I’ve already tried MX Linux on an old Thinkpad SL400, and didn’t see any difference from plain Debian.
Because it’s the stock Debian + custom themes/skins + some crappy useless minitools. The 99% of packages come from the official Debian repository, the rest are only the rice.
No one offered to? Not even the business who runs the site nor the departments within said business who do the testing? From the link:
What we test - Canonical’s QA team performs an extensive set of over 500 OS compatibility focused hardware tests to ensure the best Ubuntu experience. Every aspect of the system is checked and verified.
Regular testing for up to 10 years - Roughly every 3 weeks, Ubuntu releases Stable Release Updates, ensuring a secure and reliable experience. These updates are carefully tested by the Hardware Certification team to make sure that systems work well with Ubuntu.
Our laboratories - Canonical conducts tests in dedicated laboratories, located around the world. The “Ubuntu Certified” label is applied to systems that have been verified and are continuously tested by Canonical throughout the Ubuntu release life cycle.
Sounds like it should be someone’s job at Canonical to update the list/site.
I don’t wanna repeat myself, but: 7840u for the next few years, then I hope RISC V will be mature enough to kick some ass (and that framework releases a board for it).
I don’t plan to use it personally (Silverblue enjoyer here), but I can definitely see it as a more future-oriented alternative to Mint, especially for beginners.
It seems to have a similar philosophy (user friendly and stable), with the difference that it might be more suited for younger users that aren’t spoiled by traditional desktop workflows (Windows, KDE, etc.) yet.
My generation (those younger than 25) grew up using phones and tablets and will appreciate a simple, immutable system with Gnome way more than those who are older.
had an option to disable the activity BS on startup and go straight to the desktop.
But oh well, the GNOME team is more occupied with censoring comments on their blog and trying to re-invent the desktop environment experience with animations and whatnot instead of focusing on what really delivers productivity.
you’re using it wrong. ™
activity should be treated as the “default” mode of gnome (also you need to go to it do launch anything anyway)
also desktop icons suck
Desktop icons have no benefit for me and would look ugly. Opening in the desktop would mean that I would have to press super before launching all my apps, which would be annoying.
Because it takes manpower to develop and maintain these features?
Especially desktop icons are difficult to get right (see workarounds like “ReIcon” on Windows). E. g. keeping icon positions across multiple monitors and varying resolutions and displays (which can be unplugged at any time). They can also be a privacy-issue, e. g. when doing a presentation.
But most importantly: GNOME doesn’t want to be a traditional (Windows-like) desktop, so why would they implement features that don’t align with their ideas for a desktop experience?
There are lots of other desktops, like Cinnamon, that offer a traditional desktop experience within the GTK ecosystem. There is also plenty of room for desktops, like GNOME, that have a different philosophy and feature set.
In my opinion it would be boring, if every desktop tried to do the same thing. And there wouldn’t be any innovation, if no one tried to do things differently.
Innovation or regression? Gnome used to have optional desktop icons. They removed them. Let’s settle on gnome is progressing, while keeping in mind, that progress is neither necessarily nor inherently good.
Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean that all past functionality needs to be carried over. Actually innovation often means that past technology becomes obsolete and gets replaced with something new.
Gnome used to have optional desktop icons. They removed them.
They removed them because with GNOME Shell those icons no longer made sense. There was no longer a concept of dragging apps from a panel menu to a desktop, instead apps were now pinned from the fullscreen app overview to the dash.
Since the code was no longer used by the default GNOME experience, it became unmaintained and eventually got removed.
Especially desktop icons are difficult to get right
This doesn’t just affect desktop icons, icons in general suck under Linux. Things have strange behaviors when selected, long names don’t work properly etc.
But most importantly: GNOME doesn’t want to be a traditional (Windows-like) desktop, so why would they implement features that don’t align with their ideas for a desktop experience?
Because GNOME is the only DE with some potential and by not having 2 or 3 simple optional features aren’t getting more traction. I bet half of the KDE users would be glad to use GNOME only if it had desktop icons. Using other DE doesn’t make much sense as you’ll inevitable run in GTK and parts of GNOME and having to mix and match to get a working desktop experience.
Again, GNOME had icons, v3.28 discontinued them for no other purpose than trying to re-inveting something that worked for a ton of people.
Because GNOME is the only DE with some potential and by not having 2 or 3 simple optional features aren’t getting more traction.
But everyone has different requirements and my “2 or 3 simple optional features” that are missing are completely different than what you think is missing. I couldn’t care less about desktop icons or system trays. I even prefer not having a system tray, as this functionality should be provided via notifications and regular application shortcuts in my opinion.
But in the end, a software project only has a limited amount of resources available and developers have to decide where they want to focus on. GNOME chose not to focus on desktop icons:
GNOME had icons, v3.28 discontinued them
Because the code was “old and unmaintained” and probably no one was willing to modernise and maintain it. Desktop icons were already disabled by default before 3.28, so they didn’t “re-invent” this feature with the removal of the code in Nautilus.
