Why would you want desktop icons? I mean I get it, there were quite popular back in the day, but I don’t see how a big junky place of a desktop has any benefit
Meh. The design and all is very good, great even, but the performance is donkey. And no, telling people to turn off animations and compositor is not a valid solution, when other DEs keep the animations, especially GNOME.
I really like Gnome but requiring extensions to work properly is bad design imo.
For example my moms laptop runs Gnome and she doesn’t need much except 3 basic features: a dock, desktop & tray icons. Tray icons are necessary because Nextcloud relies on them to show the sync status, desktop icons are great to have temporary files easily accessible for a presentation.
In my opinion the most frustrating decision of Gnime is to not allow making the “dash” permanently visible, in other words, a dock. I’d argue it’s even an accessibility option because it’s easier to click on something visible than having to open the overview.
It’s frustrating since Gnome is an almost perfect desktop for anyone who wants a simple, working desktop.
I use Gnome without extensions, it’s great. IMO Microsoft didn’t invent the perfect UX paradigm back in the early 90s. People use a task bar and start menu because they’re used to it, not because it’s better IMO.
I’m glad Gnome had the balls to do away with tradition and go with something different. It’s led to a much better workflow IMO.
Gnome is great for people who like the opinionated workflow. Sadly that is not most people, at least I know of 5 people who tried Gnome and 4 came to the conclusion that the lack of a taskbar/launcher/dock makes it unsuitable for their desktop usage.
If Gnome had an optional dock, they might’ve actually used it and found out how great Gnome is. Maybe at some point they’d even disable the dock and return to the blessed workflow.
I wonder if there’s a way they could neatly implement them without cluttering the desktop. Like what if they were somewhere in the overview or something?
For the 1000th time, those extensions aren’t even close to what something really native would offer. They fail in some circumstances like drag and drop to certain plains and behave inconsistently.
GNOME Extensions actually run in the gnome-shell process itself and can do most things that a builtin solution could offer.
They fail in some circumstances […] and behave inconsistently
That proves why they shouldn’t be part of GNOME Shell themselves. Offloading some (debatable) functionality to extensions helps keeping the core components reliable and maintainable.
In general, consider setting up any kind of rollback functionality; this will enable you to get right back to action without any downtime when you’re time-restricted. This can be achieved by configuring your system with (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper. Please bear in mind that it’s likely that you have to come back to solve it eventually, though*. (Perhaps it’s worth thinking about what can be done to ensure that you don’t end up with a broken system in the first place. cough‘immutable’distrocough)
If you feel absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of choice, then you should probably consider the bold ones; not because I think they’re necessarily better but:
openSUSE’s offerings are generally speaking very polished, therefore being highly suitable to replace Linux Mint or Ubuntu. It’s its own thing though, therefore you might not be able to access packages that are exclusively found in Debian’s/Ubuntu’s repos (though Distrobox solves that trivially). Tumbleweed if you like rolling release, Slowroll if you prefer updates only once every 1-2 months and finally Leap if you lean more towards Stable/LTS releases.
siduction for being based on Debian; but it’s strictly on the Unstable(/Sid) branch.
SpiralLinux for being based on Debian; this one -however- has proper support for switching branches.
Vanilla OS for being based on Debian; this one is very ambitious. But, because it’s an ‘immutable’ distro, it might require the biggest changes to your workflow.
nvidia drivers are absent
While any of the aforementioned distros do a decent job at ‘supporting’ Nvidia, perhaps you might be best off with uBlue’s Nvidia images. As these are images relying on the same technology that Fedora’s immutable distros do, rollback functionality and all the other good stuff we’ve come to love -like automatic upgrades in the background- are present as well. In case you’re interested to know how these actually provide improved Nvidia support:
“We’ve slipstreamed the Nvidia drivers right onto the operating system image. Steps that once took place on your local laptop are now done in a continuous integration system in GitHub. Once they are complete, the system stamps out an image which then makes its way to your PC.
No more building drivers on your laptop, dealing with signing, akmods, third party repo conflicts, or any of that. We’ve fully automated it so that if there’s an issue, we fix it in GitHub, for everyone.
