My experience with flatpak has been stellar from a technical perspective has been stellar.
Where it currently falls short for me personally is trust. With my distro I am putting my trust into the maintainers, but with flatpak its… random people for most apps?
It is tough when it is not a primary channel of distribution for most devs, but I am optimistic that will change in the future.
It’s sandboxed though. Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part. So if it’s sandboxed away from your other stuff, what’s the issue?
Sandboxed just means an app can’t reach out to the rest of the OS. What about the information I am entrusting to it to process?
If my browser is a flatpak, it likely has access to most of the information I care about. If I am using a chat app that is a flatpak, it can read my most personal communications. Why do I care if it can read what is in /etc?
Running an app from a developer already implies trust on your part.
You totally missed my point. My point was that a lot of flatpaks are packaged by unknown third parties. I would love it if the devs would package things as flatpaks directly, but that is mostly not the case.
Looking at flathub right now. 1567 applications are from unverified publishers vs 789 verified. Unverified apps include chrome, edge, chromium, brave, BITWARDEN and signal. All of those applications process highly sensitive information.
Personally I never understood why file managers in linux refuse to do operations that require privileges. Guess what, if I have Nautilus open and want to move files into, let’s say, /usr/local, I don’t want to have to switch to the terminal to do so if I already have the stuff copied within nautilus. On Windows, I just get an admin password prompt if I try to do naughty stuff. On Linux, we have the whole polkit system, but no file manager seems to ever use it. Tbf, this is not a nautilus problem, as no file manager seems to do this.
Oh wow you can? I just switched to Nemo on Arch after using Thunar for a long time but I got annoyed at it for crashing a lot when I copy files to my FTP server. Very good to know!
I’m aware of nautilus-admin, but not only is it not maintained, imho it should be part of nautilus by default, and it has to open a new nautilus window when you use it. What I want is to drag and drop files to /usr/local and then get a password prompt to do the move. With nautilus-admin, I need to have the foresight to use “Open as admin” when going into /usr/local, but if I had that foresight then I might as well just start nautilus as root to begin with. Usually I just want to look into the folder, and only then realize I need to change something, which means a good old “go back up one folder, then search the local folder again, then right click, search for ‘Open as admin’, then get thrown into a new window, completely disorienting myself in the process”.
Dell is well known for their proprietary fuckery, both in hardware and software. Pretty much anything other than a Dell or an Ultrabook like the Surface or MacBooks (obviously) should give you very little issue. Look for something that uses Intel NICs and you should be fine, Realtek NICs are poorly supported in Linux.
One of my coworkers had a Dimension or whatever the “base level” laptops are and absolutely hates it. He said it ran like shit but couldn’t get another one.
I’ve had two Dell laptops that ran Ubuntu perfectly. Dell sells laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed and also certifies models for Linux. Their Linux support is top notch in my experience.
Yeah, obviously the ones they sell with Linux pre-installed support Linux perfectly, but that’s like 5 out of their 20 laptops. It would be shitty if they didn’t. People tend to buy a model with Windows preloaded and then install Linux on it though. Even though I used to work for Disney+ as a Linux System Engineer, which runs entirely on Linux, I had to fight with the helldesk to get a laptop that runs Linux, they would only support Windows and MacBooks. I told them straight up that I didn’t need their support and I was able to figure out things on my own. It took me about 5 months to get the Lenovo Carbon X1, granted this was during the end of the first year of COVID.
Seconding this, Dell has excellent support for Linux on their enterprise laptops (Latitude and Precision). XPS are another breed, and tend to be marketed as a ultrabook or a MacBook competition.
I wiped Windows and have been running Linux without issues on a Dell XPS 13 9360 for some time, so it can be done at least with some of their models. For what it’s worth I’m using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Is that a desktop or laptop? The desktops are generally better supported and they just make the case and motherboard proprietary. My dad had an XPS Gen3 desktop back in 2005. When it finally died I couldn’t reuse the case since it was the BTX form factor and the front panel connector was proprietary 😑
It’s a 13" laptop from late 2017, with an 8th gen Intel i7 in it. With Tumbleweed it feels faster than my other XPS 13, which has an 11th gen i7 but runs Windows. I actually thought the 2017 one was finished because under Windows the fans ran all the time and it overheated so badly it would slow to a crawl. I repasted it twice with no improvement. But once I switched it to Linux the fans hardly come on, and they’re quiet when they do. Linux has been a huge improvement on that machine.
