The big advantage for me is that lact runs as a (systemd) daemon. This is more convenient for me than having to autostart CoreCtrl.
A disadvantage of the daemon is that it can’t be packaged on flathub.
Enable and start the service (otherwise you won’t be able to change any settings): sudo systemctl enable --now lactd
You can now use the GUI to change settings and view information.
Give a kid the arch install wiki and a computer with the USB iso ready to go. Tell them they aren’t allowed food until they install it and run neofetch.
Any beginner guide that advises against Ubuntu does disservice to beginners. It’s doing the opposite of helping beginners get into Linux. Ubuntu is still the easiest on-ramp to Linux today by far, despite anyone’s feelings about Canonical. Avoiding it harms Linux adoption.
I have been working on Fly-Pie for more than 3 years now and I am very happy with the result. However, I have always wanted to create a similar application for the desktop in general. This is why I started this project.
After buying a steam deck and seeing how good everything worked I just yeeted my entire bootdrive. Never looked back ever again (Then again I still own a surfacebook so it’s not fully commiting)
The desktop security model is insecure in general. Phone OSes are much more secure.
Reasonable desktop OS to use is Qubes, Fedora, MacOS, ChromeOS, or Windows pro/enterprise (hardened)
Phones are much more secure especially the Pixel 8/pro with MTE immensely reducing remote exploitation. GrapheneOS is the only distro that enables MTE by default and recently implemented it in their Vanadium browser.
Secure phones (secure elements are important): IPhones and Pixels (GrapheneOS or stock)
Also yes, Chromium is much more secure on Linux than Gecko based browsers because of its great internal sandboxing and site isolation. Firefox on Windows is catching up though, but still bad on desktop Linux and android.
This all doesn’t matter if you’re running an EoL device. Make sure your receiving official security and firmware updates.
The thing is I use Noscript so I guess having random malicious Javascript executed is pretty rare. And Firefox + Arkenfox is so much more private than damn Chromium, even though I keep a Flatpak of Chromium around.
I understand that the hardened Fedora Ublue version from qoijjj isn’t that far off, maybe removing flatpaks is a bit weird and makes little sense.
I am pretty sure I wont use Chromium, as Firefox is just working better for me? Everything makes sense, and for sure I wont give Google any Data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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