You are. Reformat and install the first hardware compatible distro you find on distro.moe right now. Don’t think too much about it, just do it! /s, probably?
If checking out a different distro sounds interesting and/or fun then you should. If not, then don’t. Whatever way you Linux is the correct way for you.
Building images is easy enough. It’s pretty similar to how you’d install or compile software directly on the host. Just write a Dockerfile that runs the hide.me install script. I found this repo and image which may work for you as is or as a starting point.
When you run the image as a container you can set it up as the network gateway, just find a tutorial on how to set up a Wireguard container and replace Wireguard with your hide.me container.
In terms of kill switches you’d have to see how other people have done it, but it’s not impossible.
I found this repo and image which may work for you as is or as a starting point.
Wow I completely missed this one! This is exactly what I was planning to do! I actually installed the original repo because I’m not on arm, and it seem to work very well! I have to do a few tests to check if the killswitch actually works
I didn’t even look to see if the one I linked was a fork. I’m glad it works!
A cool thing about Dockerfiles is that they’re usually architecture agnostic. I think the one I linked is as well, meaning that the architecture is only locked in when the image is built for a specific one. In this case the repo owner probably only built it for arm machines, but a build for x86_64 should work as well.
When these launched they seemed interesting. I liked the concept, and they still do, but the biggest flaw was basing them on windows. I’ve seen windows on low-power devices before, and I’m not going through that again.
IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.
Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).
As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn’t possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.
Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn’t a niche distro, either, iirc.
Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you’re rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.
( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn’t sane to continue doing it. )
Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don’t even consider distros that break your required-set on you.
So I could recommend a distro, as you asked (which would be Ubuntu) but instead I believe what’s better is making the switch… small!
In practice that means safety net and familiarity all around :
backup your data
backup your data… and not, that’s not a mistake, truly do it, now. Before you try something new, and scary. In fact… don’t touch your computer, get another one, a cheap one like a RPi4 or a relatively old laptop that a colleague hasn’t used for years.
copy, don’t move, your data to whatever distribution you picked
ideally have a dedicated hard drive in there for JUST the data, NOT the OS
play… have fun, truly. Try to use YOUR data, I mean the copy you have now that you don’t even care if you lose, and try to use them with the stock software that comes with your distribution, e.g OpenOffice or Blender or Kdenlive, or whatever you are into
delete it all! Don’t be afraid, you can do it, you have copies anyway
do it, again, again, keep a logbook or wiki or .doc file where you write down what you learn
rinse and repeat
this way you should find YOUR distribution in no time and you won’t be afraid of messing up!
Honestly it’s a fun adventure. I’ve been learning Linux and CLI tools decades ago and I’m still learning to this day so do not assume there is one solution you can find today and move, it’s a process, a long one, but a really empowering one IMHO.
That’s really what I’m doing on my debian server where I host my docker containers.
I don’t care if I brick my system while playing arround because every day at 00:00 a crontab job dumps all my database and saves all my docker volumes and docker-compose to an external HD and saves most important dotfiles and wireguard configuration.
Back Up and running in 30 min !
2 years in, still going strong and learning everyday something new, keeping everything I learn in a markdown file.
Personal CA with self-signed certificate by an intermediate CA chain
Wireguard tunnel routing all my devices traffic to protonVPN
Alot of docker stuff
Alot of networking stuff (DNS, cryptography…)
LVM, bash…
…
Wild ride, sometimes alot of frustration, but what an empowering experience !
oh, sorry about that, I didn’t realize this could be bad for mobile users. All I needed was a command that could display all system info like distro name and version, kernel version, DE version, etc, I didn’t necessarily need the distro logo and some other useless info in there.
the little effort involves taking the piss, just taking ourselves less seriously, we’re only messing around online. And btw no info in neofetch is relevant :P
If you want to enjoy distro hopping, go find a cheap thinkpad as a secondary device, and have fun. Otherwise, you try out live discs/drives to see if you get full compatibility with your main device.
Truth is that you’ll have more difference in user experience DE hopping than distro hopping.
You only distro hop until you find what works right with an your hardware and preferred software, unless you’re doing it as a hobby. Now, the desktop environments? That’s where you’ll see the big difference.
I’ve been daily driving boring Debian since RedHat Linux 8 came out 20 years ago now. I tried switching to openSUSE and just didn’t see the point after a bit, so I switched back. The only time I’m not on Debian is when I’m playing with FreeBSD or NetBSD.
Same for DE, I’ve been using XFCE for so long that I don’t get the fuss about pretty environments.
Not hopping does not mean you’re missing out, boring can be good. Things are stable and stay out of the way of you doing actual work.
There is a quote out there somewhere about how customizing FVWM can become an obsession.
