But Wayland’s technical merits are relevant in a subtle way. Wayland is maintainable. Xorg isn’t. That’s it, the single most important technical merit. Everyone works on Wayland. Nobody works on Xorg. If people decide to use X11 today, their issues are wontfix with the solution to use Wayland instead. They can’t fix the issues themselves because X11 is an unmaintainable mess. Xorg is on life support with the only purpose to serve Xwayland.
They hated her for she spoke the truth. We (DIY people) hate to acknowledge that not everyone sees value in investing as much time and energy into perfecting their workspaces as the nerds have, and would rather have their tools Just Work™ so they can get to work on the projects they do care about. I say this as someone who still gets frustrated and argumentative when my friends say they prefer spyware-ridden OSes that remove control from the end-user because they don’t require end-user micro-management to maintain and work.
X vs Wayland might as well be Grub vs rEFInd or systemd vs SysVinit to most end-users: it matters from a technical perspective, but most people just want something that will allow them to go about their business without sinking hours into getting the “correct” option to work. And it’s important to remember that we all fall on either side of this divide with some aspects of our life, even if it’s not computer-related. How often do we agonize over finding the “correct” pipe wrench when our sink is leaking, despite what the plumbing nerds would criticize you for using? Do you sink hours into picking the right books on conflict resolution when you argue with your spouse, or do you post on AITA and hope they give good advice? Do you agonize over having all the right utensils and ingredients so you can eke out the most subtle flavors from your cooking, or do you use the pan that you got at the local superstore?
For the four groups enumerated in the article, this still is not important. It may affect them in ways they are unaware of, but you will not be able to change their minds using technical arguments at this point if they have not already been convinced by the wealth of information and support that is readily available.
Protocols are fine. Clients may speak one or another protocol. But protocols aren’t broken when clients designed to speak one protocol fail to speak a different protocol. It’s like saying English is broken because my friend only knows German, except English is Wayland, German is X11 and my friend is clients. Wayland is always ready to listen to clients that speak Wayland.
Yeah, especially the argument about Wayland compositors taking down all apps with them when they crash: that’s just bad, no need to sugarcoat that.
A better argument would be that it’s not true: KWin keeps Qt apps alive, and they’re working on extending that to all apps. As a result, in the only crash I’ve experienced, I only lost my Firefox window, and zero data as all my tabs and form entry values got restored when I started it again.
No, they aren’t. You can switch to their Universe patches anytime, at your own risk. If you want Canonical to mitigate that risk for you, you pay. Simple, really.
I remember shortly after college I was living with a couple of people and one day we all heard “NOOOOOOOOOO!” and went running to see what tragedy happened. He had started formatting the one porn drive he had been collecting on over the last few years.
I’ll never forget that scream, I thought a sound like that was reserved for when the cat ran behind the couch and stepped on the surge protector button, corrupting the hard drive as you were almost finished writing your graduate thesis, which wasn’t backed up yet.
Honestly a thesis is way higher stakes and value. Yeah, imagine thinking there was an emergency only to find out your roommate will need to spend the rest of the semester using their imagination.
Good luck getting all the developers to rewrite their apps. The only reason you had any apps was because it was based on Android so it was little to no effort to port. Going plain ol’ embedded Linux is basically the death knell of your developer story. Source: been there, had no third party apps, switched to Android
Oh man PWA as a replace to traditional apps have been promised for a while. On one hand the promise of write once run anywhere on the other less ability to lock down your app from your users (good for us, but not popular in the mobile space at the moment)
You’re likely thinking KaiOS. They are still contributing what is required under MPL-2.0 but the rest is proprietary. KaiOS 3.x finally got off of a browser from 2016 as the base, but very few have upgraded their apps to be compatible (the tweaks were minor) & others have used it as a reminder that they were still ‘supporting’ a platform like whoever is maintaining or using that WhatsApp thing for chat.
There’s also Capyloon built from B2G, but it’s still early on & is targeting touch phones, instead of feature phones.
It would be nice to see it around IMO since it’d just be another enhancement to progressive web applications & JavaScript is a better target than Java or Swift.
PWAs are great if they’re written well, especially if they allow offline access.
There’s platforms like React Native where the apps are native on each platform (they use native UI widgets). You can’t just run the same code, but you can reuse probably 90-95% of code across platforms.
I kinda getcha. Design-wise, you could get a very close copy (but I don’t think 1:1. Never tried it tbf), but if we take the workflow into account, yeah it won’t be 100% the same (also, QT apps can be a turnoff depending on the person)
I recently moved to Fedora and tried gnome first. Absolutely no thanks. I just can’t get down with it, and I had numerous issues in just a few days. KDE spin has been pretty painless.
