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MajorHavoc, in What are the differences between linux distributions?

Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora?

Unpacking a .deb on Fedora, or unpacking an .rpm on Ubuntu isn’t a big deal. The files inside are often actually identical.

But would not be useful because the files inside usually rely on shared libraries, which may or may not already be installed. Those shared libraries are installed in different places on each Linux distro. Figuring out which ones to ask for (and making sure the program can find them) is the real work that the .Deb or .RPM installers do.

A fun way to try this out is with Portable Apps. Anything called a “portable app” either doesn’t use additional libraries, or carries the libraries it needs with it.

If you find a portable app for Ubunutu, there’s a good chance the Fedora version is an identical file, and works fine on Ubuntu. There’s lots of reasons it might not work, but it can be fun to try.

For the most part, the only reason any Linux program is unavailable on a different version of Linux is that no one has bothered to build the necessary installer for that combination of program and OS.

.RPM was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match .Deb was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match (about 60% actually do). I think Flatpacks and Snaps might solve this by being universal, at some point…

Source: I’ve built installer packages for various operating systems.

SpaceCadet, in [Video] Red Hat Is About To End Xorg: Is Wayland Ready?
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when xorg should end?

I mean, sure they’re a major Linux vendor but their market is servers with hardly any foothold in the desktop market. It would be more interesting to see how long Debian, Ubuntu or Arch will keep xorg alive.

Unyieldingly,

Redhat does a lot of testing/patching with Xorg Server.

most of the people who was working on Xorg Server moved to Wayland a few years ago, Ubuntu and Debian have been Defaulting to Wayland, on the main Desktops, and Desktops are dropping Xorg Server support in Development, this is not just Redhat.

No Patches and No $$$,$$$,$$$ = Xorg server dead. if you want to pay 15 to 20+ Software Engineers/Testers to work on Xorg Server got for it.

FreeBSD has Wayland support to.

Even the Xorg mailing list is mostly dead, many of the Xorg Server Dev’s moved on, XWayland will be long lived.

and last i was there for all the Crying about XFree86 to I’m old.

LeFantome,

People are completely missing the point here. “Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when Xorg should end?”

I would say nobody but perhaps a better answer is all of us that have left the work of maintaining Xorg to Red Hat. All that Red Hat is deciding is when they are going to stop contributing. So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.

Others are of course free to step up. In fact, it may not be much work. Red Hat will still be doing most of the work as they will still be supporting Xwayland ( mostly the same code as Xorg ), libdrm, libinput, KMS, and other stuff that both Xorg and Wayland share. They just won’t be bundling it up, testing it, and releasing it as Xorg anymore.

We will see if anybody steps up.

SpaceCadet,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.

Source?

As far as I know the X.org foundation is an independent non-profit organization, and while Red Hat is a sponsor and they have 1 member in the board of directors (out of 8), they don’t appear to be the main contributor.

taanegl,

Here’s the repo for xserver. It’s basically a collective effort between developers who represent certain companies, among them Oracle - and RedHat.

AMDIsOurLord,

They’re the ones who’s engineers worked on Xorg, so yes, they decide it.

edinbruh,

As the video points out, a lot of the work in xorg (and Linux in general, fwiw) is done by red hat engineers. So red hat cutting on that investment bears direct consequences for everyone else. Unless of course someone steps up and takes their place in maintenance, but it’s not gonna happen, which is literally why Wayland (and not some revamped xorg) is the future of Linux desktop.

Also, red hat’s decisions often trickle down on most other distros. E.g.: systemd, pulseaudio, pipewire, gnome, not including proprietary codecs, etc.

So, they technically don’t arbiter, but they definitely set the pace.

wmassingham,

Nobody. And it’s not like Red Hat runs the X.Org Foundation, either, at most they have one seat on the board. Development will continue.

theshatterstone54,

By whom? Red Hat is pretty much the only one supporting X.Org so that’s why. Development will not really continue because there will be nobody to do the development.

DannyBoy, (edited ) in What are the differences between linux distributions?

The differences between distros are the things you mentioned. They all use the Linux kernel, so the differences are in the DE, installer, theme, default packages, and package manager. These changes come about from design choices: rolling vs versioned releases, stability goals, FOSS vs proprietary packages/repositories, things like systemd vs alternatives, and overall goals/use cases (lightweight, server, etc).

A distro can be as little as a theme change. The famous Hannah Montana Linux is KUbuntu with a custom theme, icon pack, and Hannah Montana as the background.

linuxreviews.org/Hannah_Montana_Linux

majestic,

So basically if i have all Voidlinux’s programs installed on NixOS, i can have some decent amount of packages (that are not heavily depending on init systems or some other non trivial stuff) from Void repos running on NixOS?