Using other DE doesn’t make much sense as you’ll inevitable run in GTK and parts of GNOME and having to mix and match to get a working desktop experience.
I use GNOME and KDE and use the same applications (as Flatpaks) on both desktops: I use GNOME Calculator on KDE, because I dislike both KDE calculators, and I use Ark on GNOME with a Nautilus script, as File Roller doesn’t allow me to set the compression ratio (I need to create zip files with 0 compression for modding games). So for me it has become the norm to mix applications created with different toolkits. Thanks to Flatpak I still have a “clean” base system though.
Btw. I am getting tired of these re-occurring complaints that GNOME works differently than other desktops. I am not constantly complaining about what features KDE is, in my opinion, missing all the time either (e. g. dynamic workspaces, same wallpaper and desktop configuration across all existing and new monitors, online account integration, command line config tool, etc.), instead I accept that this is how it is at the moment and either use KDE the way it is (like I do on my desktop PC) or use something that better suits my needs (like I do on all my laptops).
Since GNOME disabled desktop icons years ago, I liked it so much that I disable them in every OS I use, even on Windows.
They are just ugly and make the whole system feel messy. I do t need that. I can use the search or a favourites thing in a hidden drawer like the start menu or the gnome dock.
I get understand wanting desktop icons even though I don’t like them personally, but what’s the advantage of starting at the desktop instead of the overview? It seems like you would probably want to open an application when you log in so it seems more convenient to already be in the overview
IIRC LDAC mode does not support microphone input. Still, if you want high sound quality, which you do, you need to use LDAC. I had some issues with my wh1000xm2 defaulting to SBC even though I specified LDAC. Disabling microphone input helped keep it consistently in the right mode. In KDE my settings working fine are the following:
That looks very similar to mine, except I don’t have AAC and aptX. I guess the WH1000MX5 only supports SDC and LDAC? As far as I know, I need to use the Headset Head Unit to get microphone input. After a system update some time back, it would switch automatically if I e.g. was on a Signal call. Prior to this, I would have to switch manually to get microphone input.
By the way, I am not entirely sure if I am running PulseAudio or PipeWire, as I get the confusing output below, but it seems to be PulseAudio. Is it likely to improve things if I were to switch to PipeWire?
<span style="color:#323232;">$ pactl info | grep "Server Name"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.80)
</span>
As for my Windows issue, it seems LDAC is not natively supported in Windows 10, so I guess it is using SDC. Could my problems simply be that I am trying to stream a too high bitrate? I will need to recheck my settings for stream quality.
You have pipewire. It is compatible with pulseaudio. I find it very surprising that you don’t show aac. I am not familiar with sbc-xq, but Apple products don’t support ldac and my understanding is sdc is not useful for audio listening, but rather calls. My M4s work fine on my desktop with an intel ax201 Bluetooth chipset. I have been using aac there, but ldac worked I think. I had problems with the usb BT adapter before that though.
Hm, yeah. Just checked in macOS, and it is using AAC there. So lack of AAC on my Linux device would mean it is not available here for some reason then I guess, and not an issue with the headset?
I can’t seem find a way to check the same on Windows 10 without using a third-party tool, and since this is a work computer, that is not an option for me. My guess is then that it uses SDC. Seems like AAC is supported natively in Windows 11 though, and the device is scheduled for a Win 11 install soon. Hopefully that will resolve the issue for me during work hours.
For now it seems to work better under Linux with LDAC though, which is my main use case. I swear I’ve had issues with this before, but I just streamed an entire album of high-bitrate FLAC tracks without issue now. Hopefully it stays this way.
It seems from your pactl info like you are running PipeWire, though I am by no means any expert on this. I think I read something a while ago that LDAC is not supported on Windows.
The mx5 only support sbc (minimum to support) aac and LDAC. They dropped aptx to only use their own high latency (and not that much better) codec. The headphone has BT 5.3, but does not support LC3 (an extremely good, low latency codec integrated in base bluetooth).
No, kernel immediately stops execution of all normal processes once it gets into a kernel panic, and there’s no way for processes to hook into this functionality. It is intended to be the emergency stop state when the kernel realizes it doesn’t know what’s going on and it would be dangerous to continue executing. So it does the bare minimum to report the issue and then stops even its own execution.
There’s also a softer variant of the kernel panic called kernel oops that should let the user choose to continue if they think the risk of data corruption doesn’t outweigh losing all data currently in memory. But just like the kernel panic, it is handled completely inside the kernel and userspace is frozen until the user chooses to continue.