But it’s not just installation and configuration: We provide Nvidia driver versions 525, 520, and 470 for each of these. You can atomically switch between any of these, so if your driver worked perfectly on a certain day and you find a regression you just rebase to that image.
Or switch to another desktop entirely.
No other desktop Linux does this, and we’re just getting started.”
It’s often used to describe a distro in which (at least some) parts of the system are read-only on runtime. Furthermore, features like atomicity (i.e. an upgrade either happens or doesn’t; no in-between state), reproducibility^[1]^ and improved security against certain types of attacks are its associated benefits that can (mostly) only exist due to said ‘immutability’. This allows higher degree of stability and (finally) rollback-functionality, which are functionalities that are often associated with ‘immutability’ but aren’t inherently/necessarily tied to it; as other means to gain these do exist.
The reason why I’ve been careful with the term “immutable” (which literally is a fancy word for “unchanging”), is because the term doesn’t quite apply to what the distros offer (most of these aren’t actually unchanging in absolute sense) and because people tend to import associations that come from other ecosystems that have their own rules regarding immutability (like Android, SteamOS etc). A more fitting term would be atomic (which has been used to some degree by distros in the past). The name actually applies to all distros that are currently referred to as ‘immutable’, it’s descriptive and is the actual differentiator between these and the so-called ‘mutable’ distros. Further differentiation can be had with descriptions like declarative, image-based, reproducible etc.
That is, two machines that have the exact same software installed should be identical even if one has been installed a few years ago, while the other has been freshly installed (besides content of home folder etc). So stuff like cruft, bitrot and (to a lesser degree) state are absent on so-called ‘immutable’ distros.
Initially I was typing out a very long answer, but it quickly got unwieldy 😅. So instead, this one will be oversimplified 😜.
Currently:
Package management on native system just takes considerably longer on most atomic^[1]^ distros. The exceptions would be Guix and NixOS, but unfortunately their associated learning curves are (very) steep compared to the other atomic distros.
The learning curve in general is steeper.
Documentation is lacking.
Big shifts occur more frequently^[2]^.
Some things simply don’t work (yet).
One might (perhaps correctly) point out that most of these are actually more related to the technology lacking maturity. And that atomic distros would actually (already) net positively otherwise. Therefore, I’d argue, the transition to atomic distros is perhaps more akin to a natural evolution. I believe (at least) Fedora has already mentioned the possibility to sunset the non-atomic variant in favor of the atomic one when the time is there (or at least switch focus). Which is why I believe that atomicity will probably leave a lasting impact to the Linux landscape, similarly to what systemd has done in years prior.
Besides that it’s probably a challenge to maintain…
If your use-case is supported and you’ve acquired the associated knowledge for setup/configuration and maintenance, then I’d argue it’s probably even easier than a non-atomic distro; simply by virtue of atomicity, increased stability and rollback-functionality. But, as has already been established previously, the learning curve is steeper in general, so getting there is probably harder. With the exception being those whose needs are satisfied easily by the accessible software found in the main package-‘storefront’. Which makes distros like Endless OS very suitable for people whose primary interaction with ‘computers’ has been mobile phones and tablets, as the transition is -perhaps surprising to some- near flawless.
Yes, that’s how I’ll be referring to them.
Fedora Silverblue switching to OCI container images for delivery of installations and upgrades. openSUSE’s offerings switching to image-based. Vanilla OS switching from Ubuntu to Debian and to a model that’s a lot more similar to where Silverblue is headed towards. NixOS switching to flakes. etc
NixOS has been around since 2003, thus making it older than Ubuntu (2004). Even Silverblue has been out since more than 5 years (October 2018). Finally, we can’t forget about Guix that had its first release over 10 years ago (January 2013).
Great post. However, I will add my opinion about Debian Sid and its lineage: just don’t use them for production. Sid is an unstable distribution that looks like a rolling release distribution and most of the time it’s fine, but it is fundamentally different since it’s okay if it gets broken.
I’m guessing the idea behind Siduction is to use this rollback functionality to counter its innate instability, but with solid alternatives like openSUSE or the already installed Linux Mint + Timeshift, I wouldn’t recommend Siduction. Also, Manjaro is unstable by design, wouldn’t recommend that one either.
