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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Lots of people gave great advice. Let me sum a bit of that up.
Flatpak
No error means success. You might want to install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak to make it available in gnome-software. I’d advise against using flatpaks if you also have the software available in the debian repositories. Always use the package manager instead, when possible. Those packages are maintained by the debian community and tied into the rest of the system. Flatpaks are not.
sudo
What would you like? That is kinda intended behaviour and an integral part of security. But you can have it remember the password for some time. Or ask for a different password.
FDE
I think a clean install is the quickest way to fix this. You can also get the other things right while at it.
DE
You can choose the desktop environment while installing Linux. You chose the default Gnome Desktop. It’s designed more like Apple or Android tablets. I quite like it. You don’t have that menu blocking space on the monitor. Instead you just bump your mouse to that top left corner or press the windows key and you have a fullscreen menu with your favorites. You can also directly start typing the first letters of the application you want and hit enter and start is, without lifting your fingers from the keyboard and it’s way quicker and more streamlined than clicking on things in a windows start menu. You can have an addidional dock somewhere at the left or the bottom with an additional gnome extension like this or what other people suggested. But if you’d like it like windows, why don’t you try the KDE destop? I think you’d be more comfortable with that if you’re looking for something alike the windows experience.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu regularly does some stupid things. I’ve been using Debian for quite some time. I suppose the differences for you are minor anyways and you could have it look the same if you found out which gnome quick-launch bar to install or if you used the KDE desktop instead.
I’d advise against using flatpaks if you also have the software available in the debian repositories. Always use the package manager instead, when possible.
Please let me disagree on this. Debian + Flatpaks is actually an awesome combo. Rock solid and super stable base, up to date user facing apps.
Debian’s life cycle is awesome for core system stuff, it ensures that once your system runs perfectly, it’ll continue to run perfectly for several years without intervention despite always being up to date.
But for user facing apps, it’s actually really frustrating when you know there is a bug fix or a feature you need that’s been implemented and made available months ago but you’re stuck on a 2-year-old version.
It’s just, we get so many questions regarding Flatpak from newer users:
Why doesn’t App A tie into App B?
Why doesn’t the program tie into my desktop environment?
How can I install Addons?
Why can’t I access files somewhere
And it’s just not easy. The Apps/Programs are sandboxed and can’t tie into each other unless specifically made for this. Addons need to be put inside of that environment or the program needs to be fitted with some kind of Appstore that incorporates this. You can’t just download an addon from github and drag and drop it like the instruction says. New users blame that on Linux. And you need to understand the additional Flatpak permission system.
In my experience these problems have really increased in the last year or so.
Next thing is, you lose what the distro maintainers do for you. They double check that everything works together well and is tied into your desktop. Breaking changes are postponed until the next major releas of the distro. Since you mentioned Debian, they strip tracking behaviour, and most importanly they fix security issues quickly. Once I read about a severe vulnerability in libpng it’s often already fixed or takes them like one to three days.
Everytime I have a look at ‘flatpak list’ I have like 3 different versions of some runtime installed and it takes half a year until the last flatpak app is updated to the release without that vulnerability. And I get that. Programmers of a project mainly code, and maintenance and packaging the stuff isn’t necessarily top priority on their agenda. But you as a user are exposed for months and I usually expect exploits to appear in the wild after some weeks.
That may be less of a concern if you install OBS via flatpak or a game. But this would be bad if it’s a web-browser or a messenger.
That’s why I usually tell people not to use Flatpak. If you know about the consequences and how to handle the sandboxing and get an addon working, go ahead. Maybe subscribe to a mailing list regarding the security vulnerabilities, because that’s now your job.
For Debian users there are a few alternatives. You could just mix and match software from ‘stable’ and ‘testing’. That is not recommended, but everyone does it. Second thing: Just install Debian testing and you get a rolling distro. That’s what I do and it works great. Well, during the ‘freeze’ for the next version you will experience some delays until they figure out some library updates and dependencies. But that’s alright. [Edit: on second thought: Considering the next comment, maybe I shouldn’t recommend that. It works for me but it definitely has some caveats and you need to understand the consequences I didn’t mention here and be able to fix the occasional hiccup.]
