I would check out something like universal-blue.org. It is fedora silverblue but with fixes that make it more usable (like codecs by default). It also ships distrobox right out of the gate so you can use that for apps that aren’t in the fedora repos, copr , or flatpak. You also don’t have to layer packages if you install via distrobox so I think it ends up being pretty handy for stuff that you want that isn’t available as a flatpak. Finally there are many different images for all different desktop environments so you can switch between them just by using rpm-ostree rebase and the link to the different image.
It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved /home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such “bad” distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.
If you were installing “manually” and had full control over this, I’d advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.
Depends. Steam and Proton handles most games and if not, I’ll check Lutris. FWIW, some games like Doom and RollerCoaster Tycoon (the Sawyer, 2D era) have open-source remakes that work on modern machines.
For regular software, I will try it in WINE and if it provides a good enough experience for daily use, I’ll keep it there. If it doesn’t, for any reason, I’ll stick it in a Windows VM. For instance, Exact Audio Copy will work fine in WINE provided you get .NET 3.5 installed for the MusicBrainz metadata plugin, but MusicBee has severe enough problems (font redirection problems, lag when scrolling, can’t drag tabs) for me that I just use it in a virtual machine or another PC. (I actually have another rig I’m considering using as a “jukebox” machine, since I have macOS on it and use it for Apple Music, so I’m compartmentalising my music to one machine if that makes sense)
Wayland shills call everyone names but the moment anyone criticises it they call everyone they don’t like a bigot, get them cancelled and stop any discussion about the negatives of wayland. Why are they so insistent on forcing everyone to adopt an unfinished product? It’s almost like a big corporation with a hat wants to sabotage the linux desktop.
Desktop or laptop? Do you need peripherals included? Honestly for under $500 I’d highly suggest looking at refurbished machines. You’ll be able to pick up an off-lease Dell or Lenovo or HP system for < $300.
Tons of good options in the used enterprise market. 3-5 years old, usually some paths for basic upgrades, as well as a flood of part availability from all the other similar systems being off boarded that were broken and not resellable. Laptops can be a bit roughed up, but full sized and sff desktops are usually in great condition.
I use my Linux PC for gaming. Last time I tried Steam/Nvidia with Wayland I could only get one game to launch. So hopefully those 2 will work on making Wayland happen for us.
I have always liked Nvidia for years. When I moved to Linux, the Nvidia drivers have been working great on X11. I am currently playing Baldur's Gate 3 and I have DLSS 2 turned on and get frame rates at 100. Looks great and awesome game. But I know Wayland is the future and want Nvidia to work well with it and Steam. I will get an AMD if I have to but my card is still great and I am not looking for a new one yet.
When I first attempted to give Wayland a try, it just wouldn’t work. Did some troubleshooting but stuck with X11 for the time being.
About a month ago I gave logging into a Wayland session a try on a whim, and it just worked. Everything was fine, only difference was a change is mouse sensitivity.
There’s a lot of other stuff where Wayland improves the experience. Pretty much everything hotplug works to some extend on X, but it’s all stuff that got bolted on later. Hotplugging an input device with a custom keymap? You probably can get it working somewhat reliably by having udev triggers call your xmodmap scripts - or just use a Wayland compositor handling that.
Similar with xrandr - works a lot of the time nowadays, but still a compositor just dealing with that provides a nicer experience.
Plus it stops clients from doing stupid things - changing resolutions, moving windows around or messing up what is focused is also a thing of the past.
I was waiting for Nvidia drivers 545 to try again, but I checked last weekend and Ubuntu still had 535 drivers. I hear Nvidia did a lot of fixes for wayland on the new drivers.
Some of those arguments are legit but like half is complaining about wayland being fundamentally different to xorg and obviously you cannot use straight xorg apps on it.
“Linux is inferior because it breaks all my powershell scripts and all my windows only apps. Don’t use linux.”
I mean, to play devil’s advocate here - if functionality that you need is all of a sudden swept out from under you then it doesn’t matter from an end user perspective if it’s not the intended design for Wayland - to the user, Wayland is broken in that regard.
A better equivalent would be if an application you used every day for the last 10 years all of a sudden has an update that kills features you used because that’s no longer part of the dev(s) vision. Or headphone jacks on phones. Or whatever that weird thing with Teslas where they disabled a sensor in an OTA update and replaced it with some other solution(?).