There is nothing wrong about hopping, as long as you are doing it for hobbyist reasons, at the end of day the only difference is the package manager and the DE.
I’ve been using Gentoo since 2004, every now and then I pop a distro DVD ISO into a VM to see what all the hubbub is about, but I doubt I’ll ever switch to another distro unless Gentoo dies.
My point is, sans diatribe, pop a distro ISO into a VM and see if it even seems like something you’d like.
You don’t have to do any more than that, keep using what makes you happy.
Can somebody ELI5 what the difference between Linux distros is? I’m ashamed to admit I don’t truly understand, aside from different package managers and DEs but even then there are only a handful of those.
Yes but they use different repositories with different maintainers. Think of a package manager like steam, epic, etc, except instead of games it’s everything. Some package managers get different applications, some have different versions of the same applications. In the case of Debian/Ubuntu it’s more like steam in China vs steam in the rest of the world. Same steam, different games, different maintainers of who decides what games get to go in which steam.
Generally end-user applications like Firefox would be the latest/same version, but system libraries might be a few versions different. Generally security patches are written for a few major versions of libraries/daemons at the same time. So features might be different but it’s all the same security for the most part.
That’s the major draw between one distro to another, they will have different philosophies on what to include, and what major version to use. Debian for example is much more reluctant to upgrade something unless there’s a large demand for a new feature. The theory is it is more stable and consistent to use that way.
Ubuntu on the other hand features much more modern versions of libraries because they want to be more hip and modern, expecting users to learn new things more often because they think the new features are worth it and they want to support all the things.
Ubuntu on the other hand features much more modern versions of libraries because they want to be more hip and modern
You can use the “testing” release of Debian if you want newer stuff. It’s still more stable than rolling distros. Packages have to be in the “unstable” release for 10 days with no major bugs to get promoted to testing.
It can sort of depend on the distro, there are a lot of Debian-based ones such as Debian (obviously), Kali, Ubuntu, and then ones based on Ubuntu like Mint and Pop!OS, those all largely work the same under the hood, ie you’d use .deb files and something like sudo apt-get install to install something.
Then there are Arch-based ones like Arch and Manjaro, which are a bit more different, you’d use pacman or yay or paru to install things instead, and they have things like the AUR, which is a big user-maintained repository or software that has just about everything on it.
Then you have the Fedora based ones and SUSE based ones, which are different again in other ways. And some more unique and weirder ones like NixOS which is having a bit of a moment, whereby you sort of configure the entire system in one single config file and rebuild it each time (as I understand it, that might be a bit off 'cause I’m still learning.)
So yeah it sort of depends. And then you have desktop environments like GNOME and KDE which aren’t distros, but do affect how the whole system looks (and functions, to an extent.) And these are largely agnostic of the underlying distro, so you could have say a machine running Debian with GNOME next to a machine running NixOS with GNOME which would look very similar from the desktop but would be hugely different under the hood, and two machines running Arch, one with GNOME and one with KDE which would look totally different but be functionally the same.
The grand theory of classic package managers is the idea that lots of programs all need the same core libraries to function. An analogy would be like noticing most construction jobs need nails. So instead of making everyone bring their own copy of nails, resulting in dozens of redundant copies of it lying around, they have a single nails package that everyone can use.
But there are different versions of nails out there. Each version picks up unique new features, and drops legacy ones. Recent builds may incorporate and thus require the new features, making them incompatible with old versions of nails that don’t have them. On the other hand, some builds may still use and rely on legacy features of nails, and are thus incompatible with the new versions. You may run into a scenario where you want Software A that needs nails version 14+, but also Software B that can only run on nails v <13, and you just can’t, because they don’t overlap.
Additionally, there may just be a totally different competing package out there, screws, that does largely the same job as nails, but in a completely different way that is totally incompatible with projects that expect nails. So if you need Software C that relies on nails, but also Software D that relies on screws, you might cause problems by installing both.
What a distro is is essentially a group of devs declaring that they are putting together some specific list of libraries (like, say, nails v14), and then sculpting up a bundle of software around those specific libraries. Can’t cope with nails v14? That sucks. No package for you, then.
In that sense, distros are differentiated by what libraries and other low-level system softwares are available to the programs you wish to install on them. If you want your program to be available natively on every distro, it needs to be compatible with every competing set of libraries each distro has elected to use.
It is possible to just say “fuck it” to the distro’s built-in libraries, and instead bundling the specific version of nails or screws or whatever you project needs directly with it. Build your own with blackjack and hookers, as it were. That’s exactly what Flatpak does, among others. But it’s trading flexibility for redundancy. In the age of cheap and plentiful storage memory, many people think this trade is well worth it. But it makes many formalists cringe.
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