This is intended for situations where systemd runs into an unrecoverable issue while booting (for example you have misconfigured fstab and a required disk is missing). Without this, you just get thrown into the terminal with some error messages that might not make much sense to you if you don’t have a decent understanding of Linux. Now, you get a more newbie friendly message and a QR code that should bring you somewhere you can learn more about possible causes and troubleshooting steps.
Yeah, that makes sense. So it’s for the situations where you end up in an emergency shell.
Some better presentation of kernel panic would be nice (which I think is the closest equivalent to a Windows BSoD), but I guess it would require kernel support.
Logseq is a pretty nice FOSS alternative to Obsidian I came across recently. Tmux is absolutely necessary for any terminal work. Wezterm is my favorite terminal emulator because you can easily disable all of the shortcuts except very few you want (tmux handles most of terminal stuff for me). Some new alternatives to old command line utilities:
bat is cat but 1000 times better. I love it so much!
fun factI also recently learned that it’s safer, because you can have a file that has some bad command, then the backspace character several times, and cat doesn’t display the characters “deleted” by the backspaces (but it still executes). Bat doesn’t do that.
Personally, instead of Tmux, I’d recommend trying Zellij. I started with Zellij right out of the gate, but a friend of mine who dislikes Tmux a lot quite enjoyed Zellij, so I assume it’s somewhat better.
I know about Zellij, but in its current state, I think it doesn’t make sense for me to switch. I really lobe my Tmux setup, and I don’t think I would be able to replicate it on Zellij, mainly because of Tmux plugins I use. I also don’t think that Zellij currently has any advantages over Tmux except for better default config and user friendliness that I don’t need. I’m looking forward to the Zellij ecosystem getting better tho. Some day, I will probably make the switch. The WASM tabs feature looks extremely promising!
I use zoxide plus fzf which ends looking like this.
My default go-to for a better cd was teleport when I still was on bash. The tp command can be aliased to cd. I don’t think it will run on other shells though.
Honestly, for a long term usage like this a rolling release distro is better. I’ve never not had massive issues upgrading ubuntu release to release, but I’ve only ever had minor ones on arch and pretty much nothing on gentoo. Arch is bleeding edge, so can’t recommend it to you all that much and gentoo has some learning curve initially. But I’ve heard good things of whatever rolling names are from fedora and opensuse.
There is no problem with using a point release system long term. The problem is using Ubuntu. I’ve never once successfully upgraded it from one release to the next without issues, errors, things breaking or loss of functionality. It’s the main reason why I’ll never use Ubuntu again.
I’ve upgraded several Ubuntu LTS versions to newer LTS and have been running fine. The problems come up when you wait too long and the repos don’t have the needed packages anymore. You can still fuddle your way through even that scenario and retain a fully working system.
You can still fuddle your way through even that scenario and retain a fully working system.
Or at least you used to have that option without too much of a headache. I’m pretty sure you can still do it tho, but the steps required to ‘rescue’ old installation tend to be more complex than they used to be.
For a desktop system, I think something like NixOS is probably the way to go. Keep your home partition then blow away the system and boot if there are ever any issues then install the system from your backed-up system config file and you’re golden.
Ubuntu changes the entire underlying technology too often cause they always try to introduce their own system in place of something that’s already established (Upstart, Unity, Snap, etc.)
My last experiences with Ubuntu were one upgrade that failed to boot after following all the recommended steps, one upgrade where the release notes themselves recommended a fresh install to enable all functionality and a fresh install where the first thing I saw after booting was an error message by Gnome about a crashed service.
I left the distro after that and haven’t looked back. Admittedly, that was quite some time ago. It’s likely they’ve improved since then (but so have all other distros).
I’m glad we have companies helping to push the envelope and try new things. I may not always like the direction they take things, e.g., the Unity desktop turned me off for a few releases, and I always seem to run KDE since gnome went off the rails (imo), but it doesn’t hurt anything and the whole ecosystem is probably better for it. If it hurts then people move to alternatives and hopefully Canonical backpedals, or people move on and Ubuntu withers.
People think “updates are time consuming” therefore prefer LTS because its supported for longer. I parole for quite some time that LTS has no place for private use and rolling release is the right way.
I can’t stand rolling releases (for personal use) and I never recommend them to anyone. To me it feels like being in drift sand.
I need fixed releases to test my documentation (shell scripts) against something. With a rolling release those scripts can break at any time, unless you read the changelog of every package update.
But I also want and use fully automatic updates, so reading changelogs for every update would be the direct opposite of what I am looking for in an OS. I am ok with reading release notes every couple of months for a distribution upgrade though.
I want my systems to be reproducible and that’s impossible with drift sand rolling releases. In my opinion Fedora or Ubuntu have a decent release cycle, I would never consider Arch or Tumbleweed or Solus.
Uhm you never actually used a rolling release distro obviously. Why would you have to read change logs? Also what are you referring to with “test my documentation (shell scripts)”? Why would those not work if package xyz is updated? You are not making much sense, but maybe I am lacking the experience in UNIX to understand your point of view.
