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Searching gives me the impression there's a million ways to solve the same problem on Linux, and I find myself profiling answers into about four categories at a glance:
Succinct: one or two-liner, a single config file, or just a few clicks
Long-winded song-and-dance: Full train of thought interspersed between various commands and logs, several config files (some of which don't already exist), or installing an obscure package that is no longer maintained
Specific to a desktop environment or version I don't have
Just looks wrong
I'll usually just take solutions from the first category, which almost always works, save for differences between updates and versions. Solutions in the second category also seem to end with a 50% chance of the OP unable to solve the problem. If I'm desperate, I'll try the second one, but it often ends up not working, eventually leading me to come up with a much cleaner solution of my own.
Curious if anyone else does this too and if those one-liners are really better solutions or if it's just confirmation bias.
I find i to look on forums for solutions less and less anyway. Once you've been using a distro long enough unless your trying to do something you've never done before it's usually pretty simple to know what's wrong, and fix it. Because you'll get the same things popping up over and over again.
I also like to keep like a little doc of fixes I've done on each computer so that if a year later i need to do a version upgrade or reinstall i can look back to it, and see what i did last time if i get repeat issues. Especially useful on stuff like laptops where you'll have really specific hardware issues that reappear years later, and normally take hours and hours of trying to figure out what is broken.
Treat the response like you would of an LLM, it needs to make sense to you, you need to make sure they aren't messing with you or have given you a fix that only works in their case. Usually the best fixes are the simple ones. And it seems like even with the longer ones you're able to figure out your simple fixes which is awesome!
Kind of funny how quickly we've flipped from "you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger" to "you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output".
Either way, it's the right idea. If you can't understand what you're doing but you do it anyway, you're going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.
In a round about way, that does fix the problem you have, though. Just randomly changing things or installing/uninstalling packages until the whole OS is borked and you have to reinstall thereby clearing the problem.
Doesn't teach how to fix the problem, but at least they'll get real proficient with setting up new system partitions.
The difference between workable and non-workable usually boils down to whether I can understand each step and how they arrived at their solution(that is, can I fix my own fuck-up if I miss a step or impliment it wrong for my own situation), which I will know pretty quickly. That said, with my limitted knowlege, I can still spot the 50% that have no chance in hell of working pretty quickly.
OTOH, if a solution is succinct, upvoted, and still looks wrong, I'm at least going to look into the problem further with that as a reference point before I write it off completely.
First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.
Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say "Solved" with no record of what was done.
Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.
Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you're trying to fix break in a different way, but it's progress at least.
Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.
So to answer the question, I can usually tell I'm getting close to the solution when I say "Oh for fuck's sake" as I'm closing tabs lol.
I love to go with just rip out what ever is broken never look at it again and till eventually forgetting something was broken reinstalling what ever I ripped out only for everything to work again
Despite trying to reinstall things like 3 times before.
The key is you HAVE to forget about the problem or it knows your trying to trick it and it breaks it self again!
I'm just using the Cosmic Terminal that's part of the Pop!_OS Cosmic Alpha, but I ran into similar issues with Gnome terminal and even with Termius.
Scenario: I'm currently working on leveraging a VPS to act as the gateway to my homelab so I have one ssh session to Unraid server and one to VPS. One in each tab. Obviously the name shows up as what the username@servername is called in each tab. But I keep getting tripped up and sometimes try to do something from the wrong machine. Once I even failed to realize that the ssh session to one of them cut out and I was back on my desktop and took me an embarrassingly long time to realize why stuff was failing.
So what are y'all using to keep that organized in your work flow? Separate terminal windows instead of tabs? Some shell customizations to make them look different than one another? Or just so ingrained in your brain that you never have this problem?
You’ll get used to it eventually, but you can e.g. tweak your PS1 to an all-caps hostname, or use a custom tmux layout with dedicated panes for each box you connect to.
I saw that too, but it was a bit misleading. The pregnancy tester for some reason had a pretty high resolution monochrome OLED display, so the guy used the tester's display to show the Doom graphics. The actual device running Doom was a more powerful microcontroller external to the tester stick.
Trying to use my linux partition to remote into windows PCs and I am struggling to get ninja remote software to work with even a browser running through wine. Has anyone used this software before and have a solution?
Funny I just spend a few hours working on this on my workstation. Tested in VM first before deploying out to my main machine. but here are rough steps:
You have to use wine and the browser extension "User-Agent Switcher and Manager" I would say first install the browser extension then log into your RMM agent. The button to remote will appear but won't work. Click the remote in button and Download the 32bit agent from the pop up Then run wine not sudo on that exe file. Once installed you need to make a desktop entry [nano ~/.local/share/applications/ninja-remote.desktop]
Change the username and verify the path is correct by checking your wine folder
#Paste this with the correct path and username [Desktop Entry] Name=NinjaOne Remote Exec=bash -c 'wine "/home//.wine/drive_c/users//AppData/Roaming/NinjaRemote/ncplayer.exe" "%u"' Type=Application Terminal=false MimeType=x-scheme-handler/ninjarmm; ###
Second to last Register the desktop Entry: run: xdg-desktop-menu install ~/.local/share/applications/ninja-remote.desktop run: xdg-mime default ninja-remote.desktop x-scheme-handler/ninjarmm
Lastly, Paste this in your firefox extension (The we used to trick sites into thinking we are windows) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36
Agreed. I hope this gains even more traction. Building a digital economy around support and service of free open source software with the requirement of personnel being local seems like the best way for Europe to finally become competitive.
Look, folks, I’ve been hearing a lot, a lot, about this thing called Linux. Ever heard of it? Sounds European, doesn’t it? Probably invented in Brussels, or Sweden, maybe Russia, I don't know. Total disaster. I call it Socialist Windows, because that’s what it is! It’s chaotic, no one’s in charge. Total mess. Bernie Sanders running an IT department, terrible. Meanwhile, Windows, great American company, by the way, very successful, very strong.
I mean in the server space Linux has already won and is doing just fine. Imo it is actually the reverse and sad that it needs this level of turmoil to get Europe to even think about software and digital infrastructure as fundamental. And even with all that's going on they are just dipping their toes into it rather than properly comitting to a radical shift. Hell, even with all that's going on some parts of the police here in Germany are still getting into bed with companies like Palantir.
If a person reads a lot of theory about how to swim, different types of techniques, other people's written experiences etc., can they swim if thrown in a deep swimming pool? Or, at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning?
By "a lot", I mean spending over 6 months to a year, gaining theoretical knowledge. And when we throw them in the pool, they are willing to try it, as in, "I have learnt enough, and I am willing to try it out."
What tips about setting up my stock Android phone would you give me? It's not factory unlocked so I'm sticking with Google Android.
Things I've done: - Stopped and disabled all apps that I don't use or need. - Replaced all apps that I can with FOSS alternatives from github using Obtainium. - Not installed things that I can just check on my laptop like email.
Is there anything else that I can do? Thanks in advance
Edit I've also: - Changed my DNS to Mullvad DNS - Restricted app permissions to only what they need - Not signed into the phone. I don't even have Gmail account.
I made the unfortunate post about asking why people liked Arch so much (RIP my inbox I'm learning a lot from the comments) But, what is the best distro for each reason?
RIP my inbox again. I appreciate this knowledge a lot. Thank you everyone for responding. You all make this such a great community.
Imo, the best one is the one that fits the user's needs the best. Though it sounds like a non-answer, distros are usually tailored for specific needs, so not necessarily the features or lack thereof from one distro disregard another.
My Debian is the best for my work laptop My Arch is the best for my private laptop My Asahi is the best so that I don't have to deal with f*cling macos crap
Why my distro (pop!_os) is the best? Well it's probably not, but here's why I went with it:
ubuntu based, so lots of applicable tech support online
looks nice out of the box (imo)
comes with nvidia drivers. Not a major point cause they aren't hard to get, but it was one of the things I considered when I unintentionally ended up with with nvidia
tiling (the big one imo)
Aand that's kinda it :3.. at the moment it's kinda behind all the other stuff cause they're working on the new COSMIC DE, which im hoping is gonna be an upgrade to the GNOME with extensions the current version has
While COSMIC is certainly an upgrade, current gnome extensions won’t be compatible. COSMIC uses applets instead of extensions. Fortunately, there’s already an ecosystem of applets for COSMIC, many of which have been ported from GNOME extensions.
Ye :3.. honestly as someone who doesn't use that many extensions other than the pop-shell ones, im not too worried about the extensions, since basically all of that is coming as a base part of COSMIC's interface.. I think the only extension that im hoping gets a COSMIC applet soon after release is KDEconnect lol
Same. I think there’s one extension I run in my top bar that lets me individually stop, start, or restart specific system services. It’s very handy, and I’ll miss it.
Aeon desktop is the best indeed: - Crazy fast install. - System configuration is done on the first boot. - Supports ignition and combustion. - The install USB can become a $HOME backup if you re-install. - Full disk encryption by default and mandatory. - Latest GNOME, looks clean and pretty. - Rolling. - Immutable, with Distrobox by default.
As far as desktop Linux goes, I don't see why I would use anything else atm. Give it a try!
I just want to learn more about what are the differences between distros, so that they will be better or worse? Are all the distros having the same GNU/Linux kernel so that if I replace all the Arch userland files into Debian's, the system will become Debian?
Are all the distros having the same GNU/Linux kernel
Yes. Different distros have different versions, patches and so on, but the underlying kernel is the same.
if I replace all the Arch userland files into Debian’s, the system will become Debian?
If by "userland" you mean files which your normal non-root user can touch, then no. There's differences on how distributions build directory trees, file locations, binaries, versions and so on. You can of course replace all the files on the system and change distribution that way, a convenient way to do that is to use distros installer but technically speaking you can also replace them manually by hand (which I don't recommend).
Sorry, I misread your comment on my first reply. Yes, you can have gnome and hyprland installed side by side, you would just use SDDM to choose what session you’re starting at login.
But is it also possible to have the gnome login screen (so after startup) and then automatically login using Hyprland? Because I dislike any other login screen. (The gnome one is pretty asf)
My choice of distro is just a compromise and close enough to serving my needs. All distros have pros and cons, and I use different distros for different use cases.
I'm vegan, german and into fitness. There really was no other choice. /s?
Also, it's lightweight, you always get the most recent software, pacman is superb and it's super stable. In about 10 years on multiple systems, I never had anything break. The worst of it are simple problems during updates, which are always explained on their website.
Lastly, there is the wiki. The single best source of Linux information out there. Might as well be using the distro that's directly explained there, albeit a lot of information can be used on other ones as well.
With arch-install, you don't even need to learn much, but learning is never a bad idea and will be great if something does break. Every system can break. Arch prepares you for that.
having tried many distros over the years, Arch (and most derivatives) is best for me pacman is the best i've used, packages are very up to date, and it's pretty easy to troubleshoot with the enormous amount of info on the wiki and elsewhere
I (maybe) ended distrohopping last year when I gave NixOS a shot. I can't recommend it for beginners but once you understand generally how things work on Linux (and have an interest in programming) it's a superpower to be able to define your entire setup as a single git repository. If something ever breaks, I can reboot into an older commit and keep using my computer, or branch off in a different direction... I've only scratched the surface of NixOS and yet I can already make a live USB containing my setup with a single command, or deploy it ("infect") to another machine and manage e.g my work desktop and my personal laptop sharing most settings. Also it taught me about Nix (the package manager, which also runs on any distro and macOS independent of NixOS) which I now use to set up perfect development environments for each of my projects... if I set up dependencies once (as a flake.nix shell), it'll work forever and anywhere.
Same for me. I distro-hopped for about 20 years with OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and Fedora being the most memorable desktop setups for me. While all that was a valuable experience, NixOS feels like graduation.
For the Nix-curious: I wish someone would have told me not to bother with the classic config and build a flake-based system immediately. They're "experimental" in name only, very stable and super useful in practice.
Absolutely +1 for flakes. It's got some annoying UX sometimes (make sure you git add any new files before building!) but absolutely makes up for it by its features.
Same for me, I stopped distro-hoping 2 years ago when I moved to NixOS.
It was tough at first, setting it up took a while and i genuinely felt stupid like i haven't felt for a while; but now I love having the same config on my two laptops. I have one that stays at work and another one for traveling. With one word/line added into my config I can as a software, configure the VPN, change the wallpaper on both my laptop, or not. Some stuff like gaming goes only on the traveling laptop.
Also, another big thing for me is the feeling of having a cleanly built system all the time. I haven't felt the urge to do a clean reinstall since I started with NixOS.
Some more points about Nix: - It's a fast way to get to a specific setup, like a particular DE or Vulkan gaming support, thanks to abstraction that NixOS modules provide - There are tons of packages - Because packages are installed by adding a config entry you don't accumulate random software you forgot you installed - Immutable updates and rollbacks - this is similar to benefits of atomic ostree distros, but the nix solutions are more general, so you have one system that does more things with a consistent interface - in addition to updating the base system, rollbacks also roll back user-installed packages, and configurations if those are managed via Nix - devshells provide per-directory packages and configuration using the same package repos as the host system, without needing to manage docker images - Nix is portable - much of what it does on NixOS can also be used in other distros, or even on Macos or Windows with the Linux subsystem - Configurations often combine NixOS and Home Manager parts. The Home Manager part can be used à la carte on other OSes is a way that is fully isolated from the host OS package management. For example on Macos this is a much nicer alternative to Homebrew. - devshells also work on other OSes - similar to Guix - but NixOS uses systemd, and is (from what I understand) more tolerant of non-free software (whether these are pros or cons is up to individual interpretation)
Nixos Is my first distro I use on desktop. I’m not sure why but I guess the fact that it won’t build till it checks Is a huge plus for me. I love to f up things to learn from them but I don’t like broken things and oh boy. Nix keeps me in the clean, safe. Don’t get me wrong im doing stupid stuff all the time but just cus i have a few configs written down i can learn a lot. Or a little that amazes me lol
Endeavour OS is the best because you get all the benefits of Arch combined with a familiar and friendly installer, a good out of the box setup with the desktop of your choice. Not to mention the outstanding community that's built up around it.
Mint. It just works and Cinnamon is a good DE (ui design peaked in the Windows XP days). Plus you also get all the software built and tested for Ubuntu without the bullshit of using Ubuntu.
For my server I use NixOS, because having one unified configuration is so nice.
My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.
That's why I have issues with many of the "easy" distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste. Don't take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all. I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.
I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.
That's why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch by default is not easy, that it doesn't try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system to behave that way.
Linux is so great, because there is a distribution for nearly everyone out there (unless you are blind, then things are not that great apparently, but it seems to get better).
