@mintycactus@jack silverblue is not more user friendly than mint, not by any metric. A system with an immutable file system simply cannot be so. The immutability of the system often adds levels of complexity that an average person would have trouble understanding
@mintycactus to you and me that’s true, but to a person just starting with Linux, it could be complex. I think systems like Silverblue, Vanilla OS, and NixOS are great, but I would not suggest them to a new user of Linux.
@mintycactus NixOS can install to your hard drive. I have it on my laptop and it runs beautifully. I have issues with Gnome and their insistence on removing things like remembering window size and positions, and recently making it so hard to theme, but I am sure these will iron out with time.
My plasma desktop, however, is my favorite. Once I got it where I wanted it, it just worked so well and looked so good that I recommend it to everyone (BigLinux with KDE)
Also university wifi eduroam doesn’t work on Fedora for me because legacy TLS connection is not supported in Fedora (at least I couldn’t get it to work).
When the WiFi relies on insecure encryption, the problem will only be delayed on Mint because Mint’s underlying Ubuntu core is just older. Once a newer security policy comes to Mint, it will have exactly the same problem. The actual solution is for you university to update the WiFi encryption. In the meantime, according to fedoraproject.org/wiki/…/StrongCryptoSettings2#Up… the security defaults of Fedora can be rolled back to an earlier level quite easily.
Okay, after removing all the preinstalled media players plus firefox and reinstalling them through Flathub it might be possible to skip the official tutorial.
Fedora should just preinstall everything as flathub flatpaks.
the problem will only be delayed on Mint because Mint’s underlying Ubuntu core is just older. Once a newer security policy comes to Mint, it will have exactly the same problem.
That is a valid point. Although I can imagine that Mint devs would rather leave legacy TLS enabled to be more user-friendly.
If you are the one installing the distro, it probably doesn’t matter that you have to copy-paste some commands to install proprietary codes because it’s a one time thing. In my experience, the bigger problem usually is not the first time setup but the maintenance. In case of Fedora they would have to upgrade it every 6 months. That’s why I usually suggest LTS or something rolling but stabe distro like OpenSUSE Thumbleweed.
In case of Fedora they would have to upgrade it every 6 months.
The upgrading experience for Fedora Workstation is super smooth, on par with macOS, Android, and so on. Gnome Software just tells the user that a new version is available, the user clicks on the upgrade button and then it’s just waiting a bit and a reboot.
Okay, after removing all the preinstalled media players and reinstalling them through Flathub
Technically it’s not required to uninstall the default applications but obviously you’d still wanna do that to avoid clutter.
Fedora should just preinstall everything as a flathub flatpak.
Even though not Fedora-based but that’s pretty much what I have on SteamOS: Firefox, VLC, etc. all from Flathub. Because of the 32bit dependencies, Flathub is my preferred way to install Steam on regular Linux distributions anyway (for obvious reasons not on SteamOS).
That’s because Cinnamon is actually a fork of an ancient Gnome release
mate is what originally spawned from gnome 2. while cinnamon was built from gnome 3, it has been completely separated from it for a decade.
both are under active development, run current applications, and offer what would be described as a more 'traditional' desktop environment (compared to gnome shell or ubuntu's unity). they're both lighter-weight then gnome, with mate being a bit leaner than cinnamon.
mint would be my suggestion for op, and any of the default mint desktops, including their other option--xfce, would be suitable for op's use case.
while cinnamon was built from gnome 3, it has been completely separated from it for a decade.
both are under active development
I followed Cinnamon’s git closely for years. The commit “Renamed files to Cinnamon” was the last commit to the majority of files over years, despite the fact that Cinnamon had several formal releases in that time. It took literal years for its development to actually get off the ground and not just get some light touches in JavaScript files. The slow start reverberates until this day as you can see with its slow Wayland adoption and OP’s “Mint seems rather outdated” comment. IMO Cinnamon isn’t even the best choice for people who want a Windows7-like workflow. Gnome with Dash to Panel achieves the same with less technological legacy.