Your package manager should tell you about conflicts and even if it doesn’t and something is not working like it did before, you do a simple snapshot rollback and wait another week to update or actually read what might cause the issue. And those incidents are like super rare, at least on Opensuse Tumbleweed (e.g. 2-3 times in a year).
I’ve used Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed in the past and I have been using Linux for over 10 years …
With each new version of an application there’s the change that configuration files or functionality changes. Packages might even get replaced with others.
You would be surprised how much changes between Ubuntu LTS versions … My archived Ubuntu installation script had lots of if-statements for different versions of Ubuntu, since stuff got moved around. Such things can be as simple as gsettings schemas (keys might get renamed), but even these minor changes make documentation and therefore reproducable reinstallations troublesome.
With a fixed release all these changes are nicely bundled in one large upgrade every couple of months/years, which makes it easy to document and to plan when to do the upgrade.
With each new version of an application there’s the change that configuration files or functionality changes. Packages might even get replaced with others.
Even if this would be true, how would that impact your configuration? It doesn’t full-stop. If you want to access those new features you simply need to check how to activate them in your config file. Or are you making config edits in /etc/ ?!
Your next paragraph I don’t understand, it seems specifically aimed at some kind of self “maintained” script, which as nothing to do with rolling release or distributions.
It impacts my documentation. If, for example, gsettings set org.gnome.software allow-update false no longer works, because they changed the key from allow-update to updates-allowed, then my documentation no longer works correctly. Same when new technology is introduced, e. g. a switch from Pulseaudio to Pipewire. With a rolling release distribution these changes can happen at any time, whereas with a fixed release these changes only occur when a new release of the distribution is made and I upgrade to it.
I don’t have the time to continously track these changes and modify my documentation accordingly. Therefore I appreciate it if people bundle all those changes for me into one single distribution upgrade and write release notes with a changelog. Then I can spend a day reading the release notes, adjust the documentation, apply the upgrade on all devices and then move on for the next couple of months/years.
which as nothing to do with rolling release or distributions.
I tried to explain to you why I dislike rolling release distributions. That’s why I tried to give you one example where a fixed release distribution is more suitable in my opinion.
I understand that these things might not matter to you, if you only have one computer (or so) to maintain at home or maintaining home computers is your hobby. But I have four personal computers and multiple devices from the family to maintain and system administration is no longer my hobby …
LTS does have a place on the desktop: Learning how to daily drive linux. I started with kubuntu non-LTS and didn’t know you needed to manually start a full-upgrade to not get moved to backport repos. Of course that came crashing down on me at the worst time and I took a break from linux. But I did learn enough that I can use arch now and it’s been great.
I don’t understand what it means to "not get moved to backport repos, but this seems ubuntu specific. What you need is proper rollback/snapshot mechanisms in place. Looking at Tumbleweed which offers it out of the box. For Arch you can set it up yourself or use something community made like EndeavourOS.
I haven’t been paying attention on the rolling releases scene, but I’m pretty sure there was no mature option back when I installed that thing in 2019 or so other than Debian Sid (and daily driving that used to be an adventure in itself, but it’s been years since I last had a system like that). With ubuntu since at least version 14 upgrading from stable release to another was pretty stable experience, but that’s not the experience I’m having today.
But regardless of that you can still daily drive it as your distribution and many do. That’s why I said it’s an adventure of it’s own, but if you know what you’re getting into and accept the reality with Sid it can work. Personally I don’t want to use it at this point in my life, but I used to run it for several years when woody was getting a bit old on packages and sarge wasn’t out yet (and I think I just continued with sid after sarge release).
Iam using Tumbleweed for close to 10 years now and it was pretty mature from the start. You can’t go wrong with rolling release + perfectly configured btrfs + snapper by default.
You might be correct, but I haven’t found one that I’d like (not that I’ve really looked for one either). Maybe you know if there’s any Debian derivatives which do rolling releases?
I like cinnamon and I’ve been running mint on my laptop for quite a while and I like it, so I’m going with it right now and plan for my next distro-hopping needs more carefully when installing.
But in general I’d say that Ubuntu is far from what it used to be and the TLC the latest version wants is just something I’m not willing to put up with. If something breaks on a update then it breaks, but at least give me an option to choose when it happens.
I just had pacman uninstall itself the other day during a routine -Syu. I was finally able to figure out how to fix it, untar the pkg to / and then tell pacman to install pacman with —overwrite.
You won’t. Arch has very little glue that holds it together and the components are quite robust. Buntus of this world, on the other hand, have plenty of glue to enforce their way. And it might be good for first timers, but definitely gets in a way as you start learning the system. My last annoyance like this was disabling gdm - it just kept coming back. Some script somewhere was making sure thr service was running no matter what.
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