I honestly can never imagine Linux without KDE plasma. It has its flaws for sure, but at least I can modify the shit out of it to force it to meet my needs 100%.
I would use it if it supported 4k better. Every time I set the resolution to 4k and the scaling to 2x, the whole UI gets jacked up and something can’t be clicked anymore. Window bars stay really small. The panel gets all messed up. That’s basically on every single distribution I’ve tried with xfce
Yeah every once in a while I see a screenshot of GNOME that looks really nice and get tempted to try it again, and usually within a day or two I’m back to KDE lol.
No shade to people who like to use GNOME, but it’s really not for me.
Absolutely. Gnome is becoming gorgeous, but its workflow is not for me. Also, all the missing things that I have to add extensions for is just not ideal. I just re-create the gnome theme in kde when I miss gnome. or just install it in a VM and enjoy for for a little while. Otherwise, kde has always been where I belong.
Framework. I’ve run Debian, Fedora and for a while now NixOS, all of which have worked flawlessly.
I did have to replace the heatsink/fan part on mine because the fan bearing started clicking, but I’m sure that was just a first generation product issue (I was one of the first batches). I was glad to be able to do the replacement myself at relatively low cost and the process couldn’t have been easier (took about 30 minutes).
My previous machine was a 2013-ish ThinkPad X series and the Framework absolutely blows it out of the water. I’m looking forward to upgrading mine to a Ryzen motherboard sometime in the not so distant future.
Influence is a curse in today’s world. I’ve made this final selection of brands based on personal choice and for reasons exposed in this post. But it’s all personal so you may disagree with some/all candidates and that’s perfectly fine. I’ve posted here to actually collect as much opinions as possible so thanks for sharing yours.
Companies always find a way to justify for higher price to sell you not that good hardware or to overprice their stuff for non sense reasons. As anyone else (except fan boys of any given brand) I’m running away from that. In my personal views, companies on this list have reasonable offers considering their history, clients pool, philosophy…
Framework is maybe the best deal here because it has good price and all parts of their machines are replaceable. And again, prices for the parts are fair. So in the long run, users may be winners if the company doesn’t crash. If it does then it won’t be worth than having bought from another company. With all the options to build the laptop you want for your needs it really make me feel like customizing my Linux system but from a hardware standpoint. It’s a big plus for me to pay only for what I want/need and with them you can go even further by physically positioning your ports on the fly. That’s an unseen degree of freedom and it has real world applications.
This community is full of people who simply “don’t like certain things”. They may say “it’s overkill” disregarding the fact that it solves their use case perfectly. Or it could be written in a language they don’t like. Or maybe they heard somebody else complain about it on a forum once and now think it’s bad.
I think flatpaks are good. The performance penalty for containerized software can be felt much more when you’re not using a good CPU. So containers do not “solve” my use case.
Yeah, it’s also the same group of people who are always complaining about how much RAM a desktop environment or app uses, that app being whichever one they are using right now.
I installed my first distro, slackware, from diskettes in the 90s, so Im not exactly a newbie. I now use Mint ( just works but you can get under the hood fine), with both a dual boot windows and a VM for when I don’t want to reboot, since I use a few programs that are windows only. The setup works fine for me. That said I’m playing with NixOS. Definitely not for the masses, but awesome.
Well, it’s not like more advanced distros are built to not work. Rather, they work better for different focus points.
So, I would encourage people, especially those with a techy background, to take a look around eventually, but yeah, your conclusion to that journey may as well be that Mint was nice, actually.
I use linux for a couple years as a server and for 6-9 months as a daily. Am also a sysadmin.
Mint works great but is very simple. Ubuntu works good as well but the proprietary snap store is shit imo Switched to debian & kde yesterday and am already fully set up. Not without any hickups but a great experience so far. Maybe try a second hard drive to switch out and install debian if you’re feeling like it. Its pretty cool.
The patches are from CodeWeavers, and some of their work is cooperation with Valve, so hopefully proton gets those changes quickly. It usually takes a while before proton is based on a new wine release.