Or to modify the example you put, if Windows killed the cmd shell and only left powershell in a Windows Update.
I have an application that I need to use at work which will never fit Wayland’s design, short of me either finding a new job, keeping a Windows install around, or using a really old version of Linux around in a VM when X11 has completely disappeared from all distros (which won’t really work) - there will be nothing that I can do about it on the Wayland side because it’s highly unlikely the devs will update it to be compatible (since it’s a shock that they actually even had Linux support in the first place).
As it is, I currently just pop into an X11 session whenever I’m on working hours, it will suck that I can’t do that with Fedora come next release when they completely drop X from the repos.
Most points are just complaining that tools specifically designed for X don’t work on Wayland. That’s like hanging onto your childhood pants and complaining they don’t fit anymore.
But many of those are actively used by people. I use screen recording, screen sharing, global menus, key automation and window automation every day. Even if I wanted to use Wayland I couldn’t. What exactly is it that you want me to do?
And one of the first points is how Wayland crash will bring down all running applications - yep, just like on X11! But it’s somehow Wayland’s fault.
Besides the fact that on Wayland running apps can survive a compositor crash (I think new KDE will have that feature), which I doubt can be done on X11.
A WM crash does not bring down all the other applications… but an X11 server crash definitely does!
In wayland they are the same program (a.k.a. the compositor). User applications can be designed to survive a compositor crash, though many are not able yet
An X session depends on the main user process. Unless a DE picks the compositor as the main process then no, a compositor crash won’t affect the session. But they don’t do that, for obvious reasons, since the compositor is just a feature among others. They typically have a special program that takes that role, for example xfce4-session.
And one of the first points is how Wayland crash will bring down all running applications - yep, just like on X11! But it’s somehow Wayland’s fault.
They said that a Wayland window manager will bring down all apps, not a Wayland crash. Which, again, is not like it works on X, as I explained above. The window manager on X, like the compositor, is just another feature. If it crashes it just gets replaced and the session continues.
That’s a feature, stop buying hardware from vendors that treat GNU/Linux and *BSD users as second-class citizens and locks them into proprietary drivers.
Games are developed for X11. And if you run a game on Wayland, performance is subpar due to things like forced vsync. Only recently, some Wayland implementations (like KDE KWin) let you disable that.
That’s a feature, stop buying hardware from vendors that treat GNU/Linux and *BSD users as second-class citizens and locks them into proprietary drivers.
Nowadays I buy a new graphics card maybe twice a decade. I’m not changing the card for software.
Also, we’re all using proprietary hardware. Be serious. If you tried to never use anything proprietary you’d never use anything. You’re using like a dozen of them right now.
Sure, I have proprietary bits on my kernel and my AMD GPU needs proprietary firmware loaded to work, but that’s a hell lot different than the situation NVIDIA shoves users into. It’s one thing to have small proprietary components that don’t bother me or break my workflow, it’s another to have black box drivers that can bork my setup if I dare to update my packages.
I suppose it explains why people have a bad attitude about Wayland when tools providing useful functionality are described as trojans.
X11 can (…mostly…) have great security by just providing a suitable X Security module to it. It just seems it wasn’t considered that big of an issue that anyone bothered. Nokia Maemo/Meego used to rock such a module.
modern chromebooks are secretly linux under the hood and can run android/linux apps. you could also try remoting into a server for development, like over ssh/vim or via code-server.
And if you open it up and unplug the battery, then boot off the charger that disables the write protect and you can install actual linux, though a lot of chromebooks have unique hardware that might not be supported, particularly audio IME.
I used to have a dell chromebook 11, and with bitmap fonts it was actually a pretty slick little computer for <$100.
Old Thinkpads are your best bet, especially for linux support. I scored a new T14s gen 3 for $300 earlier this year, and like a year earlier got a T14 gen 1 for $200.
The Intel Thinkpads should have great support and upgradeable ram, the newer AMD ones sadly have soldered ram.
You can get an N100 mini system for about $150. Pay a little more to get (the intel enforced maximum) 16GB mem. I have a Beelink Mini S and it’s perfectly fine.
Forget about those, for 100$ you can get a second hand HP Mini that has a full i5 8th gen CPU and 16GB of RAM. Way better in all possible ways. Those systems also run very well with Linux.
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