of performance for the price.
Checking sites like eBay or the pages of hardware resellers rather than big box stores is definitely where I’d go.
True, M1 and even M2 macs have superb battery life. Fedora Asahi remix will still be pretty hacky though and have more problems. But a lot works now, it has opengl support, a FOSS rust driver for the GPU and more.
I will not compromise on the performance. I will definitively look to the refurbished units. The biggest issue we have here, it’s we are a small country and our own keyboard layout (the keyboard isn’t a real issue).
My current work forces me to work with Apple (because they are lazy to prepare Linux for working), I have been on Linux for almost 10 years and I really want to quit my Job because of this stupid Apple laptop, it is trash, the DE is stupid, and I have many issues (with settings, login items, alacritty not working… yabai stopped to work without any reason…) that stresses me a lot… So good, I love my work and I still enjoy working, but the macOS is pure trash.
I was in the same boat but Linux Mint just literally worked. Easiest transition ever. I keep my Windows dual boot because I need MS Office for work but I’m in mint 95% of the time with no tinkering.
You can always try Linux risk free in a virtual machine like VirtualBox.
If you like what you see, and you have any valuable data backed-up, you can try dual booting. That way you get to use Linux as your primary operating system, but can switch back and forth as much as needed.
I found I was dual booting Windows and Linux for over 3 years before I was comfortable enough to stop using Windows entirely. Switching to Linux doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. You can take it as slow as you want.
Oops, sorry I didn’t notice that part. I’ve never seen anything like that to be honest. It kinda violates the whole “do only one thing and do it well” UNIX ethos. As a decent work-around, you can just open the resulting images in Gimp?
That’s what I’ve been doing since flameshot stopped working for me. I ask about the built-in solution, because pasting the image into GIMP and blurring specific parts drastically increases the time to prepare such a screenshot
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I didnt realise that Arch adoption was so high. I (don’t) use arch, BTW. Although now I feel like I want to give it a spin to see what all the fuss is about!
Or maybe I’ll stay fat, dumb, and happy with Fedora and Nobara on my desktop and laptop.
Not that it would change anything for me personally, but I really think Pop! OS is a poor naming choice. Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
Stick with Fedora and Nobara, they are good distros. I use Arch myself, because I like that bleeding edge, bro - but if those other distros are working for you, there’s pretty much no reason for the average person to switch.
Nobara is sooo hyped. It is not a secure Distro. They literally
do tons of weird stuff with Apparmor and literally disable SELinux “because its easier to work with” (fedora variants are the only Distros using it, which is such a security advantage!)
add tons of packages
modify GNOME to make it very strange
delay an update for over a month
I recommend to use bazzite.gg if you want Gaming. They do all the Nobara fixes but
immutable
daily updates
SELinux intact
various spins for every hardware, including custom Kernels and tweaks
This talk gave me a realistic set of expectations about Arch, and made me wanting to stick to Fedora even though they didn’t talk positively about it for the most part
Arch was great for teaching me about Linux. It was rough, I completely borked my system about 3-4 times in the course of about 10 months lol. But it taught me valuable lessons on how to fix a destroyed system, how to use Timeshift to rollback changes, how to patch drivers and specific system packages, etc.
Ultimately, it was the constant fiddling that got me to go away from Arch and towards Nobara for my main gaming PC. I just wanted an OS that was stable, had great gaming performance, and didn’t require me to install a bunch of obscure packages and tools like Arch needed to get certain things to work.
Nobara has been fantastic so far and is probably my go-to distro recommendation for folks who plan on gaming hard on Linux, their pre-included kernel patches and utilities like Protonup-QT are awesome for gamers.
I installed LMDE on my work IT laptop recently and overall I like it. Have had a few annoying bugs because of Debian’s old packages, but everything is ironed out now and it’s great. Something stable and basic that gets out of the way for me to do my job.
Personally, I think they should make LMDE the default version of Linux Mint.
Debian -> Ubuntu -> Linux Mint vs Debian -> LMDE
Since it’s more upstream, it should be more up-to-date and secure, right?
I feel like basing a distro off of Ubuntu is sort of a crutch. It’s makes things easier at the beginning, but ultimately it holds you back as a distro developer
Hm, I’ve had this problem since my initial setup about 2-3 months ago, I think that if there’s something wrong with the software in the repos, it would’ve been fixed by now and I wouldn’t be the only one having this problem, right?
But of course, if you want I can give the testing repos a try :)
I have the s10+ and it’s actually useful, as you can remap the double click on that button to open any app you like. But yeah single click, never happened intentionally.
EDIT: F yeah, I just checked the settings and you can decide if you want bixby activation on single or double-click. Now I’ve set bixby to double click and on single-click it opens my password manager. If you don’t select anything, it will do nothing on a single click.
The setting is under “Advanced Features” -> “Bixby Key” for me.
because most people are unaware of keybindings and when they inevitable tap on the new dedicated key they’ll probably be shown a subscription screen for Copilot Premium or whatever they call it.
