If your use cases (a.k.a. requirements) are met by your current distro, never switch.
If you are satisfied with stability, availability of support, quick availability of security patches, never switch.
This is particularly important when you are using your Linux desktop as your daily driver.
Most you can do is to check what additional features other distros are offering (rolling release, hardened/zen kernel, x86-64-v2/3 support, file system type, user base, availability of packages, package formats, overall documentation etc.), validate if you really need those features.
If you are interested or just curious to test those features, install that distro on a VM (QEMU/KVM) to try it out first safely. Use it on VM for a while, make yourself comfortable with it. Once you are satisfied with it, only then switch.
May not qualify as “simple” versus a VM, but you can try using chroot environment. You essentially run minimal Ubuntu environment from a folder that can be a newer or old version of the host OS.
However, be aware that adding third party repositories may cause problems in the future. For example, if you upgrade to a version of Mint that’s based on 22.04 or 24.04, the updater may throw errors or even do an incomplete update because of broken dependency chains.
If the software you’re using doesn’t depend on (a specific version of) software in the Mint repositories, you should be fine and it shouldn’t matter. I myself have a few external repositories that I know from experience cause no dependency issues. I’ve also had to debug plenty of broken upgrades because of other (popular!) repositories, though.
You may want to use a tool like Distrobox instead. Binaries running inside Distrobox have close to zero overhead. GPU acceleration can be a bit trickier, but for Nvidia GPUs there are workarounds to maintain full performance.
You can also try the version of ROS that Ubuntu packages. It’s not the latest version, but it’s guaranteed to work without breaking your software updates or operating system upgrades in the long term.
Piggy backing to ask how one could play video from streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, etc in full HD under such a setup? My assumptions are that videos would be played in a web browser, and most if not all streaming services like Netflix limit video playback to 720p in a web browser, although I’d love to be wrong about that.
There is a browser extension called “Netflix 1080p”, but in my experience the quality isn’t the same as Netflix’s native 1080p - the quality with the extension is visibly lower (but still better than 720p). And of course, it can’t do 4K at all. It also occasionally breaks, which is annoying.
If you really want to play streaming services at full quality, it’s better to just get a streaming stick like a Fire TV Stick, or a Roku or similar.
I’ve been using a htpc for TV content for years, and I’ve finally given up and just gonna pirate all my shit now. The hoops I’ve had to jump through to get 1080p on Linux, and Netflix/prime video working on my rooted lineageos phone has pissed me off too much. Researching all the *arr software packages and which sources to get content from, this weekend.
You are. Reformat and install the first hardware compatible distro you find on distro.moe right now. Don’t think too much about it, just do it! /s, probably?
If checking out a different distro sounds interesting and/or fun then you should. If not, then don’t. Whatever way you Linux is the correct way for you.
Any distro should do it, you just need to set your media centre software to run at startup. I’ve done it with Plex and Kodi, and I think Jellyfin does it too :)
Could you please provide a brief description of Vital? I’m in the process of rebuilding my musicmaking setup after a 15 years long hiatus, so I need to update myself on what’s out there.
On that note, it looks like I’m gonna go for bitwig over Ardour. Any thoughts/opinions on that?
Vital is a vst similar to Serum, a pretty popular paid vst. It has a bunch of preset sounds but offers a lot of options for effects and automation to design your own sounds. I use it a ton personally and get a lot of range from it.
Getting plugins to install is often a big hurdle, if they are working, they work. However I think performance suffers alot. Didn’t try it on any bigger synths yet tho.
Might depend on what DAW you use but I found it abit tedious to setup with Ardour, but after that it worked perfectly with the VSTs I was running on Windows, mainly Amplitube 5.
I use it for spitfire labs, ott, and delay lama (very important) and all work great. There are occasional crashes when messing with parameters, but usually those don’t happen more then once. I haven’t noticed any performance issues.
Building images is easy enough. It’s pretty similar to how you’d install or compile software directly on the host. Just write a Dockerfile that runs the hide.me install script. I found this repo and image which may work for you as is or as a starting point.
When you run the image as a container you can set it up as the network gateway, just find a tutorial on how to set up a Wireguard container and replace Wireguard with your hide.me container.
In terms of kill switches you’d have to see how other people have done it, but it’s not impossible.
I found this repo and image which may work for you as is or as a starting point.
Wow I completely missed this one! This is exactly what I was planning to do! I actually installed the original repo because I’m not on arm, and it seem to work very well! I have to do a few tests to check if the killswitch actually works
I didn’t even look to see if the one I linked was a fork. I’m glad it works!
A cool thing about Dockerfiles is that they’re usually architecture agnostic. I think the one I linked is as well, meaning that the architecture is only locked in when the image is built for a specific one. In this case the repo owner probably only built it for arm machines, but a build for x86_64 should work as well.
isn’t it an entire OS? I only need to bind the internet traffic of my container to the ones I want doing something like network_mode: container:myhidemecontainer in docker compose
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