For a home user with recent hardware in my opinion the system to beat is openSUSE Tumbleweed. It is a stable and rolling distribution, that is, it has the best of both worlds.
Great. Works on anything without any issues. I use it for pretty much everything (except web browser and only because I don’t wanna bother with permissions on that)… As for the size argument, I have also never had isssues with space, my laptop has 128GB of storage total and the /home partition on my desktop is ~100GB, both use fllatpaks for pretty much everything, I have no issues with space on either… And yes I use flatpaks on gentoo, cry about it.
good old x201 here (i5-720m iirc), 8GB ram, sata ssd. Debian stable. No DE, just stumpWM. Not watching 4k youtube videos but runs fairly well for a 13 years old machine.
I am not terribly impressed. The ability to build and run apps in a well defined and portable sandbox environment is nice. But everything else is kind of terrible. Seemingly simple things like having a package that contains multiple binaries aren’t properly supported. There are no LTS runtimes, so you’ll have to update your packages every couple of months anyway or users will get scary errors due to obsolete runtimes. No way to run a flatpak without installing. Terrible DNS based naming scheme. Dependency resolving requires too much manual intervention. Too much magic behind the scene that makes it hard to tell what is going on (e.g. ostree). No support for dependency other than the three available runtimes and thus terrible granularity (e.g. can’t have a Qt app without pulling in all KDE stuff).
Basically it feels like one step forward (portable packages) and three steps back (losing everything else you learned to love about package managers). It feels like it was build to solve the problems of packaging proprietary apps while contributing little to the Free Software world.
I am sticking with Nix, which feels way closer to what I expect from a Free Software package manager (e.g. it can do nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.1.0).
It’s been great. I can get updated stuff on top of stable point release distro without mixing repos. Offers nice features like sandbox and forcing everything under .var for easy transfer to another machine.
There’s some small issues. For some apps fonts look weird but it’s fixable. Firefox is so sandboxed that KeepAssXC and KDE Connect/plasme browser integration has harder time with it. Managed to fix XC. Sometimes there’s issues with permissions. Well most those things were issues with permissions as in with the sandbox. But I think those issues will be settled at some point.
It’s great if the pak meets your needs. For Steam the pak didn’t meet my needs because it doesn’t allow you to add additional library locations. As long as it’s set up in a way that works for you then it’s a big time saver.
I haven’t tried it but doesn’t flatseal let you setup steam’s permissions to allow external/additional directories or mounts?
What’s stopping steam’s access to other directories?
The trick is knowing how to do it. I still haven’t fixed my Zoom install to successfully download emojis (which I suspect requires a filesystem permission it doesn’t have by default)…
i like using bottles & steam flatpaks on debian because they use newer mesa in their containers. so the best of both worlds with stable debian but more updated gaming drivers
Similar reason, with flatpaks having codecs with them so no need for outside the distro codec repo. (Talking about openSUSE here but might be the same for Fedora)
You’re using software that’s being continuously developed by people for whom stability of the UI is not a priority. Pointless UI churn is normal. Half-assed solutions kept beyond their best-before date are normal. Windows does this crap too. At least with Linux you have a choice of which issues you’re going to tolerate (or you can pick a DE where UI stability is a priority for the development team).
I use a few packages from Homebrew and don’t have any problems with it. By default it installs itself into /home/homebrew or something which I didn’t like so I put it into ~/Applications/Homebrew instead using these steps. It warns that you may be forced to compile software if you do it this way but I’m down to clown so whatever.
The biggest problem I have with it is that you’ll need to keep it updated alongside your regular packages, which I do by aliasing a simple upgrade command that runs all my package manager upgrades.
I would also recommend ungoogled-chromium as an alternative to Brave, which does have its own official Flatpak (not marked as such but it’s linked to in the ungoogled-chromium project github).
I am not sure. The only option to configure being able to see thumbnails is setting a file size limit larger than your video file size in Edit>Preferences. It caches all thumbnails into /home/USERNAME/.cache/thumbnails/ path, and you might have to test with a video if it parses manually, or if it picks thumbnail supplied by photo/video.
You are at the mercy of file manager (or plugin) developer who implements the frame that will be picked up, whether it be frame 1, first second, or 20% duration frame etc. Something like Directory Opus on Windows is supreme because of these niche needs. Your option in such cases might possibly be a file manager that uses external plugins like Double Commander, or Total Commander Extended addons edition via WINE.
I set those limits, I made sure all the plugins to do with thumbnailing are there, and so on. I’m genuinely not sure anymore if it even can work like I want it to.
Whatever I do, Thunar shows an arbitrary frame of the video as its thumbnail, not the embedded one.
So I am a data hoarder, and I manually tested just now. In my experience, Thunar shows the 33.33% duration frame of any video that it can process, otherwise if it cannot process some video (some MPEG-TS files for example), it shows the first possible frame it can fetch, usually the first frame of video.
Thunar shows the 33.33% duration frame of any video that it can process
Yeah, that seems to check out. If I research it, I’m not really finding any conclusive evidence that Thunar can actually show embedded thumbnails, so idk
I love Fedora but definitely Mint for a normie. Even then I question if you should install Linux at all since reliably being able to do what you need to do is priority one, especially for a student, and if he may be blocked in his work as a result I don’t think it’s a great idea.
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