If you don’t mind me asking, was it because of the vanilla look, the customization being based on extensions (which may or may be updated for a while when a new version releases–if at all), or was it the Gnome philosophy of “One Window per workspace”?
Just curious really, I’m more of an XFCE and KDE user myself, and i can see the appeal of Gnome (and I’m NGL, it looks nice IMHO), but yeah…not a big fan of extensions breaking every version update and the “throw unused Windows in a new workspace” thing
I don’t mind the workspaces idea, but I’m just so used to a windows-like philosophy that I just can’t adjust easy.
If I had one monitor, maybe gnome would be better. Workspaces could organize myself better. But I have 3, and almost never use other workspaces in KDE. And my mint XFCE laptop isn’t a big work machine so it doesn’t matter much.
Also I had technical issues on gnome that didn’t happen on KDE.
My first distro was pop, and their version of gnome I do like. But I’m not willing to customize it enough to suit myself. I’m more of a “stock experience with small mods” kinda dude. I do enjoy Unix porn but don’t have desire to do it myself. That’s kinda why I’m not a massive fan of xfce. The default layout is really bad.
Ditto. I’ve just never found the use for workspaces myself (like, i understand why they’re there but they never really worked for me). I tried them, didn’t like the flow of it, so i just ignored them (and Gnome for the most part, save Pop_OS, but I’ve a love/hate relationship with it cuz it’s always caused me problems when i try it out. Hopefully the Cosmic Desktop they’re making will run better on my systems) in favor of the windows philosophy myself
Agreed on Vanilla/stock XFCE being rough (and i love XFCE), and vanilla Gnome being divisive, but i’m the opposite of you and love to tinker with my stuff–even KDE, which lools good OOTB i can’t just leave it alone lol
I have the complete opposite experience. I’ve never had a good fedora kde install. It always had issues out of nowhere. I’ve hopped so much until I settled on endeavourOS for over a year now. Beautiful distro
Could be. To be fair to fedora kde, I’ve only tried it on a laptop that has hybrid graphics Intel/Nvidia. I now have a desktop PC that is all AMD, but I built it with EndeavourOS and never anything else.
I use Plasma for a bit but instability, odd bugs, or visual inconsistency just becomes too much for me.
Gnome was a pain for a couple of weeks when I kept trying to use it like a Windows PC, but once the Gnome workflow “clicked” it just made so much more sense than the Win95 UX paradigm.
And it’s particularly annoying when kwin crashes, because it takes everything else down with it (that’s getting fixed in Plasma 6 though!) For me that’s an absolute show-stopper. I don’t want to lose hours of work across multiple programs because something caused kwin to crash.
5.27 is better to a ridiculous degree compared to how Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5 was, though. KDE is doing a lot of work to put the meme of their software being a buggy mess to bed.
I used it at work recently to update my work-provided HP Thunderbolt dock, and it resolved an issue where the external monitors would fail to activate after resuming from standby. I never got an update notification when I was using my Windows laptop so I was oblivious to it; it was only thanks to connecting it to my Linux laptop and fwupd, that I found out there was an update, which subsequently resolved the issue.
I love it when stuff like this happens and Linux saves the day. =) (and I get to show off to my Windows heathens colleagues.)
Second one, which I’d rephrase as ubuntu sticking with apt/dpkg as its package manager. Which is really nice if you like ubuntu as a distro already.
Though I don’t really get why there has to be a distro to be beaten. And having flavors is always good. I, for example, don’t like distros changing too much upstream SW, so the more vanilla the better. I don’t like either the periodic releases, and to be rolling release rocks. I don’t like systemd, whereas most distros now a days are systemd dependent. I also dislike network manager and similar and require a distro that keeps support for the basic dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant… All that to say, that no distro fits all needs, so several options are good, no need to have one beating the rest, :)
I switched when one guy unilaterally decided Ubuntu would completely flip its user interface, for no goddamn reason, the night before a long-term-support feature freeze.
Mint is for people who just want stuff to work and not fiddle about too much. It does that very well. Anyone who simply wants an alternative to Windows that is easy to get into and use will be perfectly happy with it. If you want to customise everything to a t, Mint isn’t for you
EndeavourOS is the most simple to work with distro I’ve had. Ubuntu-based and Fedora all were trouble. OpenSUSE was fine but I prefer terminal centric (not saying you cannot use terminal on it). EndeavourOS is amazing. I just yay to update and all works.
Arch is bleeding edge and frequently has minor bugs as a result. This is probably fine for power users and people who want to learn Linux but I wouldn’t give an Arch distro to someone who isn’t techy. They also likely won’t appreciate the frequent updates to applications that they depend on to actually do work.
