Here’s another vote for EndeavourOS if you need it. I run BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, but I’ve never needed to use it. Like the other poster said, I’ve had minor annoyances and brief package conflicts, but nothing critical has ever gone awry.
I don’t know if you should, but you can. I use Artix for my only computer (also used for uni). It never killed itself. I did once, which was my fault. But I just fixed it.
but depending on who you ask Arch is either the most stable distro they’ve ever used or bricked their pc ten seconds into the install process
This very funny, and true. Arch is almost as stable as its user :)
I don’t think you understand how zealous C&C fans are. Some of us have entire XP machines with CRT monitors just to play the game in its purest form. We’re about as culty as Linux.
But it’s also not just one program, it’s all the c&c games, their map editors, mod loaders, and any modding tools. World builder is just an example.
You can already get it working under Linux, running a Windows VM. I remember doing that for Homeworld, it’s basically the emulator approach. A VM is ok if it isn’t too demanding graphically.
I use my laptop for work all day every (week)day. It runs EndeavourOS and I haven’t had any problems - if anything I’ve encountered fewer annoyances than with any other distro I’ve tried to date (Pop, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, Debian). I don’t use Btrfs but I do use Timeshift as well as Syncthing to back up files to a file server at home.
I haven’t felt the desire to install Arch, and TBH I’m not sure what the benefit might be because I’d just configure it to be basically the same as EOS anyway.
if you decide on Gnome, keep in mind there are two main paths to follow – stock Gnome (“as the developers intended”) and Gnome with extensions (ie. addons or plugins or mods) – extensions can do everything from minor aesthetic tweaks (Blur My Shell, Rounded Corners, Remove Rounded Corners) right on up to completely changing the behavior of the window manager (PaperWM, Pop Shell) – which side of that particular divide you end up on is purely personal preference
I don’t agree with avoiding stable distros. In the case of Debian for example stable gets priority on security patches. Just subscribe to the security mailing list and have auto updates on.
Also download any disto or bleeding edge container and scan it and you’ll have vulnerabilities in some library. The ecosystem is always moving. The question is how exposed are you.
Use a firewall, secure your browser and whitelist sites you trust to run JS. Stick to repos. Scan downloaded files via virus total or open In a vm. Dont install what you dont need.
You are far more likely to get compromised in a site breach than to get hacked. The browser is the main attack vector that you need to secure.
Also dont run servers if you dont know what you are doing. Use a non networked VM to practice.
Dont blindly paste commands and be sure to read the source before you compile and run some random program.
would recommend linking the phrase “a fuckload of distros” to DistroWatch – give newcomers a heads-up on just how deep that particular rabbit hole goes …
As a complete noob who installed Mint about two weeks ago, I have Thoughts™. This is a good start, I think., and I’m really glad to see it, but it still makes some assumptions and misses a couple of things I came across that I think would be helpful.
I’ll try to find some time tomorrow to pull together some edits and suggestions to share, rather than a bunch of comments here.
Despite snaps and Canonical’s BS, Ubuntu is the best distro for beginners because it “just works” in a way other distros do not. You are doing new users a disservice by telling them to avoid it.
(Note: I personally dislike Ubuntu. This isn’t about fanboyism; this is about giving credit where it’s due.)
Same about Manjaro, it’s probably the most beginner-friendly Arch distro. Arch is inherently not beginner-friendly, of course any distro that attempts to make it more so will have to change a couple of things. It’s a pity some people can’t see beyond keeping Arch “pure”.
I’ve actually had pretty bad experiences with Manjaro. No. 1, it cones with a lot of “apps” that aren’t obvious in what they do, and package management on Arch and Arch-based distros is very very not obvious to beginners (Syu? What does Syu mean. Wait, you mean I’m updating my whole system every time I want to install something? Where’s GNOME Software? Etc)
Manjaro usually ships two versions depending on the DE you choose, one is minimal which doesn’t even include flatpaks and the other is full which what sounds like you had.
Also you don’t have to be typing pacman -Syu if you use the GUI tools like pamac to update the system, and if you still want to use the terminal instead of type yay which does a pacman -Syu and also updates your aur packages.
Hmm… I may have to try Manjaro again, but the simple fact that there are 2 GUI package managers is not a great sign for total noobs. The main reason I’ve been staying away from it tho is the cert controversy and the arch repo ddos.
There were no arch repo ddos, there were cases where the AUR went down because pamac was searching Aur packages as users were typing package names on it and turns out there were way too many users going into the Aur. It is actually quite sad how much disinformation there is about manjaro that even the manjarno snorlax repo recently corrected a bunch of critism it had about manjaro before being taken down lol.
Also Manjaro only ships pamac with KDE in both versions, no idea if gnome includes their store in their packages. Manjaro also includes already functional and useful versions of window managers like i3 that are already setup, if it wasn’t for it I would have never discovered how useful i3 is because setting i3 from the beginning is very difficult.
Manjaro has a graphical app for installing and upgrading software, as well as one for managing kernel versions and one for drivers. You don’t need to know about the command line options if you don’t want to.
I’ve ran my gaming pc on Manjaro for about 2 years. There were too many issues to list here, but the one huge problem for me for new users is updates.
You have to wait for the semi-regular “stable update” post, check the major issues and act accordingly. This shouldn’t happen in a “beginner friendly” distro. I mean, those posts are great, but all other majors distros update without intervention.
Also, I always updated from the tty as there’s a weird “never update inside Gnome” policy.
