This is looking really promising! Pipewire already has pretty much solved audio issues (at least for me) entirely and now with HDR on the cusp, the year of the Linux desktop is nigh! Barring some Adobe BS and CAD stuff, there really isn’t much left
Ubuntu is nice. Apt/DEB works as they should. Some default apps, mostly browsers, are snaps now, but this does not bother you at all. You were getting them from your distro anyway.
Flatpak and AppImages work just fine if you need them.
The Ubuntu desktop (any flavour) just works. Others are different, but nothing is bad about Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is trying new things, proprietary to their ecosystem, e.g. Unity or snap. On the big picture, those are experiment. Ubuntu is still Linux.
The community reaction to snap is overblown. So Canonical developed something you don’t like? Ignore it. This has mostly been a waste of time for them.
(Yes, maybe that dev time would be better spent on flatpak or open-source apps. But that’s their time. I’m not paying Ubuntu developers, so can I really complain?)
Well, I’d file this as innovation. Innovation is trying and failing. It’s an experiment. And I’m okay with this.
Is it wasteful to have KDE and Gnome? Why don’t they give up and merge with each other? Did we really need systemd? Or docker? And why Wayland when every single distro is on X and every single application is on X?
Ubuntu started as a Gnome-based distribution and it is was better than the competition on the desktop at the time. Or good enough. It got popular.
Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of Unity or Gnome 3, but it worked. I found snap totally weird and against how things should be on a Linux system. But snap updates (while still annoying) have solved problems with deb-based updates of browser (“Quit all running firefox or you’ll experience problems”).
Maybe I’d like Debian more. After all I came from Debian to Ubuntu. But it’s not worth to make a fuzz.
I don’t think it’s wasteful to have both KDE and Gnome. It’s healthy competition and as you say, innovation.
However the job of a distribution is to gather upstream software into a meaningful OS, and rewriting everything that should be an upstream software shared with other distributions is a distraction.
So Unity was unnecessary “not invented here” syndrome. Just like Snap is.
Not spesifically a tool to put on a USB stick, but Ventoy is worth checking. I’ve had a bit mixed results with it on older hardware but when it works it’s pretty easy to manage your carry-on-tools.
Controversial, but when it comes to hibernating the system, it actually is.
Unfortunately Windows suffers from the s0ix power consumption bugs that’ll drain your battery faster than Linux does, so neither is a very good experience. The current state of modern PC suspend behaviour is just rather terrible.
In the tint2 docs do a ctrl-f for ‘icon’ — does any of that look like it could be of any use to you? I am not sure I understand the issue but maybe this:
launcher_icon_theme = name_of_theme : (Optional) Uses the specified icon theme to display shortcut icons. Note that tint2 will detect and use the icon theme of your desktop if you have an XSETTINGS manager running (which you probably do), unless launcher_icon_theme_override = 1.
launcher_icon_theme_override = boolean (0 or 1) : Whether launcher_icon_theme overrides the value obtained from the XSETTINGS manager. (since 0.12)
If not try searching for ‘icon’ in the rest of the repo, issues etc.
Here is some troubleshooting ideas I have. Do any of them make any difference whatsoever
Using a very generic, well supported icon theme with no customization. Is the problem that tint2 isn’t picking up any icon theme or it just isn’t picking up these icons? If not picking up any icons, then what icons is it using?
create a fresh user on system with all default settings and see if anything is different? And if you have done system level customizations you could even try a fresh system liveboot/VM but that is a lot of work to be fair.
change your xfce4-appearance and xfwm-settings themes
Do you install icon themes for the user or the system? Try the other way does it make a difference?
I am using latest stable xfce4 (1.18 I think) with tint2 for task list and xfce4-panel for workspace switcher miniature view. From what I’ve noticed, the icons in both are always the same between the two of them. Tbh in general I have found changing icon themes very annoying and inconsistent across the system with some applications and tray items being resistant. Like firefox developer I find is impervious to icon themes. Do you have the issue with all applications including very well-supported ones like thunar or mousepad?
There is a command called gtk-update-icon-cache/gtk4-update-icon-cache but I don’t know if it would help.
So I set the theme to Papirus, which came pre-installed. Most icons are ok I think, but I am still missing icons in tint2 for Slack, Freetube, and Firetools. I get a generic window icon.
The kitty terminal icon in the tint2 panel is also different from the Papirus theme icon.
Tried uninstalling the icon theme and reinstalling following the instruction on github (installed to root), but no dice.
I admit I find icons under xfce4 to be very mysterious. There are all kinds of weird behaviours I can’t explain.
However I am not the only one. There are lots of threads about the “generic icon” problem, for example: Window buttons not showing the proper icon which might have something useful for you.
Kitty has specific instructions for its icon. I don’t mind the kitty icon so I never changed it.
Is the overall problems you are facing different in tint2 than in the xfce panel? if you open them both up is one able to access the correct icons and the other isn’t? I’m out of ideas in either case but it would at least clarify if the problem has anything to do with tint2 or is a general icon thing. If its a general icon thing you’re in luck because there a lot broader resources. If it’s a tint2 problem then you are stuck trying to figure out why.
Hibernation or suspend? 2 different things. For hibernation you need a swap space at least the size of your RAM, and then the laptop is powered off after this.
For suspend, in your dmesg, see if you have:
ACPI: PM: (supports S0 S3 S4 S5)
if you have S3 your laptop should lost only a few percent.
do a:
cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
what does it says?
New CPU/BIOS/PC/Laptop only support something called “s0 idle” meaning it is like a cellphone, everything is running, and each drivers/components/os should enter low power themselves, if they do not, well, your battery is draining.