Just in case you are on a desktop and using qemu for local virtualisation, I would recommend you use virt-manager.
Besides that, set up spice or vnc daemons in the guests, as others have said.
Just in case You’re virtualising Kali Linux, use their provided qemu image, you won’t have to worry about it. If you don’t know what Kali is, don’t use it.
Thank you for the virt-manager recommendation. I’ll look into it.
I did build Kali from their ISO but I’ll give their provided image a try. I do know what Kali is and what it is used for. I’ll be using it for TryHackMe labs.
Okay, so my guess was right. Don’t bother setting things up manually, qemu and libvirt are hellishly complex. If you don’t need something super special, use virt-manager.
Just use the provided qemu image on the Kali site, import it, and you’re good to go. Don’t worry about the other stuff.
Depending in your screen you might have to set a custom screen resolution, but if you’re using something standard, xfce should automatically recognize everything.
A little tip: set up an ssh server on the VM and upload an ssh key, that way you can get a Kali she’ll quickly from the comfort of your hosts terminal.
It’s pretty new. Has wayland and pipewire. You can just enable a checkmark in the installer to install codecs. Uses Gnome, so a non-Windows like workflow. Pretty sure Eduroam would work there, as many schools use Ubuntu by default.
I haven’t tried Ubuntu yet myself, but generally I’m turned off by some decisions Canonical makes, especially the whole Snap thing adding complexity, slow app startup and proprietary store. Not very trustworthy.
But you are right, Ubuntu is the most popular and things like eduroam will likely work.
If your want something that just works, Ubuntu is pretty hard to beat. Snaps are really not a big deal anymore, performance wise; a lot of the bad rap on slow startups etc. are from years (and many versions) ago.
If you don’t want Ubuntu and you don’t like Mint, there are also other options in the Ubuntu/Debian family. Pop_OS and Zorin are both popular.
generally I’m turned off by some decisions Canonical makes
Those decision will trickle down to Ubuntu remixes like Mint eventually. Canonical’s plan is to replace as much as technically possible with Snaps. They just barely delayed shipping CUPS itself as Snap but it will come, so even a basic task like printing will rely on Snap. I don’t see Mint having manpower to package everything on their own, even if it’s “just” about porting Debian packages. Might just as well use LMDE right now.
that's the whole reasoning behind having LMDE. seems a little redundant today; but within a release or two mint may very well be only based on debian itself, with the way canonical is steering ubuntu.
within a release or two mint may very well be only based on debian itself, with the way canonical is steering ubuntu.
I expect Canonical going hard in the Snap direction leading up to 26.04. They are desperate given the fact that Flathub got a huge popularity boost thanks to SteamOS. I don’t think Ubuntu remixes will come out unscathed.
Built-in encryption in bcachefs sounds great, that’s the only thing that BTRFS has been missing for me so far.
Bonus points if it can be decrypted on boot like LUKS, and double bonus points if its scriptable like cryptsetup (retrieve key from hardware device, or network, or flash stick etc)
Yeppp this is what I currently do, and offers the best performance IMO compared to using something like gocryptfs in userspace on top of BTRFS. Pretty happy with it except a few small things…
It can be a bit of a faff to mount on a new machine if its file manager doesn’t support encrypted volumes natively ☹️. On your daily you can have it all sorted in your crypttab and fstab so it’s not an issue there
My main problem though is if it’s an external USB device you have encrypted with LUKS, the handles and devices stay there after an unexpected USB disconnect… so you can’t actually unmount or remount the dm-crypt device after that happens. Anytime you try, the kernel blocks you saying the device is busy - only fix i’m aware of is a reboot.
If the encryption is managed by the filesystem itself, one would probably assume this kind of mounting & unexpected disconnect scenario would be handled as gracefully as possible
I have also experienced that dangling devices break remounting it, but I think there’s a quicker solution for it: dmsetup remove insert_device_name_here.
It’s still a manual thing, though, but 2 steps better. Maybe it can be automated somehow, I haven’t looked into that yet.
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