With Windows it always feels like I get the dregs of the CPU cycles after all the corporate interests with software on the computer have taken their share.
Every Dell laptop I’ve ever owned has had a key repeat issue. Mind you, this was an issue on Windows too. Otherwise, I bought a Dell Latitude last year and it has worked great.
Second one, which I’d rephrase as ubuntu sticking with apt/dpkg as its package manager. Which is really nice if you like ubuntu as a distro already.
Though I don’t really get why there has to be a distro to be beaten. And having flavors is always good. I, for example, don’t like distros changing too much upstream SW, so the more vanilla the better. I don’t like either the periodic releases, and to be rolling release rocks. I don’t like systemd, whereas most distros now a days are systemd dependent. I also dislike network manager and similar and require a distro that keeps support for the basic dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant… All that to say, that no distro fits all needs, so several options are good, no need to have one beating the rest, :)
I too think Cinnamon is a pretty great Experience. I am using KDE and heard from many people that it feels better, its more unified and has way more features.
Wayland is important for security, and Mint will need a long time to adopt that. There are already apps only running on Wayland for reasons.
KDE is a bit unstable as its a huge project. I hope that will get better in Plasma 6.
I sure wish to have something like KDE more stable. But once you are used to it, its just better. Things that are not there yet on Mint are on KDE since years.
Its a bit of a mess as its so old. Extensions need to be cleaned up. But like, Dolphin extensions are so great, I dont know an equivalent on Cinnamon.
Also the distro model is the standard one. A Fedora Atomic Cinnamon variant, with modern presets and everything working, would be a great thing to install anywhere. Automatic atomic updates, easy version upgrades, transparent system changes and resets being just one command away.
U-Blue in general is a nice collection of images because not only are there various unofficial options, but a lot of things like RPMFusion, etc. are preconfigured in their versions of the main editions (SilverBlue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx).
Or you can just rebase regular SilverBlue (or one of the three other official variants) to one of those images if you’re running it already. Can roll back if you don’t like it.
I doubt there’ll be an official edition until Cinnamon has full Wayland support since Fedora is going all in on that now.
Flatpaks are integrated into the store. If you’re using fedora.
If you’re using Ubuntu, then snaps are probably integrated. What I’m trying to say here is that your comment is useless if you’re not going to mention your OS
It was my first distro I liked it at the time, but after they killed of the KDE Edition I tried out Manjaro and the rolling release with up to date software just fits my use case much better.
is there like a competent antivirus i could use: the system is freshly installed and i havent used any shady software; everything from the repo and a hash checked tor browser(I didnt visit any shady site just clearnet browsing)
I’ve been using Mint for a few months now after initially trying Fedora and Kubuntu. Mint has been by far my favorite experience and I’ve even gotten a few people converted to Linux via Mint. Definitely my recommendation for any Linux newbies.
I avoid it like the plague. It’s fat and slow, and the Arch repos + the AUR have just about everything anyway (I use Arch btw, in case you’re wondering). I’ll sooner build from source than touch anything flatpak.
With modern hardware neither of those really are an issue. You can get a 1 TB nvme ssd for €50 and 2 TB for less than a 100. That should lend you plenty of storage and speed
I still find it noticeable 🤷 I do have an nvme ssd, and while 50 eur is negligible to you or me, not everyone is so lucky, + there’s no reason to create e-waste when your older hardware is working fine.
AUR can be an unstable mess at times (yes, it’s very convenient, but it has flaws and arch isn’t the only distro out there. Also the space argument just makes no sense, yes the 1st time you download a flatpak, it downloads like 1~2GB of dependencies, but after that all other flatpaks use said dependencies and are a fraction of the size. So ironically, flatpaks end up using less space than AUR packages, if you don’t clean out their cache…
Yeah I’m always wary of what I install from the AUR, never more than 1 or 2 packages on any given system. But a surprising amount of stuff can be found even in the main arch repos, so the AUR is rarely necessary.
There are too many, especially outdated runtimes in use. That is a problem. I have like 7GB of runtimes, somewhere a year ago when I roughly counted it.
Not a global opinion here as many hardcore linux users will stand by Arch or Mint, but I always have preferred Debian. It’s what Ubuntu is based on, so it uses apt(itude), yet it’s not prebloated Ubuntu and much more true to adaptation and unedited software than Ubuntu has become… But in the end it’s more personal choice and taste, so usually requires a bunch of failed attempts to get one that fits, as every linux can basically do the same things, yet on some or other slightly different way… 😜
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