Our school systems are admined by teachers with only half a clue of what they are doing with only a few hours per week as a budget. This isn’t meant as an offense, math teachers that like to fiddle with computers in their free time are just not qualified to run the infrastructure for schools
Sway has become a joy to use over time as I’ve fucked with my config but now I feel like it’s more boring too I barely ever feel the need or want to massively change anything 🥲
you can always use a login manager to manage different WM sessions. When i get bored of sway i switch to hyprland, i use different bars for each one too. Its bloat but its fun.
Same, I got “bored” so I tried hyprland for a bit on another machine, but when I realised I’d rather have the animations turned off, and was trying to make the config the same as my Sway one, I realised all I needed was Sway. Swaylove4eva
Btrfs is awesome and awful at the same time, and it’s a complicated story. It was rather ill-defined at the beginning and took a LONG time to get anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a pretty awesome filesystem right now and I use it for all my storage drives. Having said that, i still use ext4 with lvm on my system drives and evenrnmy btrfs drives have lvm under them
It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved /home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such “bad” distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.
If you were installing “manually” and had full control over this, I’d advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.
The fact that there’s entire communities full of people who will spend energy trying to convince you to give it a try, rather than a corporation with a marketing budget and lobbying power :)
Also, can I “normally”/traditionally install software on NixOS, e.g. through Steam?
Depends on what you mean by traditionally. Steam works without needing any special setup by enabling it in your configuration, just programs.steam.enable = true. There’s also imperative package management with nix profile (don’t use nix-env -i which you will probably come across, it’s broken by design). Personally though I recommend sticking with the declarative configuration and nix-shell which temporarily brings packages in scope for the current shell only.
There’s two different ways of identifying a nix package: its attribute path in the package set, and the name it self-identifies as. Here’s an example where those differ, firefox-esr. Its attribute path is firefox-esr while the package name it reports is firefox.
It’s very fast to find a package by its attribute path since that’s essentially one or more map lookups. In contrary, the package name isn’t unique (for example, firefox and firefox-esr both have a package name of “firefox” because they are built from the same package file just with different sources) and also doesn’t have an index, so to find a package with a matching name you have to search through the entire package set and evaluate every package to get its name and check if it matches.
nix-env -i searches packages by their package name, which as a consequence makes it slow and also unreliable since you might not get the package you were looking for, but instead another with the same name. nix-env -iA somewhat fixes this by installing packages by their attribute path, but even if you use that you get the same issues with nix-env --upgrade since that always searches for packages to update by the installed packages’ names (it might even replace one package with a completely unrelated one which coincidentally has the same name!).
The new nix profile however stores the attribute paths a package was installed from so doesn’t have any of these problems.
Listen to the “Linux User Space” podcast, episode 404. They explain every immutability model af of now. Ubuntu Core is missing.
Ubuntu is creating something new, looks really great but based on snaps, which are not bad packages but rely on a nonfree store that cant be replaced. So meh.
I’ve made the opposite experience. There were loads of snap-specific issues when I used ubuntu. So many that I now recommend not using ubuntu just because of snaps.
VanillaOS and BlendOS also use containers to install apps, just like Fedora Silverblue. In fact, it’s easier to install native packages on Silverblue than it is on VanillaOS. Just set your terminal to start a container by default.
I think it depends on the user :P. NixOS is pretty hard to get into because the documentation isn’t great… but I’d argue it’s one of the most user friendly ways to configure a system, and it can be really nice to copy configurations from other people.
As others have stated, as long as you are using a distribution with reasonably modern (and maybe frequent) updates of the kernel and mesa stack, it doesn’t matter much. The updates of these two packages are what will provide updated hardware support and performance improvements.
Steer clear of Nvidia. It can work on linux, but is a pain due to Nvidia not providing proper open-source driver support. I also highly recommend ensuring you have an intel chip if you need wifi, as realtek and broadcom can be a bit variable in terms of support and stability for wifi.
Wayland is also preferable in my view, due to its significant benefits over X11 - it is more secure, makes your computer much smoother, and supports modern niceties like better multi-monitor support, gestures, lack of tearing, HDR (in the future), etc.
This segues into my next point. It makes more difference what DE you use when gaming - GNOME currently doesn’t support VRR on Wayland (appears to be coming in next release at least experimentally), while KDE does. So that is something to think about. I would stick to either of these two DEs as these are the only two that are both user friendly for beginners, and have excellent wayland support. Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE all do not yet support Wayland.
I would steer clear of distributions that are not established, and/or only have very small or single person teams (as this has potential security, stability and support implications) and would recommend Fedora. Fedora has a bleeding edge mesa and kernel (that roll between releases), but stability elsewhere with a solid community behind it and a dedicated security team, built on cutting edge technologies throughout. If you need VRR I would use the Fedora KDE spin. OpenSUSE tumbleweed is also a great choice.
Many users will recommend Arch Linux systems, as this is the hotness, particularly as this is what SteamOS is based on. I wouldn’t recommend this even as a very happy Gentoo user, however, as relatively “pure” Arch Linux distributions (and Gentoo), will require you to follow notices on the website, and will require your knowledge and intervention at some point based on this notice; without your intervention, it will likely break your system. So as a beginner I would avoid Arch Linux and Endeavour OS.