MX Linux (Debian based), using it for almost 10 years now (before, it was Ubuntu). Based on Debian, very stable, always up to date for every kernel/apps, use native .deb no snap no flatpak no systemd. Also it is using Xfce by default, the best DE.
For your info, it was a kind of "square" picture, I used yce.perfectcorp.com/ai-image-e… to extend it left and right, it created new clouds/flowers, not bad
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With Guix you have reproducibility, freedom, good docs and peace of mind, also when configuring things more deeply. You also have a powerful programming language (Scheme / Lisp) with which to define your system config as well as your dotfiles. This is my insight after years of GNU/Linux usage. I run Guix on laptops, desktops and servers, and I never have configuration drift, as well as the benefit that I have a self documenting system.
By default it is, but there are many non-free channels you can use to add the OG Linux kernel to your Guix install as well as nonfree drivers. A famous one is nonguix, which i also use in my config. They also make custom ISOs with the Linux kernel, which helps some hardware indeed. So the libre only policy is a non issue if you read into it a little, but unfortunately most people stay at surface level
Arch. I tried other distros and always came back to Arch. Other distros are very bloated and honestly I can't be bothered with removing them manually. I also love the AUR and the wiki.
Another interesting distro was NixOS, but that is a bit of a pain in the ass to learn.
For newbies, Fedora KDE Plasma edition or Mint Cinnamon is my recommendation. Kinoite is Fedora KDE Plasma edition but immutable for the ones that keep breaking the system because they keep following some absurd guide online for whatever.
Mine is the best for me because I like it the best. It does what I need with a minimum of configuration or customization. My needs and preferences are probably different from yours though, so Linux Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon desktop environment might not be the best for you.
I use fedora silverblue for a couple reasons. After jumping from elementary to Ubuntu to Manjaro to Artix I got tired of dealing with distro specific modifications and weird issues. With the Ubuntu based distro I never enjoyed how out of date some packages were. I’d hear about a cool new update for a program I use and realize it would be a while till that would be in my repos.
I really liked artix and Arch’s rolling release nature and I would probably enjoy arch if I still used my computer daily like I used to but now I can be away from it for a couple months at a time and I need updates to be stable.
I’ve found Fedora (silverblue in particular) to be a perfect middle ground between rolling release and having a more regular update schedule. I use silverblue because I never wanted to have to worry about an update breaking my install ever again.
I will admit that because silverblue uses flatpaks almost exclusively, my appreciation for software being up to date could be achieved on almost any other distro, but the vanilla style of fedora is what keeps me now. I’m a big fan of vanilla gnome and not too many distros ship it like that.
Honestly, having tried both atomic and regular Fedora, I ended up with regular, as it allows you to do all the same things without limiting you to them.
Install flatpak? Sure. Use Distrobox? Of course. But if you have to use native package, you can simply install it without jumping through the hoops with rpm-ostree (which doesn't even always work properly).
Fedora itself is great, though - a healthy release cycle, high stability, and mature base.
Gentoo works best for me because I'm a control freak. It lets me tune my system in any way I want, and I don't mind leaving my computer on while I'm asleep so that it can compile its way through libreoffice, webkit, and a couple of browsers. Plus, based on complaints I hear from people using other distros, Portage beats other package managers in every way except speed.
This doesn't mean that it's best for everyone, mind you, just that it's best for me.
ZorinOS is the best for me, because it works out of the box, looks a lot like Windows which i'm used to, is relatively configurable and is free (the paid version is just cosmetics and prebundled additional software). I consider looking into Arch though, thanks to your post and the comments there ;)
I use Fedora. I like that it's very up to date and that it doesn't change the GNOME defaults. It also has a big community and many resources to look into if anything goes wrong.
It's my plan. Not in the mood to distro-hop on my laptop right now, and I got to get through my Epic Games backlog (and also the Steam demos I can't be bothered downloading again) before I swap over my Windows 10 desktop.
Arch. I think when people say "bloat" they don't mean it in the traditional sense of the word. Most people are installing plasma or gnome and pulling all the "bloat" that comes with them. To me at least it's more that no one is deciding what they think you're likely to need/do, and overall that makes the system feel much more "predictable". Less likely to work against what I'm trying to do.
Ignore all the comments about Arch being hard to install or "not for beginners". That view is outdated. When I first installed Arch when you had to follow the wiki and install via the chroot method. Now it's dead simple to install with the script and running it isn't any more difficult than any other distro.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a decade now. I’m a computer engineer by trade and use a variety of distros in the office (Debian and RHEL primarily). I’ve also experimented with various Ubuntu spin-offs and a few flavors of Fedora. But old habits die hard.
Since I'm old and need to deal with administrating a bunch of machines for work, I settled on the most dull and unsurprising distros of all: debian. Sure, when I was younger and eager to learn and with much time on my hands, I used gentoo (basically what is now arch) and all the others too.
Tumbleweed is the only bleeding-edge rolling release distribution that just works and never fails and is super easy to install and manage without any expertise. And it is massively underrated and forgotten for no good reason.
All Tumbleweed packages go through extensive and to this day unrivaled automatic system testing that ensures no package is ever gonna bork itself or your system.
If you're still worried about stability, there is Slowroll - currently testing, but in my experience very stable distribution. It makes rolling release updates...a bit slower, so that they're only pushed after Tumbleweed users absolutely ensure everything is great and stable (not that it's ever otherwise). It does the same job as Manjaro, but this time around it actually works without a hitch.
Both deliver great experience and will suit novice users.
Why? - I guess I'm too lazy for distro hopping now 🙁
Besides, this was the 1st Linux distro I tried back in 2005. After the usual ditro hopping phase was over, I settled on it; somehow (irrespective of snap and other controversies) I feel at home.
For me its Linux Mint, I'm no longer in position really to do distro hopping, so long as Linux Mint keeps working I will keep using it, I see no reason to change right now. I'm glad and happy that you have settled on Ubuntu, have fun, enjoy and be happy huuuugs 😉
I agree. I tried Fedora first, then Pop!OS, and then settled on Kubuntu.
Kubuntu has been the most stable so far, no big issues. I chose it for that and its Wayland support. Snaps can be disabled or even have auto update turned off which is what I did and I had no real issues with Ubuntu past that so overall a good distro.
Widely supported, plenty of tutorials, has my favorite DE as a spin, it just does what I need it to.
Everybody think they are a special snowflake who needs bleeding edge, or a specific package manager or DE or whatever. Truth is 99.99% do not. They just like to believe they do, claim they do, try it, inflict self pain for longer than they need, convince themselves that truly they are, because of the pain, special.
As someone who ran Debian Stable for a while, this is not a distro for "99.99%".
First, Debian, while very stable in its core, commonly has same random issues within DE's and even programs that may likely just sit there until the next release comes along.
Second, a release cycle of 2 years is actually a giant and incredibly noticeable lag. You may love your system when it just releases, but over time, you will realize your system is old, like, very damn old. It will look old, it will act old, and the only thing you can do is install flatpaks for your preferred programs so that they'd be up to date.
This isn't just programs. It is your desktop environment. It is Wine (gamers, you're gonna cry a lot unless you work it around with flatpaks like Bottles, which will feel like insane workaround you wouldn't have to have with a better fitting distro).
It is the damn kernel, so you may not even be able to install Debian on newest hardware without unsupported and potentially unstable backporting tricks.
Don't get me wrong, Debian is absolutely great in what it does, and that is providing a rock solid environment where nothing changes. But recommending it for everyone? Nope.
I feel like a lot of your points were true at one point, but are becoming lest relevant.
For one, at least with XFCE, I found myself not really running into DE bugs.
Also, I don't think two years is as obnoxious anymore. During the era of the GTK 4 transition a couple, it drove me nuts, but now that a lot of APIs like that have stabilized, I really don't notice much of a difference between Debian Testing and Stable. I installed and daily drove Bookworm late in its lifecycle on my laptop, and in terms of DE and applications, I haven't noticed anything. I get the feeling Debian's gotten better at maintenance in the past few years - I especially see this with Firefox ESR. There was a time where the version was several months behind the latest major release of ESR, but usually it now only takes a month or two for a new ESR Firefox to come to Debian Stable, well within the support window of the older release.
Also, I don't think Flatpaks are a huge dealbreaker anyway - no matter what distro you're using, you're probably going to end up with some of them at some point because there's some application that is the best at what it does and is only distributed as a Flatpak.
Frankly, I probably am a terrible reference for gaming, as I'm a very casual gamer, but I've found Steam usually eliminates most of these issues, even on Debian.
Also, the official backports repository has gotten really easy. My laptop had an unsupported Wi-Fi chipset (it was brand new), so I just installed over ethernet, added the repo, and the install went smoothly. There were a few bugs, but none of these were specific to Debian. Stability has been great as ever.
In conclusion, I think right around Bookworm, Debian went from being the stable savant to just being an all-around good distro. I'll elaborate more on why I actually like Debian in a comment directly replying to the main post.
I might disagree with 99.999% like you - maybe I'd put it in the 50-75% range.
As a KDE fan, I had some bugs on some devices (like on one of the laptops, wallpapers did not install correctly and the setting to always show battery charge didn't work) even on Debian 12.
XFCE is well-known for stability, but seems to be increasingly irrelevant for the average/newbie user because the interface looks outdated and configuring is relatively complicated.
Interesting you mentioned Firefox ESR - iirc, even at release the version shipped with Debian 12 was considered very old, prompting many to install Firefox as a flatpak. Two years later, it's two years older.
Flatpaks are good and suitable options for many tasks - no argument here! But some things are just better installed natively, and there Debian just...shows.
Steam is a godsend, but there are many non-Steam games and, importantly, programs out there, and launching them through Steam often feels like yet another bloated and slow workaround; besides, you cannot choose Wine over Proton, and sometimes (granted: rarely) you may want to use Wine specifically.
To conclude - it's alright to choose Debian anyway, it is good! But I just feel like newbies and casual users could save a lot of trouble and frustration simply going with something that doesn't require all that - say, Fedora (non-atomic), or OpenSUSE, and then go from there to whatever they like. There are plenty of distributions that are stable, reliable, but without the tradeoffs Debian sets.
If you feel like stability is your absolutely biggest priority ever, and you have experience managing Linux systems - by all means, go Debian. But by that point you'll already know what you want.
Debian Stable actually updates Firefox ESR through the typically on by default security channel.
The current ESR version in there is 128, which is about a year old, which replaced the 115 that came with Debian 12 by default.
The newest ESR, 140 just came out 2 weeks ago. 128 still has 2 months of security updates, and 140 has already been packaged for sid. I have no doubts 140 will come before those 2 months are up.
even programs that may likely just sit there until the next release comes along. ... the only thing you can do is install flatpaks for your preferred programs so that they’d be up to date. ... Wine (gamers, you’re gonna cry a lot unless you work it around with flatpaks
I already posted on this a while ago but that's is a recurring misconception. No distribution, literally 0, provides all software to the latest version or to the version one expects. Consequently IMHO it is perfectly acceptable to go beyond what the official package manager of the distribution offers. It can be flatpaks, am, build from source, etc but the point precisely is that the distribution is about a shared practical common ground to build on top of. A distribution is how to efficiently get to a good place. I also run Debian stable on my desktop and for gaming, I use Steam. It allows me to get Wine, yes, but also Proton and even ProtonFix so that I basically point and click to run games. I do NOT tinker to play Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur, etc and my hardware is well supported.
So... sure if you consider a distribution as something you must accept as-is and NOT rely on any of the tool to get the latest software you actually need, can be games but can be tools e.g. Blender, Cura, etc, then you WILL have a tough time but that's the case for all distributions anyway.
TL;DR: a distribution is the base layer to build on. Its package manager, on Debian and elsewhere, is not the mandatory and sole way to get the software you need.
Debian. Truly the universal operating system. Runs on all of my laptops, desktops, servers, and NAS with no fuss and no need to keep track of distro-specific differences. If something has a Linux version, it probably works on Debian.
Granted, I am a bit biased. All of my hardware is at least 5 years old. Also came from Windows, where I kept only the OS and browser up to date, couldn't be bothered with shiny new features. A package manager is already a huge luxury.
Because I don't have a fickle heart, and My distro is the best, right now, for me. There's nothing more to it. I do like Mint - but a few apps are out of date, and that's annoying. But it's stable, looks great, and works like a charm.
NixOS. - I have access to more packages than with any other package manager. - everything to get my setup in the exact state I want is in my config, which is 90% useable on any other distro thanks to home manager - My config is all in one place and easy to share - If I ever break something, I can always roll back - I don't need Docker
slackware the og linux distro. super stable, sane package management etc. i've wanted to try void/arch/gentoo/crux for a pretty long time but still haven't because this just works perfectly
IDGAF if it's the best (mint), it was easy to install, easy to transition to from Windows, and in 6 months hasn't given me any trouble. I just wanna use my computer.
Yeah I was gonna say, I dunno if my distro is the best (Arch BTW) but it's the best for me. Doesn't give me any nonsense and lets me tinker as much as I want. Other people just want their OS to get out of their way, which of course is equally valid. Whatever works for you!
I've discovered that I don't much care which distro I'm using, it's the DE that matters most. I have Fedora GNOME, Debian GNOME, and openSUSE GNOME running on different machines. I can't really tell much difference until I enter the command line or package manager, and even then, it's the front end of the command that changes while the backend stays mostly the same. Flatpak has made the difference between distros even fewer.
While I still care somewhat of distro differences for functional reasons, I completely agree that DE's are the most important part in terms of user experience.
Both my machines use KDE, and while they run two different distros, they look and feel pretty much the same since I use a very similar layout on both of them. This, along with file sync through my NAS and similar apps, makes switching from one computer to the other a breeze (pun not intended), despite some differences under the hood.
EndeavorOS. It runs smooth, i dont get errors, all my games work, the taskbar and notifications work like I would expect them too. Switching from Windows 2 months ago, I cycled through a few distros but they all were giving something up until i found EoS.
Also PKGBUILD's are the superior packaging format. Back in the day people use to talk about preferring debian or redhat based distros based on how much they liked debs or rpms. Building packages on Arch is easier than pretty much any distro I have ever tried to build packages on.
I wanted the awesomeness of pacman and like the way Gardua comes pre-configured as well as packages it installs from the get go. The only thing I hate about it is the "gamer" universal KDE theme it comes with.
Man, I wanted to try Garuda a couple of weeks ago and the thing would never even boot into the live environment. Went ahead and installed Cachy OS and it's been great.
Mint Cinnamon. All my hardware works, and it can do the few things I require my work PC to do. It even remembers things like my default audio device - something Ubuntu refused to do for years.