Dotdev,
@Dotdev@programming.dev avatar

I wouldn’t compare void and nix since both of them follow very different approaches. Void is more like a traditional distro while nixos on the other hand uses configurations for setup.

And no you can’t use void on nix os as said above. Hannah Montana linux and kubuntu uses Ubuntu as the base that’s what he meant.

majestic, (edited )

Im not talking about comparing these distros, nor using void on NixOS. Im asking if i had all packages that are preinstalled on void, present on NixOS as well. Would i be able to run some packages from void linux repos on NixOS? If i make nix derivation with package from void repo and install it, would it work?

Looks like the answer is “Yes”, but im not sure.

Dotdev,
@Dotdev@programming.dev avatar

If the same void package exists in the nix os repo then sure. You can’t use a void package in nix os is the thing I would like to point out other than using distrobox.

majestic, (edited )

Hannah Montana Linux

Yeah, love it

possiblylinux127, in What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?

ZFS is a crazy beast that’s best for high end server systems with tiered storage and lots of RAM.

ext4 is really just a basic file system. Its superior to NTFS and fat as it does have extra features to try to prevent corruption but it doesn’t have a large feature set.

Btrfs is kind of the new kid on the block. It has strong protection against corruption and has better real world performance than ext4. It also has more advanced features like sub volumes and snapshots. subvolumes are basically virtual drives.

Another few older options include things like XFS but I won’t go into those.

List of filesystems: en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Comparison_of_file_systems

Lojcs,

and has better real world performance than ext4

Source? Most benchmarks I’ve seen it lags behind

Pantherina,

www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems

It seems actually F2FS is the best?? Thats used in Android and optimized for Flash storage, does that include SSDs?

Lojcs,

Yes, but most filesystems are already optimized for flash storage. Arch wiki says f2fs is prone to corruption on power loss. Based on that and the lack of information on its anti-corruption measures I’m inclined to think it doesn’t have one and that’s why it’s faster. I wouldn’t use it in a non-battery operated device.

Pantherina,

So basically all laptop users can safely use it.

Crazy how PC users rely on such a steady power supply. Arent there small UPS devices for a few seconds with auto shutdown?

Gabu,

Catastrophic battery failure isn’t really any less likely than catastrophic power supply failure (conceptually. If you use a brandless grey power supply, results may vary).

d3Xt3r, (edited )

That link is for kernel 5.14, so I’d say those results are pretty much invalid for most users (unless you’re actually on it, or the 5.15 LTS kernel). There have been a ton of improvements in every filesystem since then, with pretty much every single kernel release.

A more relevant test would be this one - although it talks about bcachefs, other filesystems are also included in it. As you can see, F2FS is no longer the fastest - bcachefs and XFS beat it in several tests, and even btrfs beats it in some tests. F2FS only wins in the Dbench and CockroachDB benchmarks.

Pantherina,

Thanks. Bcachefs is for SSD-HDDs isnt it?

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Not quite. Bcachefs can be used on any drive, but it shines the best when you have a fast + slow drive in your PC (eg NVMe + HDD), so the faster drive can be used as a cache drive to store frequently accessed data.

possiblylinux127,

My personal testing

the_third,

Let’s agree on: it has a different performance for various use cases and hardware below. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

possiblylinux127,

Well I use it pretty much exclusively now for bare hardware. For VMs it doesn’t matter so I use ext4

the_third, (edited )

Not much time, I’ll be brief with three examples that come to mind from my experience:

Great use: Large filestorage with regular changes, daily snapshots, stream snapshots offsite as backup.

Not so great use: Storage backend for qcow2 backed VMs on spinning RAID. CoW made a mess of access times.

Really not great use: Large Postgres-DB with queries that creted large ondisk temp tables.

It really depends.

AMDIsOurLord,

Benchmarks are also usually very different from real world usage, tbh

velox_vulnus, in What are the differences between linux distributions?

Research. ClearLinux is optimized, NixOS and Guix uses functional package managers.

Apart from that, there can be differences in FHS, standard library, package managers, etc.

Vilian, (edited ) in What are the differences between linux distributions?

what else?

fedora is usually more updated(newer packages and newer kernel) and it uses zram, ubuntu use swap from default, and ubuntu push snap, fedora, like others, come with flatpak pre-installed

Just wondering if there could be a way to “simulate”, lets say ubuntu on fedora.

distrobox

Mikesomething, in KDE Plasma 5.27.10, Bugfix Release for December

Praying they bring back different backgrounds for different desktops. 🤞🤞

christian, in What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?
@christian@lemmy.ml avatar

I know I’m not making a helpful contribution here, but I’ve been wondering about this stuff for a while myself and this thread has some great answers. Thanks for asking this OP.

jaykay, in This CPU is FREE! - LTT video about Milk-V
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

People really don’t like LTT here do they

0x0,

Don’t see why, it’s a relatively good video on a RISC-V desktop.