I personally agree with your assessments regarding Debian Sid and Manjaro. However, I didn’t want to force my (potential) ‘bias’ in a comment that tries to be otherwise neutral. Thank you for bringing up the ‘asterisks’ associated with both of these!
Great piece of information. I personally don’t see the benefits with immutable distribution, or at least it (without any experience) feels like that I’ll spend more time setting it up and tinkering with it than actually recovering from a rare cases where things just break. Or at least that’s the way it’s used to be for a very long time and even if something would break it atleast used to be pretty much as fast as reverting a snapshot to fix the problem. Sure, you need to be able to work on a bare console and browse trough log files, but I’m old enough that it was the only option back in the day if you wanted to get X running.
However the case today was something that I just couldn’t easily fix as the boot partition just didn’t have enough space (since when 700MB isn’t enough…) even a rollback wouldn’t have helped to actually fix the installation. Potentially I might had an option to move LVM partition on the disk to grow boot partition, but that would’ve required shrinking filesystem first (which isn’t trivial on a LVM PV) and the experience ubuntu has lately provided I just took the longer route and installed mint with zfs. It should be pretty stable as there’s no snap packages which update at random intervals and it’s a familiar environment for me (dpkg > rpm).
Even if immutable distros might not be for my use case, your comment has spawned a good thread of discussion and that’s absolutely a good thing.
at least it (without any experience) feels like that I’ll spend more time setting it up and tinkering with it than actually recovering from a rare cases where things just break
That might be the case depending on your proficiency and to what degree the ‘immutable’ distro allows you to configure your distro declarative. On e.g. NixOS you can define (most of) your system declarative. As such, reinstalling your entire setup is done through some config files. You can even push this further with the (in)famous Impermanence module that has been popularized by the popular Erase your darlings blog-post, in which your system is wiped every time you shut off the machine and rebuild (basically from scratch) every time you boot into it.
Potentially I might had an option to move LVM partition on the disk to grow boot partition, but that would’ve required shrinking filesystem first (which isn’t trivial on a LVM PV)
I haven’t worked with LVM yet. Defaulting to Btrfs (as Fedora -amongst others- does) has so far provided me a reliable experience, even though I’m aware that I’m missing out on performance. Hopefully, Bcachefs will prove to be a vast improvement over Btrfs in a relatively short time-span. You’ve pointed out to have installed Linux Mint with ZFS. Would I be correct to assume that you’ve been hurt by Btrfs in its infancy and choose to not rely on it since? Or is it related to lacking proper support for RAID 5/6? Or perhaps something else? Please feel free to inform me as I don’t feel confident on this topic!
and the experience ubuntu has lately provided I just took the longer route and installed mint with zfs.
Understandable. Though, I can’t stop myself from being very interested in their upcoming Ubuntu Core Desktop. But I imagine you couldn’t care less 😜.
Would I be correct to assume that you’ve been hurt by Btrfs in its infancy and choose to not rely on it since?
I have absolutely zero experience with btrfs. Mint doesn’t offer it by default and I’m just starting to learn bits’n’bobs of zfs (and I like it so far) so I just chose it with an idea that I can learn it on a real world situation. I already have zfs pool on my proxmox host, but for that I hope I’d gone with something else as it’s pretty hungry for memory and my server doesn’t have a ton to spare. But reinstalling that with something else is a whole another can of worms as I’d need to dump couple terabytes worth of data to somewhere else in order to make a clean install. I suppose it might be an option to move data around on the disks and convert the whole stack to LVM one drive at the time, but it’s something for the future.
But I imagine you couldn’t care less 😜.
I was a debian only user for a long time but when woody/sarge (back in 2005-2006) had pretty old binaries compared to upstream and ubuntu started to gain popularity I switched over. Specially the PPA support was really nice back then (and has been pretty good for several years), so specially for a desktop it was pretty good and if I’m not mistaken you could even switch from debian to ubuntu only by editing sources list and running dist-upgrade with some manual fixes.
So, coming from a mindset that everything just works and switching from a release to another is just a bit longer and more complex update the current trend rubs me in a very much wrong way.