I like the way Pop!_OS looks. Not gonna pretend it's the best. But as far as default UIs, it clicked with the most. Default gnome seemed too spartan and all of the Windows-like DEs remind me too much of Windows. Which I don't like. If that makes sense.
Hopefully none, why do you like Gnome? I thought it was okay, but I really love KDE more. I don't hate Gnome. It seems really good for anyone who uses a touchpad or touchscreen.
I can't speak for anyone else but I can tell you what I personally love about Gnome.
I like that it's Spartan. I like that it looks good without me having to customize a thousand different settings.
I like that It has client side decorations, so every window doesn't have to have an obscene, chunky, mostly useless title bar.
I don't miss every single application having 100 different options packed into a menu bar. Once you get used to it, you realize that it was mostly getting in the way the whole time.
It's just a really streamlined workflow for 98% of what you do. The problem is that 2% where it's too spartan and God do you wish you had some options.
But I also think KDE is a great desktop environment. If I were more of a gamer I'd be using KDE. I think XFCE is an excellent desktop environment for aging hardware and Windows converts. It is very much a matter of taste, Use cases, and your preferred workflow.
Most packages have sane defaults, and it's so stable. It's true that it sometimes means older software versions, but there's also something to be said for behavior staying the same for two years at a time.
If hardware support is an issue, using the backports repo is really easy - I've been using it on my laptop for almost a year with no problems that don't exist on other distros. If you really need the shiniest new application, Flatpak isn't that bad.
It also feels in a nice position - not so corporate as to not give a darn about its community, but with enough funding and backing the important stuff gets maintained.
I just moved to Debian trixie (soon to be stable) because I needed an upgrade after ~15 years of Gentoo.
I was a proud Gentoo user. I learned a lot about systemd and kernel configuration. Many advances in portage made it possible to find the time to maintain my Gentoo setup. On my laptop I gave up Gentoo even earlier, because updating my system was just too time consuming. I actually learned less and less about the software I was using, because I was trapped in dependency conflict management. The new binary repos did save some compile time, but the actual time sinks are decision for your systems, use flags and the forementioned dependencies.
So, I installed Debian on my main workstation (two days ago). I am already using Debian on on my Raspberry Pis. I did choose a more challenging way using debootstrap, because I want to use systemd-boot, encrypted btrfs and have working hibernation. I am still busy with configuring everything.
One could argue, that I could've used the time on Gentoo to solve my current python_targets_python3_13 issues and do a proper world update. No, this is a future investment. I want the time to configure new stuff, not wait for dependency resolution or waste time solving blocking packages.
The main reason to switch from Gentoo to Debian is being able to install security updates fast without blocking packages in the same slot.
Obligatory "There is not a single distro that's the absolute best for each and every one." disclaimer aside, my personal favorite is definitely secureblue for being a hardened-by-default distro that adheres to the ~~'immutable'~~ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm while enjoying a healthy stream of improvements pushed out by an active group of contributors.
This is going to be a longer blog entry, but here’s a TL;DR: I propose that instead of "immutable" or "read-only" when talking about operating systems (such as Fedora Core…
I love Pop OS because it got me back into Linux after ditching it for windows for the last 10 years, partly to do .net development and partly because I hated the state of Ubuntu/Unity.
As soon as cosmic is stable and easy to install on Nix I'll switch to it.
Arch btw, only been using it for a couple of weeks, only installed it because of the meme. Got my hands on a few years old thinkpad for practically free, so why not. It's actually quite good so far, been struggling a bit with external monitors, but I don't miss windows
Arch, everything it does provide works extremely well, I can configure everything how I want it without having to fight a distro maintainer trying to be clever, I get new features and bugfixes whenever they go in without having to worry about a distro maintainer deciding whether it’s relevant or whether I should just live with crashes and security issues for another two years because they figured it wasn’t important or critical enough.
OpenSUSE tumbleweed: Up-to-date, unbreakable due to Btrfs+snapper, very secure defaults (firewall), based in Germany. It works perfectly on my Thinkpad, so I couldn't ask for better.
Linux Mint because it's extremely simple and has caused me no issues for over a year. It's the best distribution to get someone who is afraid to switch from Windows or MacOS to understand that using Linux can be just as easy.
I recently needed to build newer versions of some packages for Debian. Now, they're go based so the official packaging is super complicated and eventually I decided to try and make my own from scratch. After a few more hours of messing with the official tooling I start thinking "there must be a better way."
And sure enough, after a bit of searching I found makedeb which allows you to make debs from (almost) regular PKGFILEs. Made the task a million times simpler.
I use Kubuntu. It is defintly not the best Distro. I am just used to it and too lazy to get used to another distro. My days as a distro jumper lie 15 years back...
Tbh though, I might switch to Debian stable whenever Trixie comes out.
It isn't. I'm on PopOS 24.04 Alpha 7 (soon to be Beta 1), because of COSMIC (and because I was having some bugs with Fedora a few months back).
I recently wanted to tinker with a piece of software that wasn't packaged, and I couldn't compile it because of outdated libraries. I could return to Fedora specifically to tinker with it but as an ex-distrohopper, I know it isn't worth the effort.
Even though Fedora or some version of it will likely be my forever distro, I will stick to PopOS for now because I can't be bothered to distrohop and back up months' worth of files, including game saves and a ton of stuff in my Downloads directory.
I was a Nix user (more specifically, nix-darwin user) but after being away from the computer for like one year (to study for the university entrance exam), I completely forgot how to use it and resulted in erasing the computer. Nix/NixOS is fun, but it was too complicated for me.
I use Nobara with KDE for my gaming computer, Mint with Cinnamon for pretty much everything else.
Mint is the closest to a "Just Works" experience for me. Cinnamon is rock stable, especially on Mint Debian Edition. I don't remember the last time Cinnamon crashed or had any major bugs for me.
I use Debian for most of my servers, stable and simple. Arch on a junker Thinkpad to test and mess around with new programs and window managers.
Tumbleweed. Rolling release with automated testing (openQA), snapper properly setup out of the box.
Honestly the entire openSUSE ecosystem. Tumbleweed on my main PC that often has some of the latest hardware, Slowroll on my (Framework) laptop because it's rolling but slower (monthly feature updates, only fixes in-between), and Leap for servers where stability (as in version/compatibility stability, not "it doesn't crash" stability) is appreciated.
openSUSE also comes in atomic flavors for those interested. And it's European should you care.
With all that being said, I don't really care much about what distro I'm using. What I do with it could be replicated with pretty much any distro. For me it's mostly just a means to an end.
Gentoo because it is as stable as Debian, less bloated than Arch, has more packages than Ubuntu, is rolling release, can mix and match stable, testing and unstable on a whim.
Even its one downside, compile times, is now gone if you just choose to use binary packages.
And less stable than Arch, and more bloated than Ubuntu... If that is something you want for whatever reason! It is the most versatile distro in existance because it's literally anything you want it to be - clean and nice, or total chaos. What is there not to love?
Since I mostly use computers for entertainment these days I keep coming back to Bazzite. It’s fast, stable, kept up to date, reliable, and “just works”. I’ve created custom rpm-ostree layers to faff around, but it’s not actually necessary for anything I need.
I used to keep a second Kubuntu Minimal partition around but I realized I just don’t need it. If I wasn’t so happy with Bazzite, I would probably go with openSUSE or Endeavor.
Yes, but also I had to run through proton off steam and the modding process is less streamlined. I unironically have had a less complicated time running windows and dealing with its "special" features than running Linux and having a custom setup for every other game.
I've been using (X)Ubuntu for ages. I just wanted something that "just works". Tired of too much tinkering and there's plenty of (non commercial) support. Mixing it with i3 as my window manager.
For me it's openSUSE Tumbleweed on my Desktops/Laptops and openSuse Leap on my Servers. The killing Feature for me was the propper BTRFS integration with Snapper for seamless rollbacks in case I borked the system in some way.
One "downside" for me is the mix of Gnome Settings and Yast on my Desktop. But I like yast on my servers for managing everything (enabling ports in firewall, network config, enable autoamtic isntall of security updates, etc.). Also openSuse is not that common, so sometimes it is hard to find a solution if you have a distribution specific question.
Personally never looked to closely into openSuse Build Services (OBS). But I know some people who really like it.
I am using Bluefin, based on Fedora Silverblue. I realized that I was already exclusively using flatpaks for everything except one random app, so I thought why not go all-in?
Haven't had to worry about updates or system breakages since, and it's been great so far.
I used to use Debian Stable, but since doing SysAdmin work I've just become used to the way Fedora / RHEL does things.
Lots of projects claim to be the “smallest” or “simplest” Kubernetes, but they never provide data to back it up. Let’s look at how these distributions compare to Talos Linux.
Keep in mind that this post is by a company that offers one of the options they compare. So there is an obvious conflict of interest, and I wouldn't trust the conclusions that were reached
And obviously their option is the "best". From the conclusion:
Talos Linux is unique. It’s the only option that includes OS management in a purpose-built distribution for running Kubernetes. There’s no compromise for scaling up or down. In terms of small-scale numbers, it “wins” in several of the examined categories, including memory usage, disk r/w, and installation size. But all of these metrics are side effects of Talos Linux’s defining characteristic: It’s simple.
So, a while back I installed Xfce with Chicago95, but was disappointed. Xfce just doesn't vibe with me, and a strict emulation of Windows95 is not really what I wanted, I just wanted something that "felt" that classic.
So I was gonna give up and just use KDE, until I saw TDE. I think TDE is probably what I'm looking for but I'm concerned about using anything so minor because security.
It TDE secure (for personal use)?
Can a DE even be insecure, or are they all generally as secure as each-other as long as you follow the rules (trustworthy software, closed firewall, install patches fast, and disaster recovery plans)?
What vulnerabilities can a desktop environment even have (edit)?
It's good that it looks to be still maintained, but I imagine their resources are limited with so little market share and it doesn't look like they have the resources to switch to Wayland (which I assume is more secure).
I'm not sure my noob questions are worthy of asking the devs directly.
Desktop environments are not equal form the security perspective, but they all are rather insecure, because security is hard and harms UX, and the GNU/Linux desktop is traditionally focused on UX and the user freedom by sacrificing security. However it is possible to build a secure environment based on an insecure DE, what Qubes OS does with XFCE, for example.
The question I want to ask here is, what does "secure" and "insecure" mean in the context of a DE. What distinguishes a secure and insecure DE from a practical perspective (physical access, privilege escalation, rootkits, etc.).
Looking at the FAQ, they do "maintain" their version of TQt3. Whether they maintain it to the extent that it's secure is anyone's guess. There's always the question of what kinds of exploits can even exist in a desktop environment (which I should add to my original post).
Probably not significantly less secure than Xorg itself, I wouldn't mind using in your place. DE security is usually not a huge problem, if someone can exploit these vulnerabilities usually you are quite bonked.
Remember most of what happens on screen is xorg, the wm is a simply interacting with xorg and other parts of your DE are simple user level programs like the panel etc..
What kind of threats could affect Xorg? I can't imagine anything really exploiting the display manager without arbitrary code execution elsewhere (not that I know anything at all about software security).
I guess the biggest risk is whichever browser I use becoming a Wayland exclusive and not getting updates.
There are no open security bugs against TDE that I'm aware of—if there were, I'd expect them to be fixed in the next release. In my experience, the development team, while not huge, is active and competent.
I've been using TDE since a little while after Gentoo sunsetted KDE3, and I've had no issues. Just make sure your X server is secure—-nolisten and all that stuff—and don't try to use Konqueror as a web browser (it remains an excellent file manager), and you should be fine.
Wayland is "more secure" than X in that it makes less LAN contact by default and tries to sandbox programs from one another to an extent, just in case some future browser exploit that can copy random swathes of your screen tries to screenshot your password manager or something. There are no active exploits against a correctly-configured X server at this time that will magically vanish if you switch to Wayland, as far as I'm aware—it's more future-proofing stuff.
Thanks, that's a very clear response. I guess I basically can use it until X11 stops getting security updates. I wonder whether an X11 vulnerability can trigger a serious vulnerability even if it doesn't get security updates.
No idea what that -nolisten stuff is about. Is that to do with the firewall?
-nolisten is an actual option passed to the X server—your distro may do so by default—to work around a known security issue in some versions. I admit I'd have to look up the details, as it's been a couple of years since that issue was reported. Recent X versions almost certainly have a patch.
That might be a better fit for me. I know KDE has a polish and security I want, I imagine I could make it how I want.
Apparently TDE has lower resource usage, so I wonder if for that reason TDE might be a better fit. Clearly I should get both more experience with KDE and a better idea of what I'm actually looking for.
Before you give up on XFCE and/or Chicago95 - have you replaced the default menu with Whisker Menu? For me, Whisker Menu is a must-have for any sane XFCE user. When I used it with Chicago95, I found I could have a Windows 7 style interface with Windows 95 aesthetics.
Honestly, even if Chicago95 is aesthetically not what you want, I'd recommend trying an alternate theme on XFCE - I currently use modified DesktopPal '97 combined with a pack of Haiku-style icons.
Overall, I'd be interested to know more about your qualms with XFCE and see if customization can help you overcome them. A lot of distros have annoying defaults for XFCE, but I changed a few simple settings and have a desktop I rather enjoy using. It is totally fine if it still isn't the thing for you after any potential discussion, but I just want to make sure you really know what XFCE has to offer before you move on.
I don't really like how I keep accidentally rolling-up the windows in Xfce and how long the settings menu takes to load, I probably had more qualms but I don't remember what they are. It works fine (except for some aspects of Chicago95), but it feels outdated in a bad way rather than good way. Part of it is probably my crummy laptop with broken CTRL keys and incompatible bluetooth.
DesktopPal '97 seems really cool, but right now my top priority is switching to KDE Plasma 6 with custom themes and seeing how that goes.
Also, the settings menu thing is weird - mine takes less than a second to load, and I'm on a machine with a 7 year old processor at this point. I almost worry that if that takes a long time KDE will be more miserable performance-wise, unless you've already tried it on here.
By the way, what distro and XFCE version are you running - just for good measure.
The outdated sentiment is probably based, honestly. I think it's gotten better, but there are rough edges. In the end, do what works for you.
Roll up is when you scroll-up while hovering over the title bar and everything except the title-bar disappears. In the image monovergent provided the title bar is highlighted in red.
I use Linux Mint with Xfce. Gonna change to OpenSUSE once I can be bothered distro-hopping.
EDIT: Specifically it's the Font Settings that take forever to load, not all of the settings menu.
Mine used to be bogged down by the half-a-million Noto fonts, which I alleviated by uninstalling fonts-noto-extra, leaving only fonts-noto-core and fonts-noto-mono.