This post is crap though.

jaykay,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

At least it doesn’t link to YouTube :P

Blisterexe, in Self Post

Maybe you could try zorinos, since debian died on you

KISSmyOS, (edited )

Ooh, exciting, a user-friendly distro based on Ubuntu…checks notes…LTS 20.04???

Gnome 3.38.4
gtk 3.24.20

Holy shit, that’s older than Debian Oldstable.
When these .deb package versions were released, my cat’s mom wasn’t even born yet.

Blisterexe, (edited )

Yeah it gets updates slowly, but zorin 17 has MUCH newer packages, and it just went into beta.

Its updated to to 22.0something

FigMcLargeHuge, in Does `cp -v` print out the file name when it starts copying it or when it's done?

Run an md5sum command on the last file in each location and compare. That will tell you if one of them is different and answer your question.

jokro, (edited ) in What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?

btrfs = B-tree filesystem

B-trees are a data structure.

kpw,

Great. So what?

Chewy7324,

You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.

tastysnacks,

I call it butterface

teawrecks,

Butterface?! That’s my wife!

30p87, in Windows 11 scores dead last in gaming performance tests against 3 Linux gaming distros

A typical Linux distro, especially lightweight and simpler ones like Arch, will of course be better than a bloated OS, like Pop or Windows. The only problem with Linux distros might be the choice of tools - X and AMD will work much better overall than Wayland and Nvidia.
Just that many people may have an Nvidia GPU before deciding to use Linux, and some people just prefer to use Wayland over X for literally everything else.

My PC with Wayland + Nvidia has so many problems with gaming, especially flickering and performance, while my Laptop with Wayland + integrated Intel graphics has no problems at all - even in games, that I wonder if Nvidia + Wayland still really sucks ass or if my GPU is just broken. Currently there’s a bug where frames are ‘switched’ somehow, so it’s not Frame 1, Frame 2, … Frame n, but Frame 1, Frame 3, Frame 2, Frame 5, Frame 6, Frame 4 etc.
I expect it to be fixed by an update of nvidia in the future, but there are always such bugs.

TeaEarlGrayHot, (edited )

especially flickering and performance

If my experience is any indicator, your GPU is fine :(. Any chance you’re using mixed display scalings? I’ve got an RTX 3050 eGPU for my Plasma/Wayland laptop, and for the most part it actually works fairly smoothly (albeit more slowly compared to windows), but if I try to run a game at a higher resolution than my monitor (used by Plasma for mixed scaling) I get constant flashing/frame shifting, but when I drop it down to the native 1080p it starts working again

As a side note, X and eGPUs do not play well together, but Wayland is literally plug and play after installing the drivers–I can even hot plug/unplug as long as nothing’s using the GPU!

30p87,

I played around with scaling a bit, but removed the commands in my sway config afterwards. I do have different screen resolutions tho.

russjr08,

That frame issue is because of the fact that Nvidia uses “explicit sync” and AMD/Intel use “implicit sync” - XWayland is built to only support implicit syncing for now (Nvidia is trying to get it changed), and since most games right now run under XWayland… Along with a ton of apps of course.

Until then, that issue won’t be resolved sadly. It’s what finally pushed me to get an AMD card since the issue has been open for over a year with a ton of back and forth.

null,

How your performance with X11?

quantenzitrone,

the proprietary drivers work pretty great on X11 for me

null,

Same, except the most recent update causes random bouts of lag, but rolling back to 535 works for now.

Just curious about the other persons since they only mentioned Wayland

smpl, in LXLE still good for older devices?
@smpl@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Yes, use what you know. Neither LXLE nor LXDE are end of life as claimed in other comments. The latest LXLE release is supported until 2030, which is five years longer than Windows 10.

actionjbone,

I tried installing LXLE - and in spite of multiple attempts, it simply refuses to install the boot files into the boot partition. 🤣

So I suppose it’s getting a different flavor, after all

actionjbone,

I appreciate your response. it’s good to know I’m safe running what I know. And cerement gave me some good info so I can learn more about different distros. :)

LainOfTheWired, in The Distro Wars are good actually.?
@LainOfTheWired@lemy.lol avatar

“I USE ARCH BTW” there can’t have a distro discussion without that.

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