So, basically the tl;dr is that life is much more complex today than it was back in the day where I could just tinker with things for hours without any responsibilities (and there’s a ton more to tinker with, my home automation setup really needs some TLC to optimize electricity consumption) so I just want an OS which gets out of my way and allows me to do whatever I need to whenever I need it. Immutable distro might be an answer, but currently I don’t have spare hours to actually learn how they work. I just want my sysVinit back with distributions which can go on for a decade without any major hiccups.
Ah, I had misunderstood your /boot situation previously. There’s an easy way to fix it by backing up current content of boot, unmounting it, creating some dir somewhere where there’s space (/tempboot was my choice last time), bind mounting it to /boot and going through the apt process. Then unmount the bind, mount the real boot, delete everything except currently booted kernel stuff, copy all the things from /tempboot update the initrd and grub. Et voila!
Why I didn’t think of that. It whould have fixed the immediate problem pretty fast. I would still have the issue with too small boot partition, but it would’ve been faster to fix the issue at hand. But in either case, I’m pretty happy I got new distro installed and hopefully that’ll fulfil my needs better for years to come.
Broken computers aren’t really stressful to me anymore, but it sure plays a part that I kinda-sorta had waited for reason to wipe the whole thing anyways and as I could still access all the files on the system, so in the end it was somewhat convenient excuse to take the time to switch the distribution. Apparently I didn’t have backup for ~/.ssh/config even if I thoguht I did, but those dozen lines of configuration isn’t a big deal.
Thanks anyway, a good reminder that with linux there’s always options to work around the problem.
My laptop went bonkers trying to run it, maybe I have something misconfigured somewhere. I wanted to like it because it looks great, but I couldn’t because it was seemingly too resource intensive.
Somebody mentioned I may have been running bpytop, so maybe this whole thing is my bad. I honestly can’t remember what I ran now - I thought it was btop
yeah you need a decently fast hw accelerated terminal for it
for example, the gnome terminal is pretty slow; if you’re using it, try running it in alacrity or kitty and see if that improves performance.
Pro tip: configure a font that doesn’t show open circles for unused braille characters to have a higher priority than your current font to get better-looking graphs.
On my system, braille characters are provided by DejaVu Serif, and it was as easy as just installing the font.
I think they mean the variable width of the graph’s columns. If you watch it as the graph moves, there are gaps at every 2 columns.
I don’t understand though the thing about font priorities.
And also, would that just change all fonts? Unless you mod the font to only have the braille characters…
No, you’ve got it set up right. Many people will have graphs where each character rectangle has open circles for the unused braile dots in the character block.
The lack of VRR in GNOME is what had me change to KDE. I prefer GNOME in many ways, but I was tired of having to use the vrr patches to keep the functionality.
I thought its an entire different desktop. Especially itd not possible to run gamescope while a X11 Desktop is running so I guess you are wrong with “bypassing”. Its just switching to gamescope. Its a Wayland compositor. It does even less than a Window Manager (is this right?)
I assume as this is a Gaming mode, its purpose is not to avoid waiting for features. But close the entire desktop which may use up to 1GB RAM and a by of CPU. Which definetly impacts the game by some fraction. Doesnt matter how tiny, its just what gaming modes are having as focus I assume.
The next thing I would never see on a desktop is FSR which gamescope has.
I feel the same. My entry distro was ubuntu, and every time I updated major version the whole installation exploded and i had to reinstall it from scratch.
Luckly for me now i use Debian and updating major release is smooth af. Already went through 3 major updates and 0 problems.
Just swap to Debian, Valve. And snap is engineered to waste your time, imo.
This is not an issue of what Distro Valve chose to use (SteamOS used Debian now it uses Arch) but is on Canonical for how they package it. I have just been dipping my toes into Linux lately and have been using Manjaro and Nobara and they have been working great for gaming and every day use… Until I play a game like Finals and have to swap to windows.
As far as I know, SteamOS is already based on Debian. The dev is complaining about users trying to install steam on their own Ubuntu installs, not SteamOS.
EDIT: nvm, it used to be Debian, but the newer versions for steamdeck are based on Arch. Apparently they wanted rolling updates so that it would be easier to push out changes more frequently.
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