CrabAndBroom

@CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml

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(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...

CrabAndBroom,

Yeah I was gonna say Manjaro too. I used it for a while while I was heading towards Arch but wasn’t feeling fully confident to go full Arch as a daily driver yet, and it was nothing but trouble for me. I found that it tried to prevent me from breaking things, which is not necessarily bad, but it would also break things by itself and then this feature would prevent me from going in and fixing them.

I much prefer it when the OS just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want, even if it’s dumb lol

CrabAndBroom,

Someone already said Manjaro, so my second pick would be ElementaryOS. In the past they’ve had this weird attitude about open source things being free (I get supporting devs for projects you like of course, but I don’t agree that it’s “cheating” to not pay for every single piece of open source software you use), and they seem to get a lot of hype and praise for what’s essentially just Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS IMO.

voxel, (edited ) to linux
@voxel@infosec.exchange avatar

Hey 👋 dear Linux Community,

I'm still kinda new to Linux (started using this year 😅) I already made it to my main OS, even if I still missing some things which I used on Windows, anyway. What I wanted to ask you guys, what recommendations do you have for Linux Mint (Cinnamon)? In terms of security, optimization, (a way to make the UI looking modern ;-;) and privacy? I would be very interested in what you do guys to optimize your Linux setup :) I'm pretty technical, so there is nothing which could overwhelm me (probaly).

Thx! 🤍

@linux

CrabAndBroom,

In terms of security, IMO just using Linux, having a regular firewall setup and using common sense online and not clicking on anything overtly sketchy probably puts you in ahead of 90% of people on the internet lol. I’m also quite partial to running OpenSnitch just to make sure nothing’s connecting to the internet without my say-so.

For privacy, I think it depends on your threat model but for the average person I’d say a VPN of some sort and mainly just being cautious about how much personal info you post on social media will cover a big chunk of it. Maybe a more privacy conscious email provider like Proton or Tuta over something like Gmail would help too, but none of that is strictly a Linux thing.

Kind of boring answers, sorry! But IMO the boring fundamentals do tend to cover the majority of stuff. Also there are places like privacyguides.org if you want to rabbit-hole it, but be warned that you might end up becoming one of those people who only goes on onion sites and pays for everything with Monero lol.

Also no idea about customizing Cinnamon, apologies.

CrabAndBroom,

Yeah same here, at some point I ended up settling on Kitty and now I’m used to it and there’s no reason to change, but pretty much any terminal emulator will do the job just fine.

Steam Deck Switch emulation

Hey so I installed Yuzu (and many other emulators) via emu deck so the installation is taken care of I think except for the product keys and title keys I have a switch but dont want to fuck with getting the keys out of it and all that so Im trying to just download them I found a website called “theprodkeys.com” is this...

CrabAndBroom,

Reddit has started getting a bit fucky with VPNs lately so maybe that’s the cause? I mean you could obviously go there without the VPN on, but also fuck them lol.

CrabAndBroom, (edited )

October 14, 2025 apparently.

Edit: could also affect as many as 240 million machines that don’t have TPM.

CrabAndBroom,

The only thing I would maybe hesitate about with POP! OS is the big upcoming switch to the COSMIC desktop, which is is brand-new and a bit untested. But also System76 are a really solid company and seem to know what they’re doing so it’ll probably be fine.

CrabAndBroom,

I find sometimes installing a bunch of different DEs can cause weird cross-issues, so I tend to just make VMs to try out new things. I have a bunch of them on an external drive like little specimen jars lol.

Also as a side note, I keep a VM that’s as close to my current setup as possible, so if I get the urge to try something weird I can do it there first and see if it breaks anything.

CrabAndBroom,

I’m currently using Arch (btw), but I have been hearing the distant call of NixOS lately…

CrabAndBroom,

I mean, if I went 'round saying I was a sysadmin just because some angry Finn lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away

CrabAndBroom,

I have a Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS and I can never get it to find any other devices in KDE connect for some reason. Syncthing works fine though so I just use that instead.

CrabAndBroom,

Yeah I do have Mullvad as well but it doesn’t seem to be that. I tried split tunneling KDE connect and also just turning the VPN off altogether and it made no difference.

My current guess is either some hidden security thing in GrapheneOS that I haven’t discovered yet, or maybe some router setting that’s filtering it out? The investigation is ongoing!

CrabAndBroom,

K I kind of solved it! Turns out there wasn’t a setting within the Mullvad app for “always require VPN”, but there was one in the Android system settings under VPN. If I turn that off and then split tunnel KDE connect only on the phone (not on my laptop for some unknown reason) then they can see each other.

One to file under “I don’t know why that works but I’ll take it” lol.

CrabAndBroom,

Doesn’t QBittorrent already have its own setting for that? Like you can set the network interface to wg-mullvad or whatever and then it won’t work outside of that? Or is the docker thing just for an extra layer of protection on top of that?

CrabAndBroom,

As much as I don’t like recommending people go to reddit, tbh r/panelshow and r/tv_bunny tend to cover most of it pretty well, and quickly too. TV Bunny has been a good source for old British sitcoms like Bottom and Blackadder as well.

CrabAndBroom,

There is still an older version of Scrivener available for free, from when they were beta testing it on Linux. It still worked well last time I checked. The Windows version also runs really well in WIne, although it takes a bit of setting up initially.

CrabAndBroom,

There’s also dotacat written in Rust for people who find lolcat too slow.

CrabAndBroom,

Fly-Pie is a good one! Also the same person makes modern versions of Burn My Windows, Desktop Cube and other such things.

CrabAndBroom,

Several of them are on the KDE store now too!

Is Ubuntu deserving the hate? (lemmy.ml)

Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all...

CrabAndBroom,

Personally I don’t really hate Ubuntu, but I tend to find that everything it does, there’s something else that does it slightly better.

For example, it’s supposed to be a good ‘beginner’ distro or good for something that ‘just works’, but IMO things like Mint or Pop!OS do it a little better these days. Snap is supposed to be a nice simple way to manage packages without worrying about dependencies, but Flatpak does it better and so on.

So yeah I don’t hate it, I just don’t see any particular reason to really use it. Opinions may vary though of course.

CrabAndBroom,

I think the A031 Tumbleweed logo is actually my favourite there. But the winner’s not bad either.

CrabAndBroom,

TBH I dislike Appimage purely because I can’t be bothered to go and check them all individually for new versions all the time, it feels like being on Windows again. I don’t mind a little bloat for the sake of convenience. But that’s just personal preference of course.

CrabAndBroom,

Also, I’d say install Windows first, then Linux. Windows assumes it’s the only OS in the universe and tends to steamroll over the whole boot setup, so I’ve found it much easier to just let Windows do whatever it wants first, then fix it with Linux afterwards.

What dock do you use in Wayland?

I moved over to Wayland full time a couple of weeks ago (using KDE on Arch). I have finally rid myself of any X11 hangups apart from one. Latte will NOT respect my primary screen when changing monitor arrangement (ie. turning my projector on and off) and seems to randomly pick a screen to call the primary....

CrabAndBroom,

I haven’t found anything I like as much as Latte Dock yet, but it refuses to work on my system these days and it doesn’t seem like anyone wants to fork it and fix it up so I’m just back to the built-in KDE docks & panels these days TBH.

CrabAndBroom,

Mullvad I think is very good for this. They have an extensive description of their no-logs policy on their site, and have also been raided by the police before, who apparently were unable to find any customer information.

Shenanigans are always possible of course so you shouldn’t 100% blindly trust anyone, but all the available evidence seems to point to them being pretty legit IMO.

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