S3 means “suspend to RAM”, only RAM is powered and everything else is off, your laptop can stay like this for days. I don’t know who decided that this is bad and your laptop should be like your cellphone, always running?!?
Modern Fedora doesn’t enable swap by default and configures zram instead. Of course, you can’t hibernate to zram, so getting basic hibernation to work involves either disabling zram and configuring swap, or using callbacks to temporarily disable zram and enable swap right before suspending.
I wouldn’t call it hate, more like disapprobation with Canonical’s choices. No one have to use Ubuntu, we have tons of distro to choose. If someone wants LTS, you can always go pure Debian way, it’s not hard to install as it’s used to be (for beginners), or there is Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can easily use flatpaks with these and keep your software up-to-date.
Framework has a guide for you. You’ll need to disable either power-profiles-daemon or TLP depending on what CPU you have.
As for hibernation: TL;DR: it’s a mess. Fedora doesn’t support it out of the box. You can make it work with some elbow grease.
However, you shouldn’t need hibernation if your laptop goes to sleep like it should. If you can’t get it to sleep right, or still really want hibernation, here are some pointers:
many Linux distros don’t consider hibernation to be a stable feature. The default Fedora setup doesn’t even come with a swap partition by default, which makes hibernation impossible. You’ll need to allocate some swap space before you can hibernate your computer.
make sure your swap partition is encrypted if the rest of your laptop is encrypted as well. If you use a swap file, you can make this work, too, but it’ll be slightly more complicated
make sure your swap partition is big enough (at least RAM size + the amount of swap in use at the point of hibernation)
if you don’t have a partition for swap and don’t want to create one, or if you want to keep using zram (compressed memory, enabled by default on Fedora, probably recommended to keep enabled), then this guide and its comments will tell you how to get a swap file to work. Make sure you read the update with more details too, and there’s also a comment further down specifically about Intel Framework laptops (need to disable a certain Intel driver that breaks hibernation).
disable secure boot in your BIOS. Linux doesn’t support the security features that Windows has to validate the state of boot SECURITY (even with custom secure boot keys), so when you’re running in secure boot mode (and the kernel is in lockdown mode), the Linux kernel disables hibernation. Alternatively, there are guides that’ll show you how to patch that check out, but that involves compiling your own kernel and that’s not worth the effort IMO.
configure your laptop for suspend-then-hibernate for best performance. I believe hybrid-sleep will also work. The Github gist I linked has details
you will probably need to enter your password when resuming from hibernation. This is a security feature. You can configure your laptop to use the TPM to decrypt the disk, skipping the encryption password entirely, it you don’t mind thieves having the ability to access your data when they steal the laptop.
You may be wondering why this is so complicated. A big reason is that Linux wants to be secure, but hibernation comes with unique security challenges. Linux also wants to be fast and efficient (by compressing RAM rather than writing it to disk) but that messes with the presumptions the hibernation system makes. Fedora dorky sorry hibernation out of the box, but they’re working on it, albeit not as fast as you might hope: pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/121
strictly speaking, NixOS doesn’t have repositories.
NixOS has “derivations” (rules are written in the Nix language to generate a script that builds a package, which is called a derivation - yes, everything is built from source to the extent possible/reasonable) and “platforms” (the system that builds the derivation OR the system the derivation is built for). A “platform” is e.g. the CPU architecture, the libc used, the target kernel (there’s most support for Linux and Darwin, which is the macOS kernel, but e.g. FreeBSD is supported to some extent too). The derivation code may well be shared across platforms, though often platform-specific workarounds are required.
Of course, different platforms have different support. Some platforms have derivations from nixpkgs (the NixOS git repo) regularly built for them and put into the official binary cache (which stores the derivation outputs, i.e. ready-built packages for a certain set of inputs, which generally match what you would’ve built from source because Nix strives for reproducibility, you’re still free to override a package’s inputs and build it from source). linux-aarch64 is one of such platforms. Other platforms may only have a small set of core packages like gcc built for them, or simply require building absolutely everything from source.
The reason nixpkgs is not a repository (though I guess you could call it one) is because it only provides rules to build a package, but not the package itself. Some derivations (e.g. for Gog games) even require you to add some non-redistributable files to the Nix store manually. The derivations may or may not build correctly for each platform they’re supposed to work on.
The reason the binary cache is not a repository is because it’s just a cache for nixpkgs - it stores every derivation’s output (if the build doesn’t fail), even if that derivation is one that downloads a package’s source code (yes, that’s a derivation too), even if the derivation is from many years ago (which has historical value, as you can revert nixpkgs to an old version and still be able to download prebuilt versions of packages).
Together, they form something like a repository, but it’s still way too different. For example, unlike on Arch, I can stay on the same nixpkgs version for a long time without updating, which I really prefer because I have to build 3 kernels on each update, since I’m syncing the nixpkgs version of my 4 NixOS devices, only 1 of which doesn’t require a custom kernel config. Or I can always revert back to an older version of nixpkgs if a new one breaks something and it will still work. Or I can fork nixpkgs and change some stuff, and the stuff with changed inputs will have to be rebuilt locally, with stuff that didn’t change still available from the binary cache.
yes, if that AUR was in a centralized git repository, and kept track of inter-package compatibility, and centrally cached prebuilt versions of the packages for every single update, and you could also easily modify any of the packages, and there was a way to autogenerate build scripts, and and and…
Snaps are centralised packaging, a’la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that’d be a start.
But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I’m going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.
They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.
That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.
Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.