It’s a good reminder of how influenced we are by our surroundings, even when we try to be aware of the effect. Or maybe especially when we try to be aware.
I was staying strong until I saw they were already sundowning windows 10. 10! They just came out with that shit. I have no intention of upgrading to the latest advertising package.
….windows 10 came out in 2015. I wouldn’t say it just came out, 8 and a half years ago. Thats a pretty good run for a retail OS. There was only 5 between the release of 3.0 and 95.
My big gripe with 11 was that it seemed like MS was going to go away from major releases and go to something somewhat closer to a rolling release model. My big gripe with 10 was all the telemetry.
It’s actually pretty telling that from “insert installation media” to “working web browser”, just about any Linux distro is a faster, easier, and less demanding installation experience than 10 or 11.
I use Fedora as my primary desktop distro. It’s a sturdy base with relatively up-to-date packages from the repos. It doesn’t really push technology I consider undesirable, like Snaps. Even though I have to rely on RPMFusion for a number of proprietary parts, due to Fedora’s free software stance, I don’t have any particular qualms about that. I also increasingly use Flatpaks anyway.
When I used to use Reddit the /r/fedora community was helpful and welcoming.
One downside is because the kernel changes frequently, and I (sadly) own a Nvidia GPU, akmods runs very often. Another downside is sometimes that frequently changing kernel can cause issues. I think in the past year or two I’ve had two distinct occasions where a kernel upgrade caused my mounted shares to not mount correctly. Reporting an issue to upstream also takes quite some involvement, as I discovered when I had to create some Red Hat account to report an issue about the packaging of some software in a beta release of Fedora.
So all-in-all I would say Fedora is a strong distro. It is probably not the most beginner-friendly one, though, given how you have to dip your toes into RPMFusion and related challenges. It used to be worse, since DejaVu used to be the default font system-wide and you had to install a fonts package from COPR to make the system actually look pleasant. Since then they switched to Noto, which makes the font situation MUCH better.
On servers and VMs I use Debian because I do not have the patience to maintain a faster moving Fedora multiple times over. This is exacerbated by the awful defaults of Gnome, which I have to bend into shape with extensions. When Fedora 40 releases later this year I fully intend to reinstall from scratch since KDE Plasma 6 will be available.
edit: i misread the prompt and just talked about my favorite distro that i actively use. whoops.
My least favorite distro could be Manjaro if I actually used it, but it is Ubuntu because of how close it is to being a great distro. Snaps really soured me to that deal. Snapd and Snaps make it difficult to use in VMs, too, because now you have to over-commit resources for something that could and should be smaller and simpler. Debian stays winning, as usual.
Someone already said Manjaro, so my second pick would be ElementaryOS. In the past they’ve had this weird attitude about open source things being free (I get supporting devs for projects you like of course, but I don’t agree that it’s “cheating” to not pay for every single piece of open source software you use), and they seem to get a lot of hype and praise for what’s essentially just Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS IMO.
I very much don’t care for ElementaryOS, but I really don’t think it’s fair to paint it as “Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS”. It’s not just GNOME with some extensions. They made a whole desktop environment and suite of applications for their distro. That’s a ton of work. I think any distro that does that deserves some amount of respect.
I worked with mosh for years to connect to servers on other continents. It was impossible to work otherwise. It only has two small warts: forwarding, and jump hosts.
The second is fixable/ish with an overlay network, but that isn’t always an option if you don’t control the network. I tried to solve this with socat but wasn’t able to configure it correctly - something about the socket reuse flag was very unhappy.
Yeah. I spend a majority of my working time on a slightly-unreliable Wifi network, and getting irritated that my keystrokes are lagging by some seconds and making it hard to e.g., edit the line I'm editing, is a daily occurrence. I literally had never heard of mosh before today, and when I tried it it was like the heavens opened up.
I still remember the professor in my networks class explaining how TCP worked, and then saying more or less:
Why doesn't it send a detailed mapping of which sections of the stream have been received and which haven't, allowing retransmission of only the dropped packets instead of what it does which is just backing up and blasting a whole new window's worth every time a single packet is dropped? Well, I don't know. It'd be a little more complex but the improvement in functionality would be so obviously worth it that it should. Don't know what to tell you. Anyway, this is how it works...