If you decide to return to any GTK-based desktop environments, I'd suggest trying out the GTK3 port of the Raleigh theme (github.com/thesquash/gtk-theme…). It's a much less involved install compared to Chicago 95 but gets you most of the look-and-feel.
The Whisker menu properties menu also has settings to make it fit the Windows 95 style a bit better. Here's how it could look:
Since Pango / HarfBuzz have dropped support for many legacy bitmap fonts, the following Helvetica OTB font works as a replacement for MS Sans Serif, including bold and italic versions. Add the file...
I made the changes, and it's slightly better but I think the main issue is my bad laptop and the negative association I have with Xfce as a result (since Xfce was what I was interacting with).
Raleigh isn't really my style. Too many lines. Plus I've decide I'll switch to themed KDE (and probably FreeBSD with TDE on one device).
The theme in the image you sent is really nice. Beige makes it feel more classic, and the red title-bar is far less jarring than a blue one is in 2025.
As far as the TDE devs know, there haven't been any issues resulting in a user getting hacked, they've modernized the underlying code, and actively patch any reported vulnerabilities: redlib.tiekoetter.com/r/linuxq…
That said, it is still a niche codebase with a small team, so they might not have the resources to be so proactive against theoretical vulnerabilities as a project like KDE or GNOME with Wayland. If you're being targeted, TDE would certainly be a shiny attack surface, but otherwise, I don't really see why a hacking group would go for something as niche as TDE. There's a tradeoff, like the one I take with X11 because I refuse to give up my XFCE+Chicago95 setup for an arguably more secure Wayland setup.
Most of the issues of a desktop environment just come down to there being more code and therefore a larger attack surface. Lots of widgets, obscure processes, and nooks and crannies to hide malicious stuff too. And legacy code with expansive privileges from the days before security was as much of a concern. While not Linux, it is analogous with security being a big part of why Microsoft released Server Core, which stripped out much of the GUI.
An extreme case, I also know of a someone who used Windows XP to do rather important work on the internet until around 2020. Only thing that stopped them were websites getting too bloated to load on their computer. But they did follow the basic rules as you mentioned and seemed to be just fine.
Oh damn, so just viewing a file in your file manager is enough to get infected in an insecure desktop environment, as thumbnails can be generated programmatically? If I clicked a bad link that would 100% infect my system.
I'm not worried too much about screen-capture. I'm worried first and foremost about triggering any arbitrary code execution and thumbnail generation on a file would definitely do it.
So basically they still require arbitrary code execution as a starting point.
Another guy shared this link from Secureblue that goes into thumbnail generation, which can be done programmatically and has been documented in the past as an avenue for infection in Nautilus.
My understanding of Keybase is that it was some kind identity aggregator. You were able to link identities not just by keys, but also by external services, like Twitter (at a time), email and other things.
Is the data and public keys being replicated in the communication between instances? it's not made clear how the federation actually works, because "enabling users on different servers to share data with end-to-end encryption" (from foks.pub/) is something all services with TLS / HTTPS support already do...
Also.. one big plus for the OpenPGP HKP protocol is that technically you can self-host your own key in a static HTTPS server with predefined responses and be able to have it interact with other servers and clients without issue. I'm expecting the more complex nature of FOKS might make self-hosting in this way difficult. I'd rather minimize the dynamic services I expose to the outside publicly if I'm self hosting.
journalctl is the one part of systemd I really do not like. For whatever reason, it's insanely slow, taking multiple seconds before it gets around to display anything. It also has all the wrong defaults, displaying error messages from a year ago first, while scrolling to the bottom again also takes forever and consumes 100% CPU while doing so.
There are flags to filter and display only the relevant parts, but not only are none of them intuitive, doing a mistake there just gives you "-- No entries --", not an error. So you can never quite tell if you typed it wrong or if were are no messages.
Maybe it all makes more sense when studying the man page in depths and learned all the quirks, but /var/log/ kind of just worked and was fast, without any extra learning.
I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn't make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.
Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.
Is it really breaking it? As far as I'm aware, it's more like gnu. It has components and you can select what you use (here meaning distros and packagers).
People mistake this for a monolith because it's all named systemd-thing. Integration, like you said, was and is needed. But what if all those separate utilities and services are actually disconnected and speak some protocol different to pipe? Does it make it less unixy?
And poettering is an absolute good guy here. Pulseaudio wasn't perfect, but did it improve things compared to what was there before? Sure it did. Even now, pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.
Perfect is the enemy of good. And while all these tools might not be perfect, they are the best in the Linux world.
Agreed. But he's also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.
pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.
I wasn't talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can't count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.
I always assumed that Poettering is an arse to people because of the hate he got for systemd. I imagine it's hard to see the best in people when there's a crowd of haters everywhere you go. Though I have no idea what he was like beforehand.
Everybody who is hated and popular gets death threats. Hell, even the nicest actors get death threats.
They are easy to write and send, and there's 0.01% of the population that is mentally unstable enough to actually do so. You and I don't get death threats because we aren't popular enough.
Nah bugger that. Famous actors are known by a vast majority of people. It is not normal for open source programmers to receive abuse to the level of death threats. That only happens when you get the attention of kiwi farms types.
I feel that generally, when the issue is that the person is an arse, then the complaints are often not about the software. You might see people campaigning to boicot the software out of spite, but they won't give you a technical reason, other than them not wanting the creator to get any credit for it.
When the complaints are about discrepancies in the way the software is designed (like it was with systemd), there's no reason to expect the person to be an arse. Though him not being an arse does not make the criticism about his software invalid... in the same way as him being an arse would not have made the software technically worthless. Don't fall for the ad-hominem.
Pulseaudio was introduced in 2004. How come it took almost 20y for it to be replaced if it was that bad?
Implementation, being what it is, improved the situation compared to alsa and other things before it. Again, while not perfect it made things better for everyone.
It's funny that this is a thing attributed to poettering as bad since things before were way worse... why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?
I really don't get it.
And all of these things are optional. The fact that distro people and companies select them is because they solve real world problems.
things before were way worse… why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?
My earliest memories of Linux audio were in Slackware in the mid 90s, reading and re-reading the HOWTO that started off with a bunch of attitude about how real computer users don't need audio, but we can do it anyway "so, if you must hear Biff bark..." and then a bunch of very unhelpful things to try following that never ever worked on any system I ever tried to use them on. Diverse systems that, of course, all played audio through Windows flawlessly.
Agreed. But he’s also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.
This isn't what I get when reading bug reports he interacts in. Yeah, sometimes he asks if something can't be done another way – but he seems also very open to new ideas. I rather think that this opinion of him is very selective, there are cases where he comes off as smug, but I never got the impression this is the majority of cases.
I wasn’t talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can’t count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.
PipeWire for audio couldn't exist nowadays without PulseAudio though, in fact it was originally created as "PulseAudio for Video"; Pulse exposed a lot of bugs in the lower levels of the Linux audio stack. And I do agree that PipeWire is better than PulseAudio. But it's important to see it in the context of the time it was created in, and Linux audio back then was certainly different. OSS was actually something a significant amount of people used…
From what i understand the problem is that while systemd is technically split up into different components, you can't really use it with the stuff you don't want ripped out.
You obviously weren't actually around when he was granted mini-king status and acted like a jackass to literally anyone who objected to pulse or systemd. As a result, redhat, canonical, and Debian had to eat criticism over pushing these before they were ready... because of "superstar" poettering.
Linux audio has been a cluster^$%< of epic proportions since the mid 1990s. At least you can make single application systems work well these days, but Windows has really whipped the llamas ass on the audio front for 30+ years now, in terms of "it just works" user experience - without being hyper-draconian on the application ecosystem.
It definitely depends on what you are trying to get out of it.
I'll grant: low lag audio performance in Windows is... dismal. Which is why everyone had conference call lag adjustment issues in 2020, "go ahead", "no you go ahead", "ok" - both start talking simultaneously again... It seems better these days, I'm sure that's at least in part due to training of the conference participants, but maybe they have been working on getting the lag down without too many dropout / stutters.
We have a bespoke low lag audio system that was specifically implemented in Linux even though we put the GUI in Windows because of those lag / stutter issues, years back the audio was done on a dedicated DSP chip, but a Core i7 is more than up to the task on Linux these days.
The Linux audio pains I refer to were: A) audio just doesn't work at all, and B) audio works, until you start to try to use two audio applications simultaneously - then they start to mess each other up. Both of those were better in Windows long before Linux came up to speed. But a lot of how Windows audio gets acceptable performance is big laggy buffers.
I totally agree with the functionality of systemd. We need that. But the implementation… Why the fuck do we need to cram everything into pid 1? At least delegate the parsing into another process, god damn. And could we all just agree that ’systemd-{networkd,resolved,homed}’ don’t really have a reason to exist, and definitely not that coupled to a fucking init system. Systemd-timers are wonderful, but why are we running cron-but-better in pid 1?
We have an init-system where the developers are afraid of using things like processes and separation of privileges. I’m just tired of patching fleets of servers in panic every time Pöttering’s bad design decisions hit the fan with their CVEs and consequences.
I don't know why they are downvoting you, it's true. I'm dealing with this kind of problem currently.. sometimes the boot lasts forever to the point that I have to use AltGr+SysRq commands to force kill everything.. other times it simply boots as normal. It's not consistent at all.
At least before with the old init it was relatively simple to dig into the scripts and make changes to them.. I feel now with systemd it's a lot more opaque and harder to deal with. I wouldn't even know how to approach the problem, systemd-analyze blame does not help, since the times I actually get to boot look normal. But I do believe it must have to do with the mountpoints because often they are what takes the longest. Any advice on what should I do would be welcome.
Also, I have a separate Bazzite install in my living room TV, and while that one does not get locked, sometimes NetworkManager simply is not running after boot... I got fed up to the point that I wrote a workaround by creating a rc.local script to have it run, so I can have it available reliably when the system starts (that fixed it.. though some cifs mountpoints often do not get mounted.. so I'm considering adding the mount command to the same rc.local script too....).
I'd say the main bad part of systemd is how it's used and now expected everywhere.
If you search for some Linux guides or install something complicated or whatnot, they always expect you to have systemd. Otherwise, you're on your own figuring how things work on your system.
This shouldn't really happen. Otherwise, yes, it's great, it integrates neatly, and is least pain to use.
There is no authority delegating responsibilities of writing tutorials for Linux. It is the responsibility of nobody and everybody. If you can't find one for your problem, write it yourself when you have figured it out.
If you think so and that this is important, maybe you could be the one that makes it happen. Start a project and gather like-minded people. That is how Linux, FOSS and community driven efforts operate. It's useless to complain that nobody else makes the effort if you have the capabilities but can't be arsed making an attempt yourself.
I like systemd overall. The ease of use, uniform interface and nice documentation is awesome.
Though each time I try to run it on outdated hardware (say, my Thinkpad X100e, which is, well, a life choice xD) — it makes whole system much slower. IMO, openrc is not as bad, and in some ways it gives some capabiilties of systemd these days.
I hate to admit I didn't want anything to do with systemd because it took me forever to get somewhat familiar with some other mainstream init systems.
Then, I didn't care for a while until I developed software that had to keep running using some sort of init system. The obvious choice was whatever the default I had (systemd) and I fell in love with the convenience of systemd (templates, timers, ..). I started shipping sample systemd with the things I provide & yes, you are on your own if you use something else.
I'm over here still using OpenRC. Mostly because I want to. Some servers I run have systemd on them. systemd is generally nice. OpenRC has finally gained the ability to run user services, which is also very nice.
I've been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.
The thing I don't like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the "do one thing, do it well" Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.
My issues with systemd is that it isn't an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it's slow and doesn't seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).
Recently I've been using dinit on a system, and I'm pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I'm running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.
Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?
Systemd is modular not monolithic. Distros choose which parts of system d to implement and it just happens to be most of it since its really good at what it does.
It is not modular. This is a lie Poettering keeps pushing to defend building a huge edifice of interdependent systems.
Look at the effort required to factor out logind. It can't just be used in it's own; it has a hard dependency on systemd and needs code changes to decouple.
I will repeat that journald is really bad at what it does, and further assert that you can not run systemd without journald, or vice versa. That you can not run systemd without getting timed job control. Even if you chose not to use it, it's in there. And you can not get time job control without the init part. In most unix systems, init and cron are utterly decoupled and can be individually swapped with other systems.
Systemd is not modular if you can't swap parts out for other software. Systemd's modularity is a bald-faced lie.
The one exceptions are homed and resolvd, which are relatively new and were addedlong after systemd came under fire for being monolithic. And, ironically, they're the components most distributions don't use by default.
Systemd boot, Systemd network and elogind I'm pretty sure can be decoupled. There's 69 modules so I'm not entirely sure about all of them just the ones ive encountered.
I know logind can't easily be, because I ran Artix for a while and they were using a decoupled version of it, and there was a big discussion about swapping it for something else because it was so hard to maintain.
It's refreshing to read to someone that actually says "I was so wrong"
I was wrong also with systemd, I hated it mainly because I already knew init.d, where files are, where configs where etc. Some years later hate is gone, I'm not a power user, but I just now know how to handle my things with systemd and all is good.
I see most often that it's the people who live in init.d - interact with it multiple times a day - who are most vocal about systemd hate. I'm going to call "old dogs don't like new tricks" on that one.
I do get into that layer of system maintenance, but it's maybe 1-2% of my time, mostly a set-it and forget-it kind of relationship. There was a time when the old ways were easier due to more documentation and guides on the internet, which I lean on heavily because I interact with this stuff so rarely. Those days passed, for me, 8-10 years back.
I decided to finally lean into using systemd more while i've been using NixOS, since the OS already relies heavily on it anyway. Created targets for my window managers, starting all my programs with services instead of autostart scripts, etc. And it worked fine for the most part, except for some reason, in qtile the systray widget refuses to load the nm-applet when it's started through systemd. Waybar does not have this problem. I can't help notice that systemd is not just a little slower, which isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it also tends to hang more often when shutting down, which is a bit annoying and reminds me of windows lol. Before NixOS i used Void, and while i never really cared too much about what init system i'm running, i can't help but really appreciate runit for being so simple and fast. I'm thinking of moving back to Void but using the Nix package manager on top. I recently found a solution to the nix driver problem when using it on other distros, so now i should be able to combine the best of both worlds.
I've never used any other init system since I'm relatively new to Linux (8 years of use). So, systemd is all I know. I don't mind it, but I have this one major issue with it. That "stop job for UID 1000......" Or whatever it says. It's hands down the most annoying thing I have ever experienced in Linux. Making me wait for 3 minutes sometimes is just insane. I know I can go in and make it wait for 5 seconds /etc/systemd/system.conf or whatever, but why? Also, another one usually pops up.