Manjaro has had many too issues with the security and stability of their distribution to allow me to comfortably recommend it, and the Nobara and Garuda Linux teams are both too small for me to be comfortable recommending them. Zorin OS, Pop_OS and Linux Mint are all excellent workstation distributions, but their outdated kernels and software (they are based on a long-term support base) mean you may be either giving up some performance or hardware compatibility.
My general advice would be: look at the apps you use (or would need to use) on Windows. If you’re generally dealing with word documents, PDF’s, webpages, and videos that are viewable on VLC.
See if LibreOffice/OpenOffice/OnlyOffice on Windows work as expected for the documents. If not, see if M365 through the browser does (your can run Edge on Linux and accessing the MS ecosystems seem to be the primary reason many do so.
If you can’t do those things, Linux may not be for you, or at least may not meet the needs for your work.
For personal use, I’m all with users taking the plunge, seeing if Linux works for them, and/or some the adjustments they need to make. For many, it’s a matter of a different UI for the same applications/tasks, but less invasive while being more customizable. In many cases I dual-booting or a VM, in case that user runs into a special case holding them to Windows (maybe a particular game). You could also dual-boot and flip to Windows if the edge cases it’s needed are few and far between, but you’d still need to make sure to keep both OS’s updated.
For a business user who may face time crunches, the last thing I’d want is for somebody to find out that the proprietary file format they’re provided in the regular course of business only works on a proprietary software that only runs on Windows.
At the very least, grab a cheap windows license (got can purchase legit pro license codes online for cheap and then download the image for a USB installer from MS), run Linux as your primary and keep a Windows install in a VM (i.e. using KVM/libvirtd) for a bit in case edge cases emerge. For those that just need business apps (i.e. not games, graphics-intensive design tools or social hardware) that’ll bridge the gap just fine.
Another option would be to try something like Windows with Ubuntu installed via WSL (subsystem for Linux) and i.e. MobaXterm to access the various Linux graphical apps. However that pretty much gives you access to Linux tools without the OS UI, and all the headaches of running with an MS operating system as the primary.
For my own job, I could go 90%-95% of what I need purely in Linux, with the 5-10% left being stuff like editing Visio documents, screen-sharing with sound or only for a specific app (in our workplace’s conference app). Assuming you only need to join Teams/Zoom/etc conferences with audio and video, that part works fine from browser in either OS.
In short… it’s a business, so I can’t recommend just diving in, but it’s for the same reasons I wouldn’t recommend a business just switch their vehicle fleet to 100% EV’s or move their office to a different city/state/country without a well thought-out transition plan, preferably built in stages. It may work out great and overall be a better experience nearly all the time, but if it prevents work at a crucial moment without a backup plan that can still be a deal breaker.
I have a Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 gen 6, with 3k display, i7 13370H and a 53 Wh battery. The battery life is… not so great. After watching a 2 hour movie with an external full HD display, the battery loses around 30/40%. Using the laptop display, it would be more than 50%. The average battery life is around 4 hours, but if you tweak the parameters with Tuxedo Control Center, turning off some cores and the fans, and lowering the CPU frequency, it can last more than 6 hours. I feel like this model, with a new CPU and a bigger battery (almost doubled!), should do much better.
I just have new Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 gen 8, same display but i7-13700H and 99Wh batt. The battery is like 8+ hours normal office work.
Just as I bought it they announced new Pulse 14 with 60Wh battery, but that seems more energy efficient components, I wonder how good it would perform.
I have an older InfinityBook and a slightly less older Pulse. What I hate about both is the noise. The fucking fans are so incredibly annoying. Also they are not just loud, they scale up in weird steps (not linear) making it seem like something’s attacking.
In consequence I use it with throttled CPU most of the time, but then even the desktop can become laggy.
Theoretically it’s nice hardware, practically I won’t get another.
My model (the InfinityBook Pro 6) has two fans: when they ramp up they are clearly noticeable, but I don’t think they are that annoying. I feel like the noise is acceptable and justified by the laptop’s thinness, but that’s just my perception and it could be that the thermal department has changed through the generations.
I have an InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 7, with the RTX 3050 Ti laptop, 2x2TB SSD, Intel i7-12700H and I believe also a 53 Wh battery (did not go for the battery edition with increased capacity, but instead the storage edition).
Even when using the integrated Intel GPU, the battery life is quite bad. With any kind of browser activity, I get about 2-2.5 hours. If I only do reading in Zotero with dark mode, I get up to 5 hours. For my use case, it is fine, but I could not have used this if I was dependent on working with no access to a power outlet.
Otherwise I am quite happy with Tuxedo though, and their support is usually very good. I hope they will succeed long term if they can also continue to improve on their products.
Basically nothing comes close to macbooks with apple silicon. Even the best amd cpu like 7840u with big battery, lcd screen and no dedicated gpu will still only manage around 6 to 8 hours usage. And that’s with it being clocked down to the slow as balls setting.
I actually need to send it in for repair - I think the GPU is fucked as I get irregular crashes where the screen(s) all go black, audio keeps playing but input is broken, and other weird things, like sometimes an external monitor flickers and shifts so the left third is actually shown on the right hand side of the screen…
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