The best and most official explanation I’ve read is the 2017 GNOME blog post, Status Icons and GNOME.
Essentially, tray icons are a throwback to the days before designated notification and media playback APIs, and they now create some ambiguity for app developers, in addition to being ripe for abuse.
It’s a worthwhile read and the writer makes several valid points, but doesn’t address as much as I’d like in terms of actual solutions for things like instant messengers.
Personally, I would be happy if most traditional tray apps could be displayed in the dash, with status indicators, and started in a minimized state, but I still see the benefit of having some always-visible panel icons, such as instant messengers and VPN indicators.
for me personally I like to be able to install software temporarily using nix-shell command it’s awesome. the installed program will be gone once you leave the nix-shell. It’s just awesome for me.
I just switched from Ubuntu, which I’ve been using for almost twenty years, to Mint 21.3 and I’m impressed. Not only does it seem to have solved my printing problems (at least with one day of use so far, but I’ve had zero failures compared to multiple failures per day with Ubuntu), it just seems snappier (or is that snapless?) and smoother overall. Just dumb little things like remembering my sound device settings after reboot and letting me know the printer was out of paper. Ubuntu just seems clunky by comparison now. Hopefully it isn’t just the honeymoon phase.
No it’s not just a phase. Mint really is very good which is why it’s very popular and widely regarded as the overall best distro whether beginner or advanced user.
The team really do make it their goal to have a user friendly, capable OS that helps you instead of hinders you.
I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I’m done with Ubuntu but the Ubuntu based mint is still excellent compared to Ubuntu itself.
Just my opinion, but no I don’t think there is a generalized reason to choose LMDE over LM or the other way around. Try them both and see which you like the best. Use that and be happy.
No. The regular version is fine and gets updated more often. For people who want their system not updated so often, the Debian edition only gets a new base every 2-3 years
I did have the same old printer failure today though. I suspect its endemic to Linux (or WiFi printing in Linux) given a Google search turns up the same issue in a bunch of different Linux forums. Debian based and otherwise. It was quicker to right itself in Mint than it was in Ubuntu anyway.
We are making dbus-broker our default implementation of D-Bus, for improved performance, reliability and integration with systemd.
For the foreseeable future we will still support the use of dbus-daemon, the previous implementation. Pacman will ask you whether to install dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units. We recommend picking the default.
For a more detailed rationale, please see our RFC 25.
The only thing I would maybe hesitate about with POP! OS is the big upcoming switch to the COSMIC desktop, which is is brand-new and a bit untested. But also System76 are a really solid company and seem to know what they’re doing so it’ll probably be fine.
-Linux Mint: the default choice, nothing wrong with it, however not the best when it comes to gaming or if you have multiple monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.
-ZorinOS: Looks good, but can take some time to get used to it and doesn’t have the multi monitor issues of Linux mint, however it is on the heavier side of Linux distros.
-Fedora/Nobara: the 2 are basically the same with one another, but nobara is more gaming-focused. They will also take some time to get used to how they work, but are in my experience generally snappier and more responsive.
No matter which distro you choose, remember, don’t think of Linux the same way you think of windows, think of it as desktop android, as in you download stuff from the distro’s app store and not off of the internet, unless necessary.
-Linux Mint: […] not the best […] if you have multiple monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.
I’m thinking of installing Mint (Debian Edition) on a 2013 MacBook Pro with an even older external monitor connected through DisplayPort, while using the internal Retina as the secondary monitor.
Do you think it’d be a safer bet to go with a different distro with better multi-monitor compatibilities, or do you think I’ll be good using this hardware+software combo?
Don’t get me wrong, it will work, you might just have issues like screen tearing and choppy animations…
I’d personally go with fedora on a laptop, especially for a Mac user as it’s default desktop experience is kinda similar to MacOS, and you get 1:1 touchpad gestures.
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