I was on Manjaro, and I didn’t want to put the effort in for a third time just to break it again. While I prefer arch based distros, I’ve been liking Mint since I can almost use it without a terminal like manjaro.
The bonus feature in my patch series adds the magic file /sys/kernel/notes. Reading this gives you the binary contents of the ELF notes section built into the kernel. Here you can find the build ID of the running kernel. This gives a solution to a problem that has arisen for systemtap users, where nothing prevents them from using the kernel-debuginfo.i586 data to drive Systemtap’s probe details, but are actually running the kernel from the kernel.i686 rpm. This is a failure on many levels, but some simple sanity-checking at the bottom always helps. Now it is easy to verify you have the right debuginfo file for the kernel you are running.
<span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">/*
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"> * Make /sys/kernel/notes give the raw contents of our kernel .notes section.
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"> */
</span>
@petsoi in case anyone else wonders what Toolbox is:
Toolbox is a tool for Linux, which allows the use of interactive command line environments for development and troubleshooting the host operating system, without having to install software on the host. It is built on top of Podman and other standard container technologies from OCI.
Toolbox environments have seamless access to the user’s home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc..
This is particularly useful on OSTree based operating systems like Fedora CoreOS and Silverblue. The intention of these systems is to discourage installation of software on the host, and instead install software as (or in) containers — they mostly don’t even have package managers like DNF or YUM. This makes it difficult to set up a development environment or troubleshoot the operating system in the usual way.
Toolbx solves this problem by providing a fully mutable container within which one can install their favourite development and troubleshooting tools, editors and SDKs. For example, it’s possible to do yum install ansible without affecting the base operating system.
I know it’s probably an odd choice, but ChromeOS. It has the potential to be not just a good starting point for new Linux users but also a distro that could allow Linux to be a lot more accessible to people who aren’t as technologically capable. The main problem is that, similar to android, Google prevents ChromeOS from being used as a proper Linux distro. Right now, it might be a good alternative to Windows and MacOS but as a Linux distro, it’s just not worth using. Especially considering that Linux already has some options available for running android apps, such as Waydroid, that work pretty well.
I really think Google has no idea what it wants ChromeOS to be anymore, they’re just kinda shoving in shoddy solutions to its problems so they can say “hey we can do that too!”
soon they’re gonna introduce Steam and I look forward to that being a big shitshow lol
Have they ever? ChromeOS’s original “app store” was just Chrome’s extension store. It’s been awhile since I’ve checked but Google doesn’t (or at least didn’t) officially support running android apps in ChromeOS Flex. Instead of focusing on getting more apps running on ChromeOS, they’re actively working on Google Play Games for Windows (which also hurts android). For which I think I saw that there are games that work in Google Play Games but they don’t work in ChromeOS for some reason. I’d imagine that there are a lot of other weird things but it’s been a while since I’ve actually used it.
It’s just one of those things where, ChromeOS has the potential to be a good competitor to Windows and MacOS (and maybe even a good Linux distro) but for some reason Google does nothing with it to make it worth using and actually seems to be actively harming it.
I didn’t know Thunderbird did this. I was trying to think why people would use it who have all their email in one web page already. I use Proton and it seemed unnecessary and yet everyone on Linux seems to use it. I love a good RSS reader though!
I personally prefer native email clients to web (no browser overhead, no ads, no sweet-lord-Yahoo-why-is-that-feature-there, simple no-nonsense layout, plus several features web clients don’t have like viewing message headers (which often reveal some fairly interesting information about the various servers the email passed through on its way to your inbox) and, of course, the ability to read email while offline)
Oh, I did not even know it supported RSS/Atom, that’s lovely! I think I’ll move to that then, thank you :D
Newsboat, which others recommended, also seems interesting, but I personally appreciate images, so that one is sadly a no-go for me, even if being able to ssh into a home server to check up on news, instead of having to sync the feeds across multiple devices, would be absolutely lovely.
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