Nothing radical, but I’ve used mplayer as default video player since FreeBSD 4.0, and that’s not changing any time soon. VLC is good and all, I just prefer mplayer.
Oh, and for general purpose storage partitions I use XFS, as it plays nice with beegfs.
As a former RedHat advocate it sucks honestly, I have to find companies like Rancher and Suse that off truly FOSS products now. Like I want opensource devs to get paid if they are being depended on, but the RedHat paywall makes avoiding the vendor lock or trying to be cost flexible a legal land mine. They also offer more and more proprietary rebrands of FOSS projects that I fear will get EEEd as well.
I don’t think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It’s an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.
OpenSuse has this by default, but I’m back to good ol’ Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created pre and post snapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.
Please tell me more about Spiral Linux. I’m not a huge Debian fan personally(at least for desktop), but I often install Linux on other people’s machines. And Mint/ Debian is great for them.
Key points are BTRFS with Snapper, PipeWire, newer kernels and some other niceties from backports, proprietary drivers/codecs by default, VirtualBox support (which I’ve personally had huge problems with in the past on multiple distros). They also mention font tweaks, but I haven’t done side-by-side comparisons, so I’m not sure exactly what that means.
Edit: shoutout to Spiral Linux creator @sb56637 , who posted a few illuminating comments on this older thread: lemmy.ca/post/6855079 (if there’s a way to link to posts in an instance-agnostic way on Lemmy, please let me know!)
Well for one thing their driver support is apparently “harrowing”. 😊
I will never understand why people choose distributions that will brick themselves when the wind blows, so they add snapshot support as a band-aid, and then they celebrate “woo hoo, it takes pre and post snapshots after every package install!”
How about using a distro where you never have to restore a snapshot…
To clarify, this is my first time using Spiral Linux. My experience regarding Nvidia drivers is across several different distros (most recently Ubuntu LTS and OpenSuse Tumbleweed). I have never had a seamless experience. Often the initial driver installation works, but CUDA and related tools are finicky. Sometimes a kernel update breaks everything. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with other kernel extensions.
The Debian version of the drivers didn’t set up Secure Boot properly. Instead, I rolled back and used the generic Nvidia .run installer, which worked fine. Not seamless, obviously, but not really worse than my experience on other distros. In the future I will always just use the generic installers from Nvidia.
Point is, with BTRFS you can just try anything without fear. I’m not going to worry about installing kernel updates from now on, or driver updates, or anything, because if anything goes wrong, it’s no big deal.
And my point is that it’s not normal to fear updates. Any updates, but especially updates to essential packages like the kernel or graphics driver.
If you’re using the experimental branch of a distro or experimental versions of packages on purpose then snapshots are a good tool. But if you’re using a normal distro and its normal packages you should not have to resort to such measures.
It’ll boot right into a fully functional Gnome desktop and hardly anything else. The only extra software this installs are yelp, gnome-shell-extension-prefs and network-manager-gnome. Uninstall them with sudo apt purge and sudo apt autoremove --purge if you don’t need them. sudo apt install cups if you need printing and remove your wifi device from /etc/network/devices to let network-manager-gnome handle wifi if you use it.
The way I setup my minimal systems is to uncheck everything during tasksel, then switch to another virtual console, chroot to /target and install what I need. Saves one reboot and hassles, when installing via thump drive. (Did this for Xfce in the past.)
Well, almost the opposite of you, I currently use Fedora Silverblue (including BTRFS which I very much appreciate for versioned backups), except that I override GNOME Software (never got it to work properly for me) and Fedora’s Firefox (I use the Firefox from Flathub but not Fedora).
Maybe it’s just me, but if you’re doing something technical enough to require commercial support, shouldn’t you have a competent IT team that doesn’t need it?
Just seems weird to pay additional money for technical support of your OS when teams using Debian don’t have to. Are they just more competent on average than teams using Red Hat?
K-9 is being used as the base for Thunderbird for Android but it isn’t there yet. FairEmail is a lot closer in functionality at the moment.
I use Thunderbird for Gmail (among other accounts) and it has to regularly compress my Gmail box, which none of the Android clients do - in my experience, Aqua Mail, K-9 and FairEmail all struggle with a decent sized Gmail mailbox after a while.
Could be familiarity? I saw an article go by recently about how projects that aren’t on GitHub suffer from lack of contributions. Although that matters more for smaller projects, Mozilla is a beast and could probably pull people off GitHub if it wanted to.
Also if anyone should be trying to build up an alternative to GitHub, it should be Mozilla
If you are at a skill level, where you can meaningfully contribute to a project like this, registering for an alternative git provider should not be an obstacle
It’s super cool that it supports this, heck I’ve used it when no other options were there (and thank git I could! It made a nightmare into just a little more work instead).
I will say though, it’s most of the other software forge features that people normally talk about adding Activity Pub support for (issues tracking, merge requests, tracking forks, CI tooling, handling documentation, etc).
Pull people off GitHub? I get the impression from others that contributing to Mozilla projects, particularly Firefox, is a painful experience. But afaik one former Mozilla project uses GitHub for everything: Rust, the programming language.
It’s the most widely used platform that the most people are familiar with that they get to use likely for free. Newer projects of theirs are also hosted there. Why would you say it makes no sense?
Out of all the possible Git choices, they chose one of the worst options. I am very curious about the reasoning for that. Could have been a Mozilla-hosted Gitlab instance, or something else like Gitea
Especially lately, incredibly poor performance, and constant outages. Plus if you’re an owner of a private repository, I don’t want them to train their asshole AI based on my code, without my knowledge
At least when it comes to Git I'm not too concerned. What could MS possibly do to you? Maybe vendor lock in via the issue tracker? They aren't using it and it's not exactly that hard to migrate off of it in the first place.
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