(I used Arch for almost five years and think it’s one of the best distros)
It’s simple and solid enough to give to people who don’t know what they’re doing, and its Debian/Ubuntu base makes it flexible enough to not slow down power users who want to start modifying it. Other distros that might fit this bill keep shooting themselves in the foot and going off in weird directions, while Linux Mint has been a reputable no-BS distro for a very long time. It’s a workhorse distro without any gimmicks and that’s the point.
Mint was my “gateway distro” to get away from windows as a daily driver. It still is my daily driver and it’s given me enough guardrails to not screw it up too badly and learn.
I’m looking to go further up stream towards Debian. I’ve looked at arch and “arch that’s not allowed to be called arch because it has a gui installer”, but I’m not ready/able/“risk-tolerant-enough” to keep that stable as my daily driver. Fedora dormant seem quite right for me.
I really like mint, it meets my needs, has treated me well.
I looked at Manjaro VERY briefly, and I played with Endeavor a bit. I installed several distros as VMs just to poke around. I found Debian familiar which is likely the main reason I find myself leaning that way.
I use Mint, PopOS, or Arch/EndeavourOS more or less interchangeably. I’ve sincerely never had any issues with Arch’s stability. The term “stable” when describing a distro refers more to the package versions than system stability or overall reliability. Things aren’t necessarily broken cause they’re more up to date. Back in 2020, my laptop didn’t play well with Ubuntu 20.04 because of some power management issue caused by a kernel bug. My only real option was getting off of LTS and switching to 20.10 which had a newer fixed kernel version. So in effect, the Ubuntu LTS was less “stable” for me because of them keeping the kernel version stable.
YMMV, obviously, but most of what I’m doing when doing a fresh install is installing the packages I need, and configuring them. I can do this pretty much regardless of the distro. Most of the difference is if those packages are available in the first place, and how I’ll have to install them if they aren’t in the base repositories. Configs/dotfiles are usually pretty portable. The rest is just well… Linux as usual.
From experience, ignore your instincts and give pure Arch a try. It’s a lot more stable than you’d think, and their wiki has very thorough instructions for everything.
It’s a bit of a trial by fire on your terminal knowledge, but you’ll learn a ton in the process. Worst case, you get fed up trying and just go to Fedora or something after.
i dont have the energy or patience to go to a wiki for my OS, i just want it to work and not be proprietary. besides setting up wine staging and pipewire it’s generally been smooth sailing
I’m with you here, sometimes I’m really lazy and don’t want to mess with it. Other times I’m hell-bent on doing something I know how to do in a GUI through terminal.
Mint has let me keep my system OS rock solid, and I’m not afraid to try about anything in the vm. Reinstall when time permits or just roll back to a snapshot.
I’ve got time shift installed, but I use my computer for work, so there’s some draw to stability and having everything just work.
I’m sure it’d be fine, I’m probably not willing to put in the right amount of effort. I think a big fear for me is I use the computer for work, and while I have others, I prefer this one. I may not have the 15-30min to research and resolve something I did to myself.
I also try not to be the person who asks for help on the same question for the 17th time.
So far I’ve always been able to find answers in documentation or communities. Turns out I’m not so unique. ;).
I would echo that but suggest going to EndevourOS. EOS is a lot easier to install for normal people. What you get is insanely close to pure Arch.
I agree that running Arch is easier than people think. It is very stable. Also, because everything you could want is in the repositories ( and up-to-date ) it does not become a spaghetti like mess over time. No more third-party repos. No more PPAs.
Thanks for this recommendation as it’s potentially a logical step. I’ve thought about this but not researched it enough, yet. I don’t understand enough about the differences yet. Hypothetically, do I need or want Mint on Debian, or do I just want to get the real deal? Not posing the question to you, just what I’ve yet to research further. Mint is currently working fine for me, so there’s no rush.
Going straight to Debian isn’t hard. LMDE might have newer packages, IDK. I used Debian 12 for a bit and still use it on my server. Mint offers a great stock experience but Debian has a hard to explain vanilla coolness if you will. I would also recommend considering OpenSUSE if you haven’t looked at it.
It just works. Whenever anyone I know tells me they are going to install ubuntu or try out linux for the first time - I just tell them to install linux mint and they’ve had no complaints so far.
(Even though I only use mint as a fallback distro, I really appreciate it being there)
I have not used pop recently. To be fair both are kind of similar, at least base wise. So one cannot go wrong with any of the two. I like the traditional layout of cinnamon better than Gnome (out of the box) so I’ll pick Mint.