Other than that, I really like how I can make timers. I like how I can make scripts run on boot, logout or login. And I like how I can make an app a background service that can auto start if they ever crashed. Maybe all of this can be done with other init systems? I wouldn't know, but I like these in systemd
I use it because I'm frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.
I'm a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the "unused ram is wasted ram" phrase that has caught on with people.
I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and...require you basically to be a developer to use them.
I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can't imagine how fucked I'd be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.
If you're in a system where 256mb of RAM is the limit, sure - go for the RAM efficient OS options, they're out there.
Can you even buy less than 2GB of RAM in a desktop system anymore? Even the Raspberry Pi 5 starts at 2GB (and, yes, the older models have less, but I did say desktop system, implying: reasonable desktop performance.) Maybe if you feel the need to use a RasPi 3 as a desktop for something then you should dig around for one of your more efficient OS configurations, but I'll note... back when RasPi 3 was the new model, Raspbian came default without systemd, but offered a systemd option. The systemd option booted from power off to the desktop (such as it was) in about 1/3 the time.
You can play around with the mount option nofail, if that's set, systemd will not wait for the mount point to be ready and continue booting normally. Can be useful with HDDs that take a while to spin up and aren't needed for the boot process (e.g. backup drives, etc.).
Another thing to look out for: SDCards or USB flash drives that might randomly fail to "spin up" and hang, unplugging those helps.
I hated it and still do because for a period of years every weird, difficult to find issue on a bunch of servers was caused by systemd. It may be fine now, but I switched to Devuan and have had incredible stability. Poettering's response to security issues was also terrible and honestly the dude seems like a real piece of shit.
I think it strongly detracts from the post. I basically skipped right to the comments without clicking the link because I'm assuming it's AI slop, and I'm hoping the comments are interesting.
People would be less mad if you straight up used a stock image with a watermark so I don't understand why people go out of their way to use AI when they know people will comment on it and it will detract from the point of the article.
Also, using AI in the thumbnail makes people automatically assume you're using AI in the text as well. And if you're not doing that, why would you lessen the perceived value of your writing by making it seem like you are?
It just seems pointless and actively harms your actual goals because people will get hung up on the fact that you used AI and ignore your actual valid points. Especially when you're writing about open source projects when most people interested in open source are vehemently anti-AI, it really just shows you don't know your target audience.
While I mostly agree with you (and 100% on it distracting from the article), I think you’re not thinking about image rights.
If you’re a serious blogger with a good sized blog, a lawsuit or DMCA or otherwise is potentially a killer outcome of using an image you don’t 100% sure have the rights to. With AI, you can be 100% sure you can use the image however you want, without any repercussions. I’d imagine that’s huge in the considerations for a blogger.
I dont think this is a reasomable counterpoint because the target audience in question would also vastly prefer shit as simple as an mspaint illustration or a dithered irl image.
Also, it is quite feasible to find royalty free images, and I have no idea where you're getting the impression it is not. There are a host of images that provide licensing metadata. Google image search and co. can find these. It's simply a matter of verifying the license authenticity.
Any idea how well verified the images are on those sites? What's the chance that one with copyright gets uploaded and I get hit with a giant fine for using it?
Dunno. I feel like if you've used an image from a reputable source under the proviso that you're licensed for it, and it turns out you're not... you may be able to blame Unsplash etc. and just swap the image out.
Personally I think it's fallen out of fashion. For my blog I'd either use a meme or other dump picture for each post. When generated images first came out I used a few for blog posts, it was new and interesting and said "I'm interested in technology and like playing around with new things".
Nowadays I'm back on the meme pics. I feel now it's so much easier to generate images, it more says "I want to look professional but also spend no money and have no standards".
i’m downvoting ai slop every chance i get. i’m sure it’s just as futile as downvoting every post that used the acronym ‘FAFO’. i hated that one because i think the people who used it thought they sounded sooo cool.
if you’ll excuse me, i’ve got some clouds outside i need to go shake my fist at.
I don't appreciate the attitude and arrogance of the guy behind systemd because he actually believes what he produces can replace everything that already "just works". He wants to push out systemd-homed because "why not". He wants to replace grub. He wants to replace a myriad of things that just flat out don't need to get replaced. autofs, cron, you name it! That kind of thinking and one-size-fits-all mentality is backwards and does not benefit the community in any way. All it does is stuff everything into one bin and so long as influencers like this guy continue to restrict what works or doesn't work according to their own work, the community and its users will not be able to freely develop FOSS. Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency on systemd and so when you're trying to use something like Gentoo, it becomes very difficult to get that done and hacks have to made in order to get it working. FOSS shouldn't work like that. He'll keep stripping away legit projects from major distros until IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good. Sorry if I can't rejoice in the woah whiplash.
So, I don't like the guy either, but for a little devil's advocacy:
The stuff that already "just works" was developed during a very different era in terms of computing power, tasking of the computers which were running the systems, etc. Nobody (serious, and he is serious) develops something different because "why not?" they, at least from their perspective, feel that they are improving on the status quo, at least for the use cases they are considering.
one-size-fits-all mentality is
being decided by the distro maintainers, not the developers. Sure, developers promote their product, but if a distro thinks that multiple flavors are a better path, they distribute multiple flavors. It's not like the systemd developers are filling billion dollar war chests with profit because they're using strong-arm tactics to coerce distro maintainers to adopt their products.
stuff everything into one bin
When one bin serves the purpose, it's a lot easier to maintain, modernize, security harden, etc. than ten bins.
the community and its users will ~~not~~ always be able to freely develop FOSS.
Fork it and your loyal users will follow.
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That's the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
FOSS shouldn’t work like that.
FOSS, by its very nature, should be expected to work all the ways. If a particular way can't get enough developer traction, it stagnates but never really dies, not until the ecosystem it is dependent upon can no longer find hardware to run on and users willing to run it.
IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good.
I am very glad that I walked away from CentOS about 8 years back, its proximity to Red Hat never made me happy. I have been trying to walk away from Canonical (toward Debian) for about 3 years now, but it still has some hooks that keep our professional team happier than Debian. If the unhappy ever outweighs the happy, we'll execute the move.
Sorry if I can’t rejoice
Never asked you to. End of devil's advocacy. I still don't like the guy, but I never really interact with him. I do interact with his products and the alternatives, and in my use cases the products speak for themselves. There's nothing about systemd that makes me dig around for systemd free alternatives - they are out there, but for my use cases I don't care. YMMV.
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?
Absolutely. If you don't mind using Gnome exactly as Gnome wants you to - this year - then it's usually a pretty refined desktop experience, but if I wanted to be told what to like, how to like it, and to shut up and be happy, I'd use a Mac.
I prefer XFCE for its modularity... don't want a launcher bar? Don't run the launcher; nothing else misses it when it's gone.
Mess around with Gnome too much and it becomes a nightmare mess of dependencies.
Well, it is not one bin. There is no monolithic systemd bin that does everything. There are a lot of separate bin files for all the different tasks. Well and if you don't want to use timers, then don't and just use cron instead. If you don't want to use journald, then just don't and use rsyslog or whatever you want. Don't need systemd-homed? Well, then don't use it. You want to configure your network with something else then systemd-networkd? Great, do it if you want.
The Poettering Army will not come and force you to enable all the options 😜
If it breaks it is, in my experience as a grub user for over 20 years and as a guy working in server hosting for 15 years, either because of failing HDD/SSD or because of user error. People don't read when the updater tells them that running "grub-install" is needed (or they perform it on the wrong drive/partition) and then blame grub when it fails on the next boot.
The crappy bootloader that comes with systemd very often, in my experience, fails to register that a new Kernel was installed and boots the old one (or fails to boot if the package manager removed the old Kernel).
Oh and GRUB has so many useful features, like booting a ISO image. GRUB is a piece of programmer art!
Even a system that uses 90mb of ram on a cold boot will accumulate gigs of stuff in cache if you're using it. (assuming it has the memory for it) That isn't what people have a problem with though.
Maybe this is an incorrect use of language on my part, but I feel like I'm not the only person who means "memory actively being used by a process" when referring to memory usage. I understand the whole linux ate my ram thing. That just isn't what I or what I assume a lot of people mean when talking about this.
When I boot up my system, pull up my terminal, run htop, and see 800-1200mb being used just by processes (not in buffer, not in cache), that doesn't raise any flags or anything, but I also know that some people have gotten their systems so streamlined they use 10x less than that. That's all memory that could be used by other things. That could be the difference between a low memory system running a web browser or not. Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system. There are endless possibilities.
Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system.
One reality of the world is: the developers choose what hardware/OS configurations they target. If the makers of your game don't target your RAM efficient system, you're outta luck. Developers make their choices for their own reasons, but even with the ever-growing FOSS communities, the majority of developers work for a paycheck, that paycheck comes from profitable businesses and those businesses have very strong influence on what the developers work toward. The businesses only exist because they are profitable... FOSS may not be bound by those realities, but it lives in a world dominated by them.
Because people here accuse Poettering of being an asshole: I've read some of his blogposts and seen some talks of his and him doing Q&A: He answered professionally, did his best to answer truthfully, did acknowledge when he didn't know something. No rants, no opining on things he didn't know about, no taking questions in bad faith.
As far as I can tell all the people declaring him some kind of asshole are full of shit.
He is not that bad, the issue is that, as all foss devs, he is not interested in solving problems he does not feel like are important.
The problem is, he disapproves when resources are allocated in his project to those problems and one main area he is not a fan of is support for legacy stuff.
It just happens that legacy stuff is the majority of the industry, as production environment of half the globe needs to run legacy software and a lot of it on legacy hardware
I have seen with Oracle Java and OpenOffice (as two examples) that the open source community is very good in just leaving and forking a project if the current owners fuck up.
The same will happen with systemd if needed. Red Hat may be the primary source behind systemd now, but they don't own it. All the code is fully open source, none of your ramblings have any hint of facts or any real foreseeable danger behind it. I asked for facts, for anything with some kind of real information behind it.
There is nothing that powers the claim that RedHat or IBM could take over Linux with systemd. How would they do it? They can't, because even if IBM would tomorrow change the license to a closed one and would want money. Who cares, everyone will just fork the version before the license change and good is.
Just as it happened back then with Xorg (I mean the change 15 or so years ago, not the current strange fork), like it happened a short while ago with Redis, and there are so many examples more.
I must assume Gentoo does require manual intervention here and there, and updates must take eternity for packages that are not precompiled, ain't it so?
So, this is kind of an awkward problem, and I think i know the answer but I just want reinforcement before I do anything. My friend recently got me into doing these dip powder nails, and they're super cute. I've been doing them for a couple months now, and I've enjoyed having them.
About a week ago my husband informed me he was interested in trying fisting. Before this we haven't been intimate in probably two or three years.
To be clear, I'm super on board with trying it, I'm looking forward to the intimacy, and I'm aware the answer is probably just "do short nails without glow in the dark shit on them", but is there I way I could tickle his insides without shredding them to pieces with long nails, or any suggestions before diving into this?
Well, generally, the answer is a no. Nails and intestines do not mix well, and once you're past the anus, that's what you're dealing with.
It isn't impossible to modify the nails to be less risky, but never to the degree that I'd be willing to have them up my rear, even if I was into that. There's reasons that nurses and nurse's assistants are often expected to keep their nails short, and that's one of them. We don't go wrist deep, and it's still too big a risk.
Way I see it, you have two options. One is to cut them back to where they don't extend past the end of the fingers, then use two nitrile gloves over your hand that's doing the work. You can still keep pretty nails like that, they just won't be as showy
The other is to take the risk, and wrap the nails in something like gauze, then tape them, then glove up. I've heard of people doing that with no injury, but it is still risky.
If you can't/won't do either of those, call it done and get a fist dildo.
Yeah, I was afraid of that. I'm not gonna risk hurting him, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing another obvious solution i guess. I appreciate it, thanks.
The National Education Association, the United States’ largest teachers’ union, has voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League over the group’s weaponization of antisemitism and attacks on supporters of Palestinian rights.
They take fat from elsewhere in your body and shove it in your ass, if they do it wrong and accidentally hit a vein, it can cause a pulmonary embolism. Even after if the surgery doesn't take the fat in your ass can rot and cause a smell. It's an insane and high risk surgery solely for cosmetics.
My friend was telling me of this, thinking since its crypto related it must be really good. I said this has been around for many years and there are much better solutions than any that Jack is going to come up with to scam us. Have you guys heard of this?
I have to laugh at these tech-bros that actually know nothing, thinking they are great genius inventors. Reminds me of fElon.
Im just skeptical of it, since similar solutions exist with briar, matrix, Irc, signal...sure theyre not all the same, but I fail to see how something a crypto scammer is trying to push could be good.
Piefed has a few extra features that I like and I know that the couple features that are currently missing are on their way. The development team is pretty quick to respond which doesn't affect me a ton but I don't want to support a shitty dev team. Which then lines up with the third big reason, the Lemmy devs are transphobic assholes. If I'm going to be posting a lot then I don't want to be doing it using what they made.
Which then lines up with the third big reason, the Lemmy devs are transphobic assholes.
This is kinda a big deal for me too tbh. Do you happen to know, is there a good (android) piefed app, or is it website only for now? I imagine there'll be some of their aren't already, but my brief play store search wasn't very fruitful.
I don't actually know and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that. I've heard that Voyager has got some early support but I know nothing about any other apps. I'm sorry!
First, don't tell me that the answer is just to "not bottle things up", because that's objectively incorrect too. Society doesn't want you to have any negative emotions. I need to know how to not express negative emotions at all whatsoever unless I'm alone. I know it can be done because it is done in many other people on the planet.
Set and enforce boundaries with everybody in general and specifically for people you feel overstep. Basically either faux-pas or actively try to fuck with or trespass you in any way
Grey rock people who you believe are antagonising you
I'm looking for something in the low hundreds range, mostly to do Visual Studio Code, pretty light html editing, general purpose stuff like Netflix and web browsing.
I'd kind of just like a decent tablet with a keyboard cover. The Pixel tablet might be an option, even if I have to go with something like this.
You can find a used Surface Pro with keyboard cover in your price range. It's a little heavier than your typical Android tablet, but with the Linux-Surface kernel it seems to run pretty well.
Don't even know if you can find them right now, but the Minisforum V3 is a stunner as a dev machine and tablet. Great Linux compatibility (even the fingerprint sensor works), and great design. The only downside is the battery life being about 2-3 hrs. Could probably get 5-6hrs out of the pixel tablet, though Android is awful for actual development.
Honestly? Surface Pro tablets. I have an OG 1st gen one with Ubuntu on it with the Surface kernel and it works fantastic! Just make sure you go with the vanilla Gnome desktop and not Ubuntu's modified version and a better on screen keyboard extension for best results. The default OSK is shit. KDE Plasma is also good but I feel it lacks in stylus support and decent on screen keyboard.