IMO it’s a very disgusting and intrusive way of fishing subscriptions to the AI thing they’ve invested so much money on.
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it’s a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of “hallucinations” and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole “voice controlled assistants” bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
Not a single soul wants this. They just want to use every foul trick to get you to use copilot (by accident even) just like they do with bing and their other garbage.
I think it's those stupid hard coded buttons on my remote that I accidentally press every so often then have to repeatedly try and back/exit out of the stupid thing it launched that I cannot remove/uninstall from my tv.
If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you’ll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it’s 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it’s 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.
If it’s one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅
Maybe I'm a pessimist but this is going to really resonate with the people who are "looking forward to AI" because they read headlines, but haven't actually used any LLMs yet because nobody has told them how.
I want a voice controlled assistant that runs locally and is fully FOSS and I can just run on my bog standard linux PC, hardware minimum requirements nonwithstanding
All I want is a real life iteration of J.A.R.V.I.S. and several billion dollars so I can blurt out cool ideas and have them rendered and built in a couple hours.
Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft’s copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they’re gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.
The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn’t an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.
Sure, all that may be true but it doesn’t answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren’t that “oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants”, it was more “voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would”. I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.
I’m reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.
It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.
I suppose having worked with LLMs a whole bunch over the past year I have a better sense of what I meant by “automate high level tasks”.
I’m talking about an assistant where, let’s say you need to edit a podcast video to add graphics and cut out dead space or mistakes that you corrected in the recording. You could tell the assistant to do that and it would open the video in Adobe Premiere pro, do the necessary tasks, then ask you to review it to check if it made mistakes.
Or if you had an issue with a particular device, e.g. your display, the assistant would research the issue and perform the necessary steps to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
These are currently hypothetical scenarios, but current GPT4 can already perform some of these tasks, and specifically training it to be a desktop assistant and to do more agentic tasks will make this a reality in a few years.
It’s additionally already useful for reading and editing long documents and will only get better on this end. You can already use an LLM to query your documents and give you summaries or use them as instructions/research to aid in performing a task.
A year ago local LLM was just not there, but the stuff you can run now with 8gb vram is pretty amazing, if not quite as good yet as GPT 4. Honestly even if it stops right where it is, it’s still powerful enough to be a foundation for a more accessible and efficient way to interface with computers.
[cosmic-randr] uses the wlr output configuration Wayland protocols.
Does this mean cosmic-randr should work on other compositors that support the wlr output configuration protocol (e.g. sway, hyprland, river, …)? It’s great to see cosmic adopting existing protocols, instead of compositor specific protocols (or worse, no external app support at all).
Also, it’s great how portable Cosmic DE seems to be, as it’s already mostly packaged on NixOS. On first look, cosmic-term seems to be a quick terminal so I might switch to it, as well as cosmic-files.
If they support the wlr output configuration protocols, then yes it’ll work fine. There are some more advanced features that we want that aren’t supported by the protocol though, so we will likely develop some cosmic protocol extensions for those features.
Despite the CPU being 64-bit, the distro MUST be 32-bit. This is because of the MacBook’s BIOS, which prevents 64-bit bootloaders from working.
That’s the thing, you can run a 64-bit distro as long as you’ve a 32 bit grub starting it :) You run Debian 12 amd64 on a 32 bit EFI:
As of 2023 and Debian 12 the amd64 installation media (available in netinst form) includes the UEFI boot loaders necessary for both i386 and amd64 boot. By selecting “64-bit install” from the initial boot menu, debian-installer will install a 64-bit (amd64) version of Debian. The system will automatically detect that the underlying UEFI firmware is 32-bit and will install the appropriate version of grub-efi to work with it.
I am running 10.6. Chromium Legacy is for 10.7 and above, and the same is true of a lot of software. Meanwhile, on my Linux partition, I can have Firefox Nightly if I want. It’ll run heavily, but it’s possible.
As it happens, I do have a somewhat recent browser installed in OSX, but it’s not great.
Also, running an older OS like that isn’t a good idea, as it won’t have received security patches or microcode updates.
That’s the thing, you can run a 64-bit distro as long as you’ve a 32 bit grub starting it :)
I hadn’t quite considered that somebody had implemented this. Thanks for the info!
There was also another user who gave me a link to some software that modifies mixed-mode ISOs so that they will boot on my potato laptop.
I am running 10.6. Chromium Legacy is for 10.7 and above
Can’t you run 10.7 on that laptop? It seems like you can, and that will greatly improve your software situation. Another thing to consider is to replace the HDD with an SSD. That computer will run any SATA drive (I’ve tested with modern WD blue drives), just grab something like 250GB for 30€ and enjoy speed.
There was also another user who gave me a link to some software that modifies mixed-mode ISOs so that they will boot on my potato laptop.
Yes but Debian provides that out-of-the-box and officially supported. That means everything will work fine and as stable as Debian is usually.
The crashes are in the middle of browsers (both Firefox and chrome embedded in Spotify), if you try a simple mprime stress test (from the AUR mprime-bin) does it crash too?
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