You have to wait for the semi-regular “stable update” post, check the major issues and act accordingly.
You don’t have to wait for them, you can update without it. The vast majority of issues in those posts are caused by the upstream packages not by Manjaro. If you use one of those packages and if an update brings a problem and if you’re affected by it you can read the latest post to see if there’s a readily available solution that someone in the Manjaro community has already found. It’s a community service not a mandatory read.
This shouldn’t happen in a “beginner friendly” distro.
You have to keep in mind it’s still an Arch derivative. I said the most beginner-friendly among Arch distros, not the most beginner-friendly in the world. Arch is a bleeding-edge rolling-release distro. When you keep constantly updating tens of thousands of packages to their latest versions some of them will occasionally have bugs. It’s the price you pay for staying on the bleeding edge.
all other majors distros update without intervention.
I have updated Debian across 4 major releases without issues. I have daily updates on Fedora without issues. I had to do maintenance probably monthly on Manjaro.
Arch doesn’t do things for you, therefore Manjaro doesn’t do things for you. This means you are the one who needs to do the maintenance and upgrade config files and such. It is interesting, it is formative, but it is not for beginners who might get the impression that Linux needs constant maintenance and breaks often.
Perhaps it’s important to point towards resources where new users can check compatibility; like e.g. linux-hardware.org. Or even better ones that I’m unaware of.
I’ve been waiting for this desktop to release patiently. I can’t wait to try it. I have one question that I never got to ask anywhere, how is this going to work with the whole Qt/GTK apps? Are things going to look weird like they do on (mostly) Gnome and (sometimes) KDE Plasma?
We will attempt to automatically generate themes for common toolkits, but the desktop environment has no control over how the toolkit chooses to render itself or operate.
Fair enough. As long as the app goes with the dark/light theme and doesn’t look super tiny on hidpi screens, I personally wouldn’t really lose sleep over it. Will there be an HIG specific to cosmic for devs who want to make apps for it?
Yes, the libcosmic toolkit automates a decent chunk of the process to building an application with our interface guidelines. If building an application with the cosmic::Application trait. Which includes the header bar, navigation bar, and context drawer.
Thank you for answering all these questions. Last question, do you know when an alpha or a beta will be released? I want to test and help out with reporting. I have a spare laptop that I can use to test.
Please don’t automatically generate themes for third-party apps. If an application brings its own styles and icons, it results a weird mix of multiple styles.
If a user wants to style it themselves, they should be able to — at their own risk. But shipping (inherently broken) styles with a distro/DE misrepresents the appplication and creates unnecessary issues for the upstream developers.
Tell that to my eyes when your application only has a blinding light mode. Theming is an accessibility feature and should be prioritized as such.
It’s 2023. Every application should have a theme engine built-in. If not, that’s on the dev. Let’s not make a movement out of a lack of interest in providing support for accessibility.
You’re so silly. If the developer doesn’t want a themeable application, then either don’t use a themeable toolkit, or hardcode the theme so that the system theme is ignored.
I want that individual users are able to theme my app. I don’t want that distributors and DEs automatically theme my app and expect that it still works the same.
It’s a bit like websites: I’m absolutely fine if a user wants to inject some CSS in my website. On the other hand, if a browser manufacturer decided to inject CSS into all websites to customize their look, it would be a nightmare for web developers.
You don’t seem to realize that this is equivalent to that. The user already made the choice to install a desktop environment which generates themes. So if you make the choice to build an application with GTK, and you want users to be able to use system themes with it, then consider it done.
To argue otherwise would make you a hypocrite. It would mean that you don’t actually want users to use themes, so you take issue with desktop environments which make it easy to do so by default. So if you want people to be able to use themes, then you shouldn’t complain when people choose to use a desktop which enables that use case.
You’ll likely need something separate that’ll style both of these through the settings, similar to how you would config GTK themes on Plasma, or vice versa. I haven’t checked if they do this on their on yet, but it’ll probably be handled this way eventually. Out of the box, expect any Qt or GTK apps to look like their Breeze and Adwaita defaults look, unless you’ve already changed this on your system
It technically still does if you use their theming app “Gradience”. I use it currently on my laptop. Pretty nifty little app. It still doesn’t theme the shell (the panel, the password box… etc), but it does theme even flatpaks most of the time
Iirc Gradience punches a hole in the flatpak sandbox for xdg-config/gtk-4.0, which usually is in .config. This makes it work and isn’t a security problem.
Gnome Shell is unaffected because it doesn’t use GTK.
It uses a custom UI framework, St, using renderer primitives built into the compositor, mutter. Whereas COSMIC is using the same libcosmic library inside the compositor, applets, and desktop applications. Thanks due to our Smithay client toolkit being used to provide a renderer for iced which supports the Wayland layer shell protocol.
So that means themes will cover everything and things will be unified, unlike how the shell is always dark on gnome? (I know they’re working on a light mode).
Yes, this can already be seen when configuring a personal theme in the Desktop > Appearances page in COSMIC Settings. Compositor elements, applets, the login and lock screens, and COSMIC applications automatically adjust in realtime to the configuration changes.
Oh, I’m not rushing anyone. I’ve just been anticipating this DE for a long while. I’m very excited for it to be released. I’ve seen some previews and it looks freaking amazing.
In general, the articles found on privsec.dev are excellent reads and provide both guidance and motivation. With their article on Desktop Linux Hardening being my personal favorite.
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