All your points are valid, and I agree with most of them except maybe advising people to use Testing ;)
From a security point of view, Testing is dead last in Debian’s vulnerabilities fix order of priorities after SID and Stable, and fixes in general except when the next release is being freezed. I’ve undergone breaking changes and regressions weekly on Testing, dependency issues that took forever to get fixed, and the year or so I’ve spent on Testing was miserable. Testing definitely has its purposes, but daily driving it on a laptop should not be one of them.
I understand the issues you’ve got concerning Flatpaks and how it goes against a distro’s philosophy, but I think, from a “normie”'s POV, it’s still miles better than the classic “download a random exe from a random website and never bother having to uninstall and reinstall it every week to keep it up-to-date” windows paradigm. Flatpaks are mainly a solution for developers and package maintainers (package once, distribute everywhere), but it benefits the end users. You get to use “the same version as everyone else”, always up-to-date whether you’re on Debian or on Arch, compiled against a known version of all dependencies so bug reports are more consistent and avoid weird distro-specific behaviors.
Thanks. You’re right. I’ve edited my comment. I shouldn’t be advertising testing. And I probably misremember how often I fix a minor hiccup that I forget about 2 days later. And I keep an eye on important programs when they get ‘stuck’ or I get aware of vulnerabilities and switch to SID or stable with cherry-picked packages. But that requres you to read all the tech news and that’s not a safe way to do it regardless.
I agree. Flatpak is lightyears ahead of downloading executables or doing the imfamous ‘curl software/install.sh | sudo bash’ It is definitely the right tool if your alternative is to download something from a random website or the software isn’t packaged in your distro. (And also for proprietary software.)
I think the correct approach is to ask yourself if you really always need the latest releases and newest version of your software. And if it’s worth the consequences. Flatpak really makes it so easy and smooth that many people aren’t aware it comes with consequences until later. I know everyone always wants everything. Rock stable and tested, bulletproof security and the newest version of everything right away. I do, too. We seem to both like Debian. It’s provided me with most things I need for quite some years and it really earned my trust. We all know how the maintenance process works there and how that turns out. Problem is, if I now circumvent what defines Debian, I kinda lose parts of what makes it great. That should be done with some caution. But sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes I want unpackaged software. Sometimes I need the newest features of OBS or Kdenlive. Or FreeCAD did some major restructuring and the Debian version just always crashes once I add a chamfer to my 3D-workpiece and Debian keeps that ancient version in the repository. There’s no way around taking matters in your own hand. Also I sometimes keep several versions of browsers around to do some web-development and Flatpak is awesome for things like that.
Maybe I need to provide people with a more nuanced answer the next time someone asks about Flatpak stuff. The main point is probably that you take matters in your own hands at that point and need to be aware of that. It requires you to make case-by-case decisions and have a look at if the specific Flatpak is maintained well. There is no simple answer anymore. With a distro you mainly get what you asked for and you should know if you chose your distro, and with it the way it handles things, for a reason.
My suggestion would be to setup a keyfile to unlock the partition automatically. You can use your EFI partition to store the keyfile, which makes no sense from security perspective; or you can keep it on a usb drive. Machine will ask for password if usb is not present, or boot straight up if it is.
I agree with NixOS as a good choice for this. The most important bit for me is it cleans up really well when you switch. Every other distro I’ve tried tends to leave a lot of mess behind and a lot of duplicate function apps.
Just be ready to clean out your home, maybe add a new user to test them. I set up KDE then went back to gnome and it broke my cursors somehow… nbd but it’s a bit annoying
Can’t say I’ve seen that yet, but it is a good point. Your home directory might still get a little messy. I think the thought of using the config to me a user per-desktop environment you test is problem a good idea.
If all the apps are in React Native I feel like they are gonna have a bad time. If you’re not careful React Native apps have bad performance, and Fire TVs don’t have a lot of performance to spare.
I already tried an Amazon Fire tablet, Amazon. No thanks. I returned it. I don’t need a locked-down console that spies on me. Windows is well on its way to becoming that already.
I tried to get one since it was 30 bucks, so I’m not too surprised this is how they operated. They are locking down jindles real hard too. Probably going to make a lot of ewaste.
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