I use Recoleta (in the alternative version) for my personal stuff. I just like the look of it and it’s IMO good for both body text and headlines. I also like the slight 70s vintage style.
Regarding 4; I suppose you’re looking for the ArcMenu extension if you wish to continue using GNOME as your Desktop Environment (will be abbreviated to DE from here on). Though GNOME’s workflow is considerably different to Windows’. Therefore, you might be interested into looking elsewhere unless you’re actually interested to continue GNOME. FWIW, GNOME is one of the most popular and most polished DEs out there, but it’s very opinionated; which rub some folk the wrong way. I personally like it, but others might differ on this. Lastly, GNOME is NOT particularly known to be light. Therefore, if you’re not happy with how it runs; e.g. frame skips with animations or just high RAM usage overall, then perhaps consider Xfce or Lxqt. If you’re not discontent about the performance on GNOME, then you could also consider KDE or Cinnamon as those might ‘feel’ more ‘modern’ than the aforementioned Xfce and Lxqt.
Regarding 5; Ubuntu gets a lot of hate due to:
how they’re forcing Snaps (their in-house universal package manager; therefore a direct competitor to Flatpak) onto its users. So much so that even attempting to install some packages through apt will result in the Snap being installed instead; which is basically unprecedented within the Linux landscape.
some mishaps in the past resulted in very bad PR; especially to those that are privacy-conscious and/or F(L)OSS-advocates.
You’d have to get to your own conclusions though. It’s probably still the most used distro and therefore you might expect some QoL-features are only found within. If you’re inconclusive, just try it out and consider reporting back to us on how it went. Regarding old hardware; the DE is the most important factor anyways.
Thanks! I think I’ve seen some frame skips, I’ll double check and maybe go with a different DE. And having heard all that, I’ll keep Ubuntu as a last resort.
Seems unreasonably slow to me that xterm would take a second to start. My two computers running kernel 6.7 are slow than the machine in the test, both have BTRFS on LUKS.
I tried a cold start of xterm on my older thinkpad with an NVMe drive at ~0.3s.
A cold start on my desktop (also NVMe), 0.08s.
I’m unable to reproduce. I wonder if he might’ve had a fresh install with some background operations grinding on, or some indexing going on.
Yeah; my somewhat up-to-date thinkbook with NVMe drive cold boots to Cinnamon desktop in under 8 seconds, terminal window opens in the blink of an eye. BTRFS is not without its problems, but they’re more along the lines of specific RAID configs not being what you’d wish for; I’ve never heard a complaint about speed before, and I’ve never had that problem myself.
You are right. I was happy with linux mint, and before that MX Linux. This is all just bike shedding. I spend a lot of time setting things up Hell, I spend too much time just downloading crap because I have not bothered to make a script that would automate installation of the apps I use.
Debian based, arch based, rhel based are all somewhat different and have different package managers (with flatpak, appimage and snap that might be less important nowadays though)
Nobara comes with all the stuff for gaming, not everyone who uses Linux knows exactly what they need to install themselves
NixOS is fantastic and drastically different from all the others
NixOS, silverblue, vanilla are all immutable which makes a massive difference
Also not everyone wants to install their own DE, so if they want something like cinnamon, pantheon, KDE they need a distro that comes with it preinstalled
for 1, in linux no output is often indicitive of no problem. To verify if your previous command exited successfully, type ‘echo $?’ at the command line and if its anything but 0 its an error.
For 3, I do the same but since I’m the only user I auto login so its still just one password to enter to get to a desktop.
Depends if you’re using a graphical login manager or not. If so, you’ll have to search the name of it and ‘autologin’ in your favourite search engine. Its typically no more then checking a box and adding your username.
I dont use a graphical login manager, I just let it boot up and agetty (from util-linux) logs me directly into my shell (because I added -u ’ to the config.). Then my shell profile takes care of starting the graphical environment for me.