The rust one is called bottom (btm) see the other thread :). When you already have a rust environment it is just at a cargo install away which is convenient.
Could you please provide a brief description of Vital? I’m in the process of rebuilding my musicmaking setup after a 15 years long hiatus, so I need to update myself on what’s out there.
On that note, it looks like I’m gonna go for bitwig over Ardour. Any thoughts/opinions on that?
Vital is a vst similar to Serum, a pretty popular paid vst. It has a bunch of preset sounds but offers a lot of options for effects and automation to design your own sounds. I use it a ton personally and get a lot of range from it.
Getting plugins to install is often a big hurdle, if they are working, they work. However I think performance suffers alot. Didn’t try it on any bigger synths yet tho.
Might depend on what DAW you use but I found it abit tedious to setup with Ardour, but after that it worked perfectly with the VSTs I was running on Windows, mainly Amplitube 5.
I use it for spitfire labs, ott, and delay lama (very important) and all work great. There are occasional crashes when messing with parameters, but usually those don’t happen more then once. I haven’t noticed any performance issues.
Other comments have hit this, but one reason is simply to be an extra layer. You won’t always know what software is listening for connections. There are obvious ones like web servers, but less obvious ones like Skype. By rejecting all incoming traffic by default and only allowing things explicitly, you avoid the scenario where you leave something listening by accident.
It never occurred to me before reading this comment that there actually is a use case for the execute permission. To me it was always just this annoying thing I have to do whenever I download an executable which I didn’t have to do on Windows.
I started this way today but kept coming up with an error with rsync during install. I tried in Virtual Box and had the same error. I gave up and just installed Fedora in the end.
No clue what rsync would be doing. Maybe there’s an issue with the current ISO, but I’ve installed it on a few systems in the last couple months with no issues.
I mean, it’s one dropdown/checkbox click, to enable codecs sources. I get your point though, having to remember to enable that.
I’d used Nobara if I knew it was being supported by more than just one (great/special; I’m aware of his contribution to gaming on Linux) guy (please correct me if this is no longer the case?), since it would be installed on my daily driver box, and it’s important for me to have a high level of reliability, even though I do more gaming tasks than non-gaming tasks on it.
I’m aware that Nobara is based from Fedora, but am nervous about having a single point of failure, support wise.
I run Kubuntu on my desktop and laptop machines but I’m seriously considering switching to Debian (which I run on my server). Any reason I wouldn’t want to do that on my desktop or laptop?
(Previously I ran Slackware on everything, so both of them feel like gliding softly on a cloud to me.)
Yeah it seems to work very well on my server. I’ve always just wondered why I don’t see more people recommending it when they’re switching from Ubuntu/Kubuntu. From what I’ve seen on the server (which I mostly access remotely), it seems decent.
You probably will not notice that you are in other distro when you start using Debian. They are the same in most things, but without Snaps and most propietary stuff (by default. But if you really need propietary things, you may see the official non-free sourcelist)
I really do not know. But what I can say for sure is that during the installation of Debian, it allows you to choose the desktop environment at installation time, so you can have your Debian with KDE at minute 0 after installing it.
On the other hand, remember that Kubuntu is derived from Ubuntu. I don’t see Ubuntu fans very enthusiastic about creating another Debian-based distro with KDE preinstalled when they even offer it (live images) to you here.
Weird. I’ve been trying to find a distro I’m happy with and was setting Fedora KDE up today. Ran though my bookmarks and found no videos played on Twitch. Had to install codecs to get it to work. I hadn’t seen this in previous distros. Is this specific to Fedora? Other than this hiccup I’ve enjoyed it so far.
I liked how straight forward Linux Mint is but prefer KDE Plasma. Plus Mint seems quite far behind in versions.
In their gnome version, during the setup process (first boot, not install), they would prompt for third-party repo and codec (Enabled by default, IIRC).
I think you might have unchecked that? or KDE not offering such experience?
EDIT: NVM, I just checked, and I have never installed the codecs… LOL.
Fedora is notorious for avoiding shipping proprietary software with their distro even at the cost of new users.
I think this might stems from the fact that fedora used to be a distro aimed for advanced users. It is slowly getting better at being new user friendly.
Do most Linux users (in this context we’ll say people who specifically choose to use Linux and by extension chose a specific distribution) look unfavorably on proprietary software being excluded by default?
For me, I prefer it so I don’t see it that way. But it is also an extra step and an annoyance if you want things to “just work”. Which is an understandable position.
I’d like it if they weren’t necessary and everything was AV1, then I would be alright with the codecs being omitted by default without any simple way to install them.
Similarly with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, NVIDIA actually recommend installing the driver through the package provided through your distro on thier download page
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