Interesting. I got one from an auction and it seems to work okay. I'll keep an eye out for that issue. I'm wondering if it is because of bad paste between the CPU and heat sink or just poor heat disposal.
From what I understand, the poor heat dispersal slowly fries the power management circuits.
If you don't do anything to taxing with it, it may be fine for a while. Ever since I installed EndeavourOS on it, it's been running cooler - much less system overhead than Windows. Still, I know one day it's bound to fail. 🙁
PieFed.World is still in its early stages, and we still need to port some of our automations we already have in place on Lemmy.World. This includes functionality to inform people about moderation actions taken against them, as well as some other moderation tooling. Administration is currently done by the same team responsible for Lemmy.World, and the same rules that apply to Lemmy.World also apply to PieFed.World.
What is PieFed?
PieFed is a Fediverse/Threadiverse platform similar to Lemmy or Mbin/kbin. You can find a description and feature comparison with Lemmy on their website.
While PieFed has a range of features currently not present in Lemmy, it also is a a lot younger and isn't quite as robust as Lemmy currently is. There are still many bugs and missing features that you will likely run across compared to Lemmy, which will take time to be addressed. PieFed has fairly active development and is seeing a lot of issues addressed fairly quickly, which is especially important recently, as the number of active PieFed instances and PieFed users increased significantly with a range of Lemmy instances opening up PieFed instances as well. PieFed currently does not have proper "stable" releases and no test suite, so it's not unlikely for things to break from time to time. Although 1.0.0 has already been released a while back, there are still too many issues addressed in more recent commits to stay on that version.
As PieFed is part of the same federated network as Lemmy and Mbin, all PieFed communities can be accessed from Lemmy and Mbin, as well as other Fediverse platforms. Likewise, PieFed can access communities from Lemmy, Mbin and other Fediverse platforms. Whether you use a PieFed instance, a Lemmy instance, or an Mbin instance, it does not matter what type of instance the community is on. The software affects your own user experience, but the content is available regardless.
Creation of communities
Creation of communities will be limited to admins for the first week of the public launch. We will reserve this time to allow community moderators of established communities to claim the name on PieFed.World before we open community creation to the public. We will limit this to communities with the same name and at least 2k monthly active users. In case of multiple qualifying communities with the same name on different instances expressing interest, Lemmy.World communities will be given preference, afterwards the number of monthly active users. Please reach out if you'd like to discuss an exception. Requests can be posted in !support@piefed.world. After the first week, community creation will be available to anyone.
Migration of communities
PieFed has a feature to migrate communities to a local instance. We will not be offering PieFed's community migration feature initially.
We still need to research the details of how this works and the impacts this has on federation before we will make a decision on whether will support this in the future. If requested, we may reserve some names for potential future community migrations until we have made a decision to allow community migrations.
This does not prevent you from moving communities in the classic way, by opening up a new community and posting in the old community that people should move over.
Private voting
We had previously disabled private voting for PieFed.World before opening the instance to the public, as the original implementation has a range of drawbacks when it comes to federation, and our team overwhelmingly believed that the individual benefits of private voting did not outweigh the impact this has on the Fediverse beyond the user's instance. Additionally, due to the implementation of that feature, it was also trivial to identify the original voter, which significantly limited the promises of this bringing actual voting privacy.
Since then, the implementation of private voting has been changed to provide the option of federating or not federating votes. While this is more likely to result in vote differences across instances, it does not feed bad information to other instances, which could make it a lot harder for other instances to identify manipulation.
Non-federated voting is available for all PieFed.World users.
Topics
Topics are a kind of "starter packs" or collections grouping multiple communities that people can follow, curated by the admin team. We don't have a clear vision for the structure of these yet.
PieFed supports feeds, which are user-created groups of communities, similar to topics. These are currently in a global namespace and all users can create public feeds in the same shared namespace.
Reputation and vote weight
PieFed has options for admins to treat certain types of content differently for "reputation" calculation, as well as options for weighing votes of specific instances differently compared to others. We currently have all options for treating certain content, communities or instances differently disabled.
How does PieFed compare to Lemmy?
PieFed has various features not present in Lemmy, check out their website!
There is also various functionality that Lemmy has, which you may be missing currently with PieFed for now:
Limited API support
In Lemmy, the default web interface relies entirely on the Lemmy API. This has the major benefit of all functionality available in the default web interface also being available to all third party clients. PieFed currently uses separate code paths and implementations for the default web interface and its API. To make it possible to access functionality in third party apps, dedicated API endpoints have to be created, even if this functionality is already available in the default web interface. This also includes alternative web-based UIs.
Multiple developers of alternative UIs and mobile clients are already working on PieFed support, some already released experimental versions.
Limited availability of Markdown previews
Markdown previews are currently only available in posts. There are many other places that accept markdown, but you can't preview the rendered comment before submitting it. This is tracked in #532.
Image uploads only on post creation
Images can't be uploaded to comments currently. You'll have to host them externally for now. This is tracked in #768.
Autocompletion of users/communities
Usernames and communities can't be autocompleted when typing their names currently. This is tracked in #799.
Limited availability of modlog
Modlog is currently very limited. While there is an instance modlog, there are currently no filters available, so it's not possible for users to see actions taken against a specific user or within a specific community. Community modlog exists, but it is currently only available to community moderators and admins. Filtering modlog is tracked in #846.
Moderator hierarchy
Lemmy has a moderator hierarchy based on the time a moderator was appointed, relative to other moderators in the community. This allows moderators to add other moderators, but they can only remove moderators that were added later than they were. There are a few other actions that check moderator hierarchy as well, including deletion only being possible by the top mod. In PieFed, communities have one or more owners, who can add and remove moderators, while all other moderators are currently on equal level. Community owners currently cannot be changed without editing this directly in the database, if you'd like to change owners in your community please reach out in !support@piefed.world.
Donations
Similar to Lemmy, PieFed development is supported by donations. You can donate to PieFed development through Patreon.
Additionally, we would appreciate donations towards the Fedihosting Foundation, the non-profit organization operating PieFed.World, Lemmy.World, and a range of other Fediverse platforms.
Ugh...this one still frustrates me a lot. If I could wave a magic wand and have a different contributor do two things for the project, animated gifs would be one and a more consistent compact layout would be the other.
Edit: Just want to add that when I was working on the gif problem, I got it working for posts...but you have to click through into the lightbox or to the complete image url...the thumbnail isn't animated. So, I got partway there, but ran into technical limitations of the specific python library being used. Relevant issue.
i just need a good integration between all fediverse services so people would migrate to fedi. lemmy posts with all its replies are still flooding my mastodon timeline rn
Steps to reproduce the problem Subscribe to Lemmy community Wait for new comments Check Home timeline, it's flooded with comments to subscribed communities. Discussion on Lemmy github re. this issu...
I keep thinking that subscribing to communities in mastodon would ideally have the top level posts "reposted" by the community account and the comments on the posts in the replies to the posts. Does it work that way now or no?
still not. that's what i really sad to see, that fediverse really sells about the connection between services (mastodon, lemmy, etc) but the implementation is still not good enough.
piefed does have some social auth support, which is currently also being worked on, but lemmy is not an auth provider that can be used with that. once social auth in piefed becomes more stable we will consider enabling it for supported providers.
Yeah, nutomic and some of their statements were a significant factor motivating my switch from Lemmy to Piefed. I’m glad we have the option here on Blahaj, and shout out to the Voyager dev for adding Piefed support!
Some users don’t want to support a project that’s being developed by people they don’t like.
It’s kind of how some people left Reddit because of Spez, even though the amount of money Lemmy devs make doesn’t remotely compare, and the risk of enshittification/powertripping is minimal due to the whole project being open source.
I personally don’t see it as a huge issue, but I can see why it would be for someone (and I’d definitely see it differently if I was actively supporting the platform through donations).
I think you have misunderstood something. I do not agree with .ml people(tankies and such). And the issue is whether or not a person can just ignore their rantings and simply enjoy Lemmy.world
Definitely. I've been on the Threadiverse for a while now.
The problem is that ML is such a prominent instance and the lead devs are degenerate tankies.
And I don't use the word degenerate lightly or as a generic insult.
Claiming (without irony) that North Korea is good place to live and their political system has been discredited by a vast capitalist conspiracy led by the BIA is a sign of true degeneracy. It doesn't even matter if they are engaging in demagoguery or not.
My point is that .ml is becoming less and less relevant to Lemmy as a whole as time goes on and as more users join the fediverse. New instances are always good but running down perfectly good ones like Lemmy.world is very regressive and that kind of behavior is what I left reddit to get away from.
Nah, that's just going back to my original point. Why I commented in this thread at all. Some people were acting like Lemmy was dead cause .ml devs were douche bags.
I feel like all of this federation is a double-edged sword. Constant evolution and development isn't bad, but maintaining active users while constantly moving from one platform to another is probably going to be difficult too. I know I'm starting to get overwhelmed with it.
nobody needs to move to another platform. both lemmy and piefed show the same content, think of it more like using a different client that also has different features. both lemmy.world and piefed.world will continue to exist.
What I really want out of a federated Reddit-like service is link consolidation. I don't want to see the same link posted on five different communities; I want those to be consolidated into one topic, with the OP text and comments from each threaded below it. It'd clean up the interface and make it work a lot more usefully.
In fact, this would make pretty much everything in the Fediverse better. Let me sort my timeline by URL or hashtag, so that I can see what is being said about a certain thing and not make the same observation or joke that a dozen others already have. Put that functionality into an RSS reader, so that I can see the discussion without leaving the article. Or, even better, merge the two into a single feed, tying threads together based on the URL that's being shared.
Now that would be an "everything app" worth using.
EDIT: Apparently they've already made the first leap there! Everyone's talking about topics and feeds, I didn't know they'd made that advancement. Looking forward to trying it out.
I don't know why piefed.dk isnt on lemmy.wtf sidebar but the email you get upon registration has the lemmy.wtf domain so I guess piefed.dk is from the same team as lemmy.wtf / peertube.wtf
It's pretty critical to topic feeds. The app I'm using doesn't understand the link consolidation thing that Piefed offers, so I'll see 5 of the same post all together in it. Really I just need to start using a PWA instead of the app until Piefed has better app support.
As somebody that has done a lot of recent work on the UI for piefed, I have tried to make sure that it works even at quite small screen sizes. I actually just submitted a couple commits in the past couple hours to make the navbar across the top of communities/feeds/topics flow smoother across different screen sizes. The PWA is so far my preferred way to use piefed.
On Reddit, I kinda get it. You wouldn't want to connect the same link across (for instance) /r/antiwork and /r/conservative; the crosstalk there would get horrifyingly bad. But on a federated platform, when you could have multiple /c/antiworks on different instances, it fragments the conversation.
I never saw any apps implement it, but it does look like it was part of the API, but maybe it wasn't robust enough.
I also know at one point, and possibly still, is that it lacked URL normalization. So for example, exanple.com/headline and example.com/headline#topstory would be treated as two different articles.
The official video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. Never: The Autobiography 📚 OUT NOW! Follow this link to get your copy and listen to Rick’s ...
Oh, interesting. I honestly just glazed over that every time, but you're right that that's a step in the right direction. What I'd really like is for the instance to go the next step further and merge the conversations visually.
So in my mind, at the top of any individual post you'd see the thumbnail and the link title; and then underneath that, as a special-looking top-level comment, it would show the post title and OP text for each incarnation of the post across various instances and communities. The replies to those individual posts are then all rolled up under their top-level comment.
You could roll Mastodon (and other Fediverse) posts in there, too; they would just appear as their own top-level comment, just like replying to Lemmy posts on Mastodon works currently.
I have a novice question that wasn’t addressed in the FAQ: is piefed.world associated with/run by the same people/computers as lemmy.world? Or are they unrelated?
Administration is currently done by the same team responsible for Lemmy.World, and the same rules that apply to Lemmy.World also apply to PieFed.World.
Except even that never happened and it was just overcautious mods dealing with vague ToS. I’m pretty sure the only thing the admins did in that whole issue was make the ToS more clear.
I’d like to see what do you mean about it happening “over and over”.
Pretty much every .world post I see is people complaining about mods, aka not “the people who run lemmy.world”. I had to go back like 4 months to find anything about admins, and tbh it’s kind of understandable.
lemmy doesn't support subscribing to users, but you can subscribe to communities the same way you'd subscribe to other communities from other instances.
Question: is PieFed the new kid on the block? Or has it been around for just as long as Lemmy or even longer?
I just love to see these platforms competing whilst working together, in the sense of adding to eachother, making the entire thing bigger and bigger. I've known for a long time that this is possible, but to see it happen is beautiful. Surely this allows for way more innovation and customization than closed source apps could ever realize. It makes me confident that the Fediverse will flourish, more than it already is.
piefed is a fair bit younger, the first commitin the git repo was on Fri Jul 28 02:07:44 2023 +0000. it has only in recent months started really picking up some traction with several lemmy instances already creating piefed instances as well.
I have never used yunohost before, but ldap was just recently integrated into piefed (that's what chat.piefed.social uses for instance). So the main blocker from that issue seems resolved.
as explained in this post, the original implementation of "private voting" has already been replaced with non-federated voting, which addresses the abuse concerns, as it's then limited to just the instance the votes are cast on.
lemmy currently doesn't have granular federation controls. the only option right now is to defederate from mbin instances, but other instances might still announce your users' votes to mbin instances. the more hacky way would be to also block federation related http requests from mbin instances to prevent them from retrieving user profiles, which is probably the most effective method that could be used.
piefeds non-federated votes are a user setting for the default value and users have the option for each vote whether it should be federated. see also piefed.social/post/982478
Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it's just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I'm excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).
A great addition to the "Threadiverse" in particular, and the larger Fediverse!
I'm building PieFed, an open source federated forum similar to Reddit, Lemmy or Kbin. See https://piefed.social for a demonstration and more info at https://join.piefed.social…
I had sadly the opposite experience as a developer. He bends the rules, the code of conduct to his will so that he stays in the "right".
He disregards any improvements to the codes style ( formatting, styling, linting ) and when you point that out you just get the lemmy devs treatment. I mentioned, the code is a mess. He went on rampage declining any attempts to "untangle" or format the code. And he simply said "Go away and dont come back".
Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.
As only an amateur coder, I can't weigh in how serious the issue is, but I'm gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it'll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.
I've read your interaction with him, and, frankly, if I were moderating a community where you incessantly carried on over insignificant details, continuing to question things after you got your answer (sea lioning), insisting on focusing on nothing, and never ever stopping, I'd block you too, and I've only blocked 2 people in my entire life as a mod.