Its just personal choice but I dont see any point in a login manager when Im the only one logging in. I understand that it may come as part of the desktop suite though. I prefer to start with nothing and add what I want versus getting everything and removing what I dont want
I’ve tried running Plasma 5 on Wayland occasionally but due to having NVIDIA card there’s always been bigger or smaller annoying issues so I always reverted back to X11.
Looking forward to try out Plasma 6 as soon as it’s released!
i have a rtx3080ti and am using KDE plasma 5 wayland on Fedora 38(now 39) exclusively for gaming. i made the switch to wayland a month or so ago and i am having a considerably smoother experience than x11. especially with multiple monitors and flatpack apps like discord in the mix.(steam is running native though). no issues that i am aware of so far
Meanwhile Wayland absolutely hates my year old AMD laptop. It hangs itself on a regular basis, some applications go completely unresponsive every so often to the point they need to be kill -9’ed. Rock solid when running X11, completely unreliable in Wayland. It’s a shame, I want to like Wayland as I think there is no future for X11, but as it stands currently I simply cannot use it yet for my day to day business.
Just tried it yesterday. It is a LOT more smooth for me, but it can’t seem to handle 144hz. I turned it down to 60hz and it seems to be going well for now. I can live with this I think.
I’ve tried running Plasma 5 on Wayland occasionally but due to having NVIDIA card there’s always been bigger or smaller annoying issues so I always reverted back to X11.
Yeah, I tried it again this morning and got a black screen with mouse trails. I also have an Nvidia card and will give it another go when Plasma 6 comes out.
In the meantime please share that these issues exist on nvidia forums. Issues caused by nvidia drivrers shouldn’t come under the purview of the kde devs.
Exiting news! Can’t wait for final release to hit the repositories!
Yesterday I gave Wayland another try on Plasma 5 using the latest NVIDIA drivers, but unfortunately there were several visual glitches and the panel stopped updating itself :(
Same. Really wanted to give Wayland a chance, but having artifacts on blurry windows where the cursor was is just too annoying for me. Plasma team is already aware of the issue but said it’s too huge of a change for 5.x
To be honest, X11 is not terrible, even with multiple monitors with different refresh rates. I’m running 2x 60Hz and 1x 144Hz without any problems on X11.
Number 2 is by design. Running as root is extremely dangerous, and passwordless sudo is not much better. You can, of course, allow sudo without a password by editing the /etc/sudoers file, but be concious of the security implications (any program you run would essentially have full access to everything, without you ever knowing).
I can’t figure out how to setup flatpak. Everything seems to be working fine until I enter the last line in the terminal:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Hard to help without logs or error messages. Maybe you could run the command with --verbose flag to see if it prints out something that might help?
I somehow set it up so that my username is not the super user, so I have to type a password in the terminal every time I want to use sudo. Is there a way to fix this without a clean install?
This is default behavior and probably shouldn't be changed. It's a good idea to set up your normal user without root privileges and it's a good idea to ask for authentication credentials whenever you need to elevate privileges.
I somehow set up the hard drive partitions so that the OS is on an encrypted partition, so I have to put in a password for the BIOS to boot up. Is there a way to fix this without a clean install?
Again, if you want encrypted disk, then this is actually good behavior, but in case you want to decrypt the disk without reinstall - it's possible, but not entirely simple or newbie friendly procedure, you need to know a bit about disk devices and mounting drives, for reference, see: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/60971/how-to-remove-luks-encryption
I’m used to a desktop interface with a toolbar/start menu that I can pin frequently-used programs to, but with Debian it seems like I need to click “Activities” to do anything. Is there a way to set up the interface so it’s more like Windows in that regard?
You can also tweak and change Gnome with addons and extensions to suit your needs - see https://extensions.gnome.org/
Is there any reason why I should stick with Debian? I’ve heard some people trashing Ubuntu but I’m not sure why. Is Debian better for older hardware?
The same linux kernel (in various versions) is running underneath all the distributions, so it's really just a matter of preference. Since you're new, hop around - try Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, Fedora, Arch and everything else to see what you prefer.
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