Ahh, itsfoss.com. they had some article on “being a supercharged Joplin user” or some nonsense and suggestion 3 or 4 was “Create a notebook”… Really being a power user when you’re utilizing the most basic functionality the app was created for…
I thought about doing that but updating nixos confuses me. Does nixos-rebuild switch pull new packages? To my understanding there is a file that saves all currently installed versions of packages and switch only adds new things but wouldn’t update packages.
Like, if I want to update Google Chrome. Doing switch wouldn’t change anything if the config hasn’t changed, right?
I believe that’s correct – if nothing has changed from your last generation, then the new generation will be identical. But if something has changed, it will do a bunch of duplicating and remapping symlinks in the Nix store to ensure that everything plays nicely together and that you can rollback to a previous generation if needed.
So if you do a rebuild switch regularly, you will end up with gigs worth of old “copies” of things that aren’t being referenced in your current generation.
That’s what nix-collect-garbage handles – once you know your current generation is working well, you collect the garbage and recover that space, at the expense of not being able to roll back.
That’s why I think building a core system with NixOS and then having user software come from Flatpak is a nice combo for simple workstation that won’t update and bork itself, leaving my grandpa without a laptop until I can come take a look.
Edit: To clarify, nixos-rebuild-switch won’t update your Flatpaks at all – just the Flatpak service
That makes a lot of sense. I can setup their computer with nixos and stuff that needs to be updated regularly (like a web browser) can be flatpak which should be more stable too.
Then flatpak update would get them updated without rebuilding the whole OS.
My grandparents have been rocking Linux Mint for a few years. I have managed Chrome through Flatpak since I discovered that was possible on Mint. I’ve been flirting with the idea of having NixOS instead so I don’t have to remember what I’ve configured in the past. I’m not 100% sure now though :-P
Nobara (wayland/gnome) + NVIDIA 2080ti, screen and projector dual setup = never add any issues. I’m a noob, came to linux 6 months ago. I’m really curious about why so many people are having problems with Wayland and NVIDIA but my system basically worked out of the box. I guess I was lucky?
Honestly, I tried Plasma on my friend’s 2-in-1 laptop and it’s pretty great with gestures and touch. I haven’t tried gnome but I can definitely recommend plasma.
Ubuntu uses LTS with five year support, which is why they like to keep a lot of software versions back. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu I think. PPA is something you can add to Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Linux distributions to have newer or specific software repositories as extra on your system. Here’s a guide on PPA : itsfoss.com/ppa-guide/
Since you want a just works deal, I’d go with a ublue based immutable distro, my favorite is Bazzite. You can pick between KDE and Gnome, and change between them cleanly at any point. User apps auto update in the background, your system also updates while it’s running and you only need to reboot to apply. If anything ever goes wrong, you have painless rollbacks. All that with up-to-date fedora packages and kernel.
I’ve been running it on my deck for a while now and it’s never let me down so far, really pleasant experience. It generally keeps out of your way and takes care of the chores while still allowing you to mess around if you want.
I second bazzite. Been running it on my gaming laptop for a few months now and loving it. My main desktop is running Garuda Linux, which I also absolutely love but I was weary of a rolling release arch based distro on my laptop which isn’t on and running 24/7 - tried manjaro on my laptop previously and it was broken more often than not. (although I am learning that is likely more a manjaro problem than an “arch-based” problem, it gave me a reason to try bazzite)
Sway is probably meh because it’s a manual tiler. I use sway-autotiling in laptop mode and don’t bother with switching the layout in tablet mode.
But generally the question should be “How does a stacking window manager even work with touch?” The answer is “like shit”. Instead of having your windows automatically placed on the screen, you have to drag them around with your stylus.
I used to use KDE Bismuth (tiler for Plasma) and it was the best experience on a touchscreen I could imagine. I mainly used 2 tiling layouts. The usual Master+Stack for regular use and when watching lectures I used a layout which is almost stacking but makes the windows slightly smaller than full screen, so you can grab the window on the bottom easily. I had a keybind which reduced the opacity of a window making it see-through. That way I could have my lecture over almost the full screen while still being able to write over almost the entire screen.
Plasma also has the option to do something when you drag from a specific screen edge. I used that to launch the app launcher, to select workspaces and lock the screen.
EndeavourOS is a pretty decent setup, it has been working well for me so far, and I prefer Arch-based distros because of how quickly Linux has been moving.
Manjaro have let their SSL cert problem happen twice since I’ve been in the loop, and they were unintentionally DDOSing the AUR for a while.
Yes. I know Manjaro got bad press several times, about their SSL cert and about firing their treasurer but as a Linux distribution Manjaro is pretty decent for the average user, in my opinion.
SSL cert expiring stopped access to updates. That’s not just bad press, that’s poor form overall, especially for an Arch-based distro. Even worse, this happened while certbot exists, so there’s no excuse. It tells me they are less reliable as a distro, especially to have let it happen twice.
Nothing wrong with Fedora Gnome. I’ve been using it for several months (well ok technically Nobara but I decided to try vanilla Fedora recently and it’s about the same). Prior to that I had been using Mint / Cinnamon for a decade and it’s a good choice too.
But truth be told the Gnome simplicity / minimalism has been growing on me. I wished it were more customizable but whatever.
Fedora is a very very mainstream distro, too, so help is easy to find if anything goes haywire.
PS: nobara is great for gaming but the big gotcha for me was that updating from the shell prompt requires a somewhat involved set of commands. If you use a simple dnf update you’ll break something like I did. Which is why I decided to give Fedora another go. If you choose Nobara, just use the (slow) GUI updater.
The other commenter who mentioned installing and using Gnome tweaks, etc. nailed it. Do that. :)
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