Now you're in here trying to malign him, for revenge, for shutting you down so he could get work done and he can focus on important work instead of debating you over never-ending trivial topics.
He is the opposite of the image you are trying to give him.
I mean i gave him the changes to his feet and he kicked them away. I know it were small changes but if i have to argue around for 4-5 session to implement basic formatting ( a one and done thing ). I would blick him too.
My understanding is that your one PR broke logins, and it took maybe 5 days for someone else to fix the code? Maybe your changes that were kicked away just weren't so good after all, or trusted?
Ahh yes, that is another risk factor of him. He never tests it. I guess he always goes for guts instincts. ( As there is no CI tests or any type hints ).
And again we speak of FORMATTING pr's those risky formatting pr's i guess he tested that? and somehow found that it didnt worked?
Just to be clear, i fixed a lot of bugs already too. E.g. Mastodon login never even worked ONCE, i implemented that to the end. With his merge first fix later attitude, for little bit more established servers its killing argument: Oh yeah feature X broke because no one tested it before.
My PRs were in good faith. I was ok with constructive feedback ( e.g. change this, change that ) but dismissing ones PR MULTIPLE times. With almost none real reason other than "Opiniated Formatting" ( where none exists )
WASHINGTON—Insisting that he deserved a place alongside the iconic visages of the auto supply company’s founders, President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday adding his face to the Pep Boys logo.
Ubisoft has updated its End User License Agreement, and it’s instructing its users to remove and destroy their games completely should the title be taken offline.
Essentially, the EULA has given Ubisoft free rein on its ability to stop supporting a game, writing: “You and Ubisoft may terminate this EULA at any time, for any reason. Termination by Ubisoft will be effective upon notice to you or termination of your Ubisoft account, or at the time of Ubisoft’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product.”
Interestingly, this isn’t the only company that has the same terms in its EULA. The likes of Capcom, Sega, and even the Oblivion Remaster have the same clause in their terms and conditions, meaning the stipulation isn’t unique to Ubisoft.
The Linux foundation seems ready to finally axe a Microsoft-made remote network protocol for USB that is still a part of modern Windows operating systems.
So if my mint install updates I won't be able to use USB tethering? Is there a way to update my phone to use USB CDC NCM? Or would I have better luck recompiling my mint install to add the standard they just removed? I'm pretty new to Linux (literally made the switch last November) and I sadly have to use USB tethering when my ISP shits the bed with routing to the US
Does anyone have recommendations for some chalk that resists water very well?
I'd love any recommendations of brands, specific chemicals or properties to look for, or maybe questions that I would need to answer about the environment.
I'm planning to use my chalk on my asphalt driveway.
Honestly chat GTP is your friend. Or download an applications like Sim Daltonism that simulate how colors appear to individuals with different types of color blindness.
A.I response.
To understand how a cartoon like Harvey Birdman might look to a colorblind person, it's essential to consider the different types of color blindness and how they affect color perception.
Types of Color Blindness 1. Red-Green Color Blindness: This is the most common form, which includes: * Protanopia: Difficulty distinguishing between red and green hues. * Deuteranopia: Similar to protanopia but affects green perception more.
Blue-Yellow Color Blindness: Less common, affecting the ability to differentiate between blue and yellow colors (tritanopia).
Complete Color Blindness: A rare condition where individuals see the world in shades of gray.
Visual Representation in Cartoons * Color Perception: For someone with red-green color blindness, colors that are typically vibrant red or green may appear muted or indistinguishable. For instance, a bright green tree might look more like a grayish or brownish color, and red objects may blend into greens or browns.
Cartoon Examples: In cartoons, characters and backgrounds often rely on bright, contrasting colors to convey emotions and actions. To a colorblind person, these contrasts may be less pronounced. For example:
A cartoon featuring a red apple on a green background might appear as a grayish shape against a similarly muted backdrop.
Characters with red or green clothing may look similar in hue, making it challenging to distinguish between them.
Oh man, I was freaking out for a second after clicking one of the simulations and seeing no difference from the regular image. Then I thought to check whether NoScript had blocked scripts from the site. Yeah. So, it hadn't loaded the simulated image and I was seeing the original.
Yeah, I saw them in Philly like 5-6 years ago. Brent was getting increasingly agitated with the roadies in between songs. It got to the point where he smashed his monitor to pieces right on the stage. Guy clearly has some issues.
Wow, took them so long to get quote posts. A welcome addition imo (I know there's a lot of controversy around implementing it, but for me, I think I prefer it).
Oh, my understanding is that originally they didn't want quote posts because it could lead to a culture of people dunking on each other and a lot of negativity.
So I believe there was a lot of resistance early on against that feature. That's just what I've seen people saying whenever this feature was requested over the past few years. I could be wrong though.
To my understanding (please take with several grains of salt), some folks felt like it would encourage toxicity since you can essentially mock something someone said without saying it to them directly, while sending your audience to the original post, and I believe for quite some time the plan was intentionally not to add it
On the other hand, I've heard folks suggest that by allowing people to have their own isolated conversation about an idea you can potentially limit some of the harmful consequences of people with large audiences or something, but I don't remember the exact explanation
Personally I'm happy to get quote posts and I'm happy that mastodon is cautious about implementing features that facilitate hostile interactions in the way that major platforms do for engagement
Hopefully someone can chime in with a more informed/detailed explanation, but I thought I'd share what I know in case I'm the only one to reply 😀
thanks. Friendica has it and i dont see people talking down about it though. I also already seen people being that way (it was a conservative using #justsayin afterward, coming from another instance) on a reply, maybe just notify people of quote posts so its not something equivalent to be talking at their backs without them being aware of it, notification could help
I think quote posts are undesirable for the reasons you mentioned but I have to accept that it will be huge for adoption, and the flip side (promoting others work in a positive light) is also going to be really great.
This is fantastic. I REALLY hope you can set a control on a post that allows quoting to be disabled or only allowed by people you follow. A great step in the right direction.
This is the “Emergency Certified” Teacher Facebook group.
These people possibly have bachelor’s degrees, but in subjects completely unrelated to the subjects they will be teaching.
Common complaints are about the tests being too hard (they aren’t, you can memorize the questions on fucking quizlet).
My first year teaching I was pulled aside and told by my principal, “you actually have a degree in this, you’ll have to step in to help your team” - because the other science teachers were a Physical Education teacher and the schools secretary.
But no f-ggots allowed! Being a drag queen on the weekends disqualifies you to be a school principal now, no matter how good you were at it.
I am a relatively new teacher in Oklahoma. In my experience, the teachers I've worked with are a fairly mixed bag. There are absolutely amazing teachers working in Oklahoma that are knowledgeable and passionate about their content areas. I have also noticed a fair amount of teachers that are wildly under qualified or seem to only be in a classroom for the opportunity to take advantage of the system (frequently missing work, not actually teaching their students content, etc.) Oftentimes, though schools don't have many options because they simply need bodies to supervise the students. It is very heartbreaking.
"My first year teaching I was pulled aside and told by my principal, “you actually have a degree in this, you’ll have to step in to help your team” - because the other science teachers were a Physical Education teacher and the schools secretary."
I can relate to this. I'll be entering my 4th full-year teaching. In my short time working in education, I have become the most senior and qualified teacher for my subject and grade level. I do the bulk of the curriculum planning for my subject.
The politics injected into public education via State Superintendent Ryan Walters is absolutely disgusting.
Commercial 3D printers keep getting faster and faster, but we can confidently say that none of them is nearly as fast as [Jan]’s Minuteman printer, so named for its goal of eventually printing a 3D…
First of all, I'm not sure this is the best community for this, so if you think there is a more suitable one, please inform me.
So I've been looking for manufacturers that sell computers with Linux out of the box and I remembered hearing about Tuxedo Computers. Some people seem to really like them, but I've also heard of some people complaining about them too.
And so I've come here to ask this community what are your experiences with this vendor? Is there somewhere else I should look? Thanks in advance.
Describe more about your use-case. Tuxedo is just alright, but a bit overpriced IMO.
The he absolute best performance and value laptop or desktop on the market is going to be a Framework, for instance, but maybe that's not exactly what you want.
Its value proposition is in its repairability and upgradeability. You save money by repairing and upgrading the existing laptop later instead of buying a new one. If you don't like tinkering, its not a great value.
Framework does not provide firmware support. Most framework mainboards only receive one or two firmware updates within the normal lifespan of a device. So if you need a secure bios, framework is not an option.
The actual performance per dollar of framework laptops the day you buy them is poor. A lenovo or a dell will beat it in perf/$ anyday.Frameworks laptops are only attractive perf/$ wise later when you start benefiting from cheap upgrades.
Well this is one of the worst takes I've seen around here 🤣
1) Not sure where you're getting this from. The value comes from buying a known Linux compatible platform at a similar price point to any other manufacturer. The Desktop is the first AMD Ryzen Max+ platform on the market in that form factor, and those chips are well above the performance of any other Ryzen chip on the market. Fair price as well.
2) This comment is disingenuous at best, and just wrong overall. They were slow on their firmware updates during their initial pilot shipments while the platform was still in validation, so they were making delayed changes to firmware in light of that until they cleared that hurdle. Been regular updates since. Also, firmware rarely decides the overall security of a hardware platforms unless known vulnerable portions are found and then intentionally NOT fixed, which is not what happened with all of that.
3) Absolutely wrong. The price point is the same as any other machine in the same segment, which is not the general consumer crap Lenovo kicks out, but the slightly elevated professional segment. If you're not looking for that in a new device, guess what, they have refurbs at have the price. Both conditionals right there completely invalidate whatever point you're trying to make, especially when you're buying for the stability on Linux as OP mentioned, and it's a crapshoot at best with any other manufacturer in their cheaper segments of machines.
I don't know if you're shilling for some specific point here, but you need to get informed.
Not trying to be disingenuous, I have a framework 13 and I love it. Just pointing out some real tradeoffs with it that folks ought to be made aware of.
You can get a lenovo or a dell or something else with the same specs for cheaper if you're willing to give up repairability. I'm not, so I have a framework, but that's not everyone.
For firmware support, the 12 gen frameworks still haven't received a single stable update on Linux since launch despite known vulnerabilities. That's an ongoing issue, its not fixed. For some people in security a critical environments, that's a deal breaker. Similarly the 13th gen only got 1 stable update on linux and the ryzen 300s (which I have now) again have started to get vulns reported but no patches yet.
Most vendors patch vulnerabilities according to the coordinated disclosure, and framework doesn't. Not saying framework is the devil or anything, just that there's a real tradeoff for some people.
Unfortunately no, that is only for installation via windows. There is no Linux updater for it. Still no stable update on Linux for the 12th gen 🙁
Edit: oh nice actually I see they added an EFI updater! That's great progress 😀 so I stand corrected -- 3 years after launch, it got its first and only stable update on linux! Thanks for the correction.
Correct they do not, there are components on some models (like the 12th gen) that they do not support updating using fwupd. You must use either EFI updater or update from windows to get the full update on those platforms.
I have a Tuxedo Pulse 14 gen 3 as my personal laptop, was looking for something with a bit more display resolution than my old 1080p machine, but did not like the price of 4K laptops.
It has been superb for over a year now. Came with Tuxedo's own Linux, which looked pretty but wasn't for me. Installed Arch on it, has been rock solid. Is a great machine for coding on, makes a great job of running Dwarf Fortress and less stressful 3D games - Crusader Kings 3 and Disco Elysium run great, for instance. Battery life impressive too.
Been quite robust, too - heard complaints that the lid can get a bit loose but mine's fine. All the rubber feet have come off the bottom, but that's probably because I use mine on my lap. They prefer that you install their own fan control app rather than eg. just providing drivers so that you can set it up in CoolerControl, but it works fine.
All in all, good machine. Better than the ThinkBook that it replaced, and those are fine laptops.
when i bought one, they were nothing more than re-badged clevo and tongfeng laptops.
that means that they costed a little bit more than windows based laptops with the same specs; but it also means that there was no headaches with hardware compatibility and that the battery life was better if you chose your hardware correctly. (it's also smooth sailing if you pay for the support).
i bought from kfocus most recently and it turns out it's not any different than tuxedo and i suspect that all the linux laptop companies are the same; besides system76 who have started building their own laptops instead of re-badging clevo/tongfeng.
I quite like my Kubuntu Focus. I found some people complaining about the durability of System76 chassis (apparently they're plastic) and that's why I didn't go with them.
I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.
Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.
They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.
I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.
We have a few Tuxedo computers and some other Linux brands at our company and are generally happy about them. Cheaper devices have a less than perfect keyboard (though I liked the one on the slimbook) a worse camera and microphone (though some are very ok).
I'm very happy with these Linux devices. The few makes for which we needed parts also supplied them but sending the device their way for repair took longer than we'd have wanted.
It was a performance monster and still had amazing battery life. But as others have said, they only take some finished Clevo models - like most small distributors, who can't afford their own factory.
But they verify that everything runs with Linux, else they sometimes patch stuff.
And I need to highlight their support! After years with my Pulse 15 the battery became a pillow, because I used a USB C charger that wasn't working right (always switched on and off, which killed the battery) Pretty much without questions asked I got a new battery for free.
Now I have it to my nephew, who enjoys Minecraft on this laptop (still Linux), but the CMOS battery was dead. Got that one for free as well after warranty
So, I can't really complain about them. Actually the opposite.
But I still settled for a Framework 16, because I wanted something different and the models at that time weren't fitting my use case...
It's our Republic and I think while what is happening now is despicable it won't push enough people. Suspending elections. ... That will rouse the nation.
What makes you think suspending an election is going to tip the scales?
Mostly that at least right now there's hope for midterms to change things in Congress and then the presidential election to get Trump out. Right now we still have the trappings of a Republic. I think if elections got suspended all belief in a peaceful solution will be erased and people will react.
You have a point though, bread and circuses go a long way towards kowtowing the population. That and the risk of death at the hands of the state. I don't know where the line is that people will readily accept potentially getting shot especially if they're in white man suburbia.
I know I’m new here, and I understand some may feel unsure about trusting a stranger. But I come to you with my heart open, because we truly have nowhere else to turn.
My name is Britnny, and I’m a transgender woman living in Gorom refugee settlement in South Sudan. I’m here with three other queer sisters women I now call family. Together, we’ve survived what most people couldn’t imagine: daily threats, hunger, violence, and complete abandonment. But now, even survival is slipping out of reach.
The South Sudanese government gave us an order: leave the camp and go to Juba or face arrest. That deadline has already passed. We’re living in terror, unsure when the next knock on the door might come, or when we’ll be dragged out, humiliated, or worse. We weren’t given any help no money, no transport, not even a safe place to go. And for people like us trans and queer women Juba is not safe. We fear being beaten, harassed or even killed in the streets simply for being who we are.
Right now, we’re holding on with nothing. No shelter, no food security, no peace of mind. We don’t need luxuries we just want a chance to be safe. A kind friend who was once in the same camp helped us set up a fundraiser to help us relocate safely and find shelter in Juba. But we need help to make it real. We’re not asking for pity,we’re asking for solidarity, for a hand to hold while we try to escape what feels like a death sentence.
Please, if you can share, donate, or even just boost this message, you could help save four lives. We just want a chance to live. A chance to breathe without fear. A chance to make it to tomorrow.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for not turning away.
I feel for you, but I hope you understand why people are hesitant to trust a stranger on the internet asking them for money. As well this isn't exactly a community designed for that. Wishing you the best.
Loops is still in beta, so there's no other instances yet, but it's gonna use ActivityPub like everyone else does so it can federate with Pixelfed (and probs mastodon). Also, like 90% of Fediverse instances require registration, usually to prevent spam and other crazy shit (CSAM, literal gore, etc.) from being posted. Just gonna have to wait a bit.
I actually agree that registration is silly. It's trivial to create fake email addresses; all it does is present obstacles and slight privacy implications for legitimate users, while forming an incredibly mild speedbump for malicious users. But, it's probably not going away, every little tool in the toolbox that can be deployed by overworked volunteer admins against the unending tide of malicious users trying to make their lives more difficult is probably going to get deployed if it is easy to do.
Didn't realize you just wanted to scroll. Yeah, almost no instance requires registration to scroll. Once again, I think Loops is just requiring registrations now because the project is unfinished, and probably can't handle a large amount of users. They also need easy feedback from users.
Yeah, definitely could be making faster improvements, and it's disheartening considering Pixelfed hasn't had major improvements either. But I'm not a coder, so other than the fact that I donated to the spring Kickstarter, I can't complain much.
It's Dan's whole M.O: he gets excited about some new project, goes on a rushed coding rampage, releases some alpha-quality code, then loses interest and starts the chase for the next shiny toy.
tiktok alternatives would suffer the same problem that shorts and loops do; they are content creator driven platforms so unless you incentivise content creators to move you just get reposts from other platforms or ai generated slop.
Loops, like everyone rightly said, but while this initially peaked my interest, at this point I'm a little skeptical about this project. Dev seems very keen to overhype and tease new features, but usually fails to deliver, like the webUI that was supposed to be days away last year but still doesn't exist. For a fedi platform, not being able to access it via a browser on a desktop is the most bizarre thing to me. I'd hate for fediverse tech to follow this mobile-only trend.
Thinking nothing more wonky than mint/pop!/bazzite/elementary. I know there is never “one” perfect one but feeling like trying something new on this machine that’s at least somewhat push button. Since it no longer receive regular updates from Apple I just want to keep this machine available for use when needed.
I’m pretty comfortable on the above ones I mentioned. I’m not a coder/engineer so I tend to lean heavily on flatpaks and such, though if I have to go into the terminal occasionally I can usually poke my way around
Why don’t you type “MacBook Pro?” I think “MBpro” and “MBP” is probably confusing to people and they might not even know you’re talking about something that isn’t PC/Intel-adjacent.
The only problem I’ve had was the Mac not going asleep properly, and immediately waking up. But that’s something I encountered on other distros including Mint also.
Found a fix for it.
Ctrl key hasn’t been a problem. Often on many distros the old hybrid Nvidia graphics and the old Broadcom card were both problems. But ok on Mint and EOS.
in case you can't stand the snap business go fedora, add rpmfusion and poke around. if everything works, you're set.
two possible issues with resume from sleep. if your wifi won't come back, use the script from t2linux. if your laptop won't wake up expeditiously (takes a while), come back here and ping me and I'll dig up the the script.
stay away from mints and xfces and friends as you need wayland (so, Plasma or Gnome) for fractional scaling, gestures, seamless dock/undock, etc.
I just released the first version of Gosuki, a multi-browser real time bookmark manager I have been writing on and off for the past few years. It aggregates your bookmarks in real time across all browsers and even external APIs such as Reddit and Github.
I was always annoyed by the existing bookmark management solutions and wanted a tool that just works without relying on browser extensions, self-hosted servers or cloud services. As a developer and Linux user I also find myself using multiple browsers simultaneously depending on the needs so I needed something that works with any browser and can handle multiple profiles per browser.
The few solutions that exist require manual management of bookmarks. Gosuki automatically catches any new bookmark in real time so no need to manually export and synchronize your bookmarks. It allows a tag based bookmarking experience even if the native browser does not support tags. You just hit ctrl+d and write your tags in the title.
Feature Highlights:
A single binary with no dependencies or browser extensions necessary. It just work right out of the box.
Use the universal ctrl+d shortcut to add bookmarks and call custom commands.
Tag with #hashtags even if your browser does not support it. You can even add tags in the Title. If you are used to organize your bookmarks in folders, they become tags
Real time tracking of bookmark changes
Builtin, local Web UI which also works without Javascript (w3m friendly)
suki cli command for a dmenu/rofi compatible output
Modular and extensible: Run custom scripts and actions per tags and folders when particular bookmarks are detected
Browser Agnostic: Detects which browsers you have installed and watch changes across all of them
Also handles multiple profiles per browser
Stores bookmarks in a portable sqlite database compatible with the Buku. You can use any program that was made for buku.
Can fetch your bookmarks from external APIs (Reddit and Github for now).
Easily extensible to handle any browser or API
It's open source with an AGPLv3 license, Checkout the README and website docs for more details.
Right now it's not yet built-in but it's on the high priority list of features and should be fairly easy to add soon. It will be either a self hosted sync server or a replicated architecture.
For mobile it can be achieved with the autoimport feature and Syncthing
🔄
This guide describes a workaround for multi-device bookmark synchronization using existing GoSuki features and third-party tools. Native multi-device sync is not yet implemented in GoSuki.
Right now it's not yet built-in but it's on the high priority list of features and should be fairly easy to add soon. I am planning to do it as a self-hosted docker.
For mobile it can be achieved with the autoimport feature and Syncthing
🔄
This guide describes a workaround for multi-device bookmark synchronization using existing GoSuki features and third-party tools. Native multi-device sync is not yet implemented in GoSuki.
Interesting, could be nice to help move away from Firefox Profile by being able to import from it rather than "just" the current installed Firefox instance.
I am not sure I understand the use case but as it stands now you can select a profile and run Gosuki once, it will import everything from said profile or even all profiles if you prefer.
Not yet, it manages snaps but I can add flatpaks as well. I made it so all definitions are in a single file so that people can easily contribute by testing. I will update the documentation to reflect this.
Emerging from the festering depths of the Finnish underground, GRAVE HEX are set to unleash their debut album, “Vermian Death”, on August 22nd, 2025 via Nigh...
The kind if person who would benefit from that shouldn't be using a computer. But then again, most smartphone users shouldn't be using a phone. How about choosing different default settings in an installation based on a central "expert" vs "newbie" setting?
People who find computers useful should be using computers.
This weird idea from some linux users that only people who see their computer as a hobby and have mastery over them should be allowed to use them, and that computers should be designed exclusively around the needs of computer-as-hobby users, is absolutely nuts.
Its a tool. It should be designed to be useful as possible to anyone who needs such a tool.
Sincerely, Another linux user who cares about UI/UX and is tired of this kind of junk. It's a dumb argument, let's all stop making it please. Linux supports all your "technical user" wildest dreams, let the average people have their features and design considerations too.
Its a tool. It should be designed to be useful as possible to anyone who needs such a tool.
Twenty years ago I might have agreed. Now, in hindsight, I can say that giving everyone access to computers & thereby the internet has brought out the worst in humanity, including mass-manipulation and authoritarian regimes thanks to people making even worse calls in elections than they used to.
The devil is in how things are made useful to users who just want to get things done. The problems comes with corporations making decisions about what users should need to understand, and what users want. There's been a lot of dumbing down and manipulation in that process, serving the needs of those corporations and advertisers and not the needs of the users.
Software can be made useful for those who don't want or need to undertand all the details, in a good, non-harmful way. The principle of separation of interface and implementation even demands it. But our society being what it is, that largely doesn't happen, so I'm inclined to agree with your pessimistic take.
I recently installer something, and KDE showed me where it ended up in the launcher, which I appreciated, and now I'm not supposed to use a computer. Really? Thanks.
At least me wife will be happy, but I'll need to find new work.
What qualifies as "expert" setting can be very divisive.. for me, it would be removing this menu entirely. Or even switching from KDE to sway or similar ^^U
But if I was the kind of people that do use this kind of menus I would probably find that kind of indication useful. It helps finding the category the app you just installed belongs to. If you install an educational app/game that teaches programming by giving instructions to a turtle in order to draw a graphic/picture (I think I have seen something like that before): which category should it be at? games? education? development? graphics?
My main point is: If the desktop environment "expert" toggle is set once, gimmicks like this one here would be disabled by default. On a default installation, with the "expert" toggle to "off", those same gimmicks might be enabled by default.
Everything in the desktop is a gimmick... remove all visible things of the desktop and only show apps. Settings can be handled in a text configuration file. Or are some of these gimmicks actually useful, even for "experts"?
I have many times, installing a new app on a Windows Server, just gone in and seen the latest installed app and clicked on it. Sorry, that is my best example as that is where I most often use this feature - I don't install that many apps on my desktops.
If this defaulted to off, then it would actually be useless.
Would just be the other way around with what posts you see online. Instead of OP you'd see "how can I find my newly installed apps" and the same "ahem" screenshot reply.
Except that if people don't know the feature exists, they might not ask about it. If you see the feature exists and you don't want it, it is easier to figure out how to turn it off.
There are many feature that are turned on by default - this is just one of them.
I see plenty of posts here, on the kde matrix, on the kde forums, on the bugtracker asking for non existing features.
I have no clue about the exact percentages, their motivations or feelings, so it's hard to conclude anything.
Personally, I more often ask for nonexistent features (and i feel no barriers there) than turning off something that is on by default - which is a good sign I guess?
But you don’t see all the people that does not ask for features, but could benefit from them. I worked IT support for years and I often suggested features or different workflow to users because I could see they were doing things that could be done easier.
I’m glad there’s a toggle, it seems like it would actually be useful here but I’d probably turn it off.
With that said, there’s a special place in hell for the multitudes of apps that have red notification dots all over the UI with no clear indicator as to what they’re about or how to clear them 😁
I cannot wrap my head around the use case of this. Is the attention span of people really this degraded in 2025 that they need to be reminded what program they just installed?
I think the author has a valid point. This just clutters the UI and adds unnecessary mental load by directing your focus to the indicators every time you open the application menu.
Don't get me wrong, I am not against a "new" label in every context but in this specific case it just feels unnecessary.
*edit: If the use case is: Little Timmy installed a new program on grandmas PC and now she can see the new program better I guarantee you grandma will be super confused when the green dot disappears and from that time on can't find the program anymore. I support a couple of KDE systems with users like Grandma and a dynamic UI like this is contra productive in my experience. For grandma you put the app she is supposed to use in the taskbar as a starter and that's it. No "new" label needed.
Some apps have weird names and I forget what they're called. Showing a "new" badge, even if it's just for the first few times I open the app, makes it more likely that I'll remember the app's name.
Thanks for the reply. Forgetting the name of the application you installed 10 seconds ago was not something I had considered. I wonder if this a common occurrence since this literally never happened to me before.
You can set most KDE menus to show the "Comment" key of the .desktop files instead of the "Name" key. So "KDE Advanced Text Editor" instead of "Kate".
Packages can come with several "programs" that aren't necessarily named the same as the package. Example: Calibre installs menu items for "Calibre", "EBookViewer" and "EBookEditor" on my distro.
It's not about forgetting...it' about helping to quickly find what you just installed and what is all included.
What's the problem here? I said I had never had that problem before and therefor was wondering if that's a common problem users might have. So that would make the feature indeed not as useless as I thought.
I install graphical and visual design apps. And I'll navigate to the category by mouse. I don't memorise the names of all my apps. I'm not in IT, and I'm not working with text all the time. I'll right click the app icon and go 'Add to favourites', so I have a highly productive, 1 click access to important apps. I'm interested in usability, am not a beginner and I know my UI and settings well. I can see why people find this tiny green dot useful. It's OK if you are not into usability. But note that there are many different user types, with different needs at different times. And the flexibility of KDE Plasma makes it a really great desktop environment.
It's more about which category a particular specific software belongs. If a kid installs an educational app/game that teaches programming by giving instructions to a turtle in order to draw a graphic/picture (I think I have seen something like that before). Which category should it be? games? education? development? graphics?
I personally don't use this kind of menus with categories, I prefer dmenu style launchers where you type to search what you need. But if I was the kind of people that do use this kind of menus I would probably find that kind of indication useful.
I was very annoyed when I got this, but remembered that it's KDE, and turning it off is 4 clicks. Proprietary software often doesn't allow you to turn this off (easily). Windows has this "feature", where is the setting?
I don't think it's a productive "feature", but considering it can be turned off so easily I don't consider it a complete showstopper.
The main issue is UX imo. On Windows 11, it's "5 clicks", but you have to open the settings app and find the setting two submenus deep. On KDE, it's right click > configure application launcher > toggle setting > apply.
Yeah, for some reason they've seemed to made it harder to find the actual start menu settings instead of more generic taskbar settings. So that's a fair point.
It sounds like the author of the article is more concerned with the incentive it creates for developers to push useless or sloppy updates ("impact driven development") than the UX.
My understanding is that this only happens in newly installed apps, not recently updates ones. They are only highlighted because the user installed them, not because the developer did anything.
It's a screenshot of the application launcher, the menu to launch apps already installed, not the software store.
Thing like this are why there's a million settings in KDE; every dev is prepared for the inevitable "but I hate it, make it go away" complaint. Granted, this complainer was pretty respectful and threw in a donation to soften the blow. Most people just act entitled, like the dev personally affronted them with their update.
I find this complaint very strange. It's a dot. It helps people find what they installed.
But if this person doesn't need it, how would they ever see it? Most power users I know never even look in the menu, so they would never know there is a dot in the first place.
It's all a show. Some people are just desperate for attention. "Oh, look at me, I'm OCD" as if that makes them cool or something. This person just spent €100 for literally nothing (glad it went to kde of course). Being annoyed by this is, IMHO, very stupid. It's a menu that can't even stay open. Who's sitting there sifting their menu all day long that this bothers them? 😂
I'll never understand why this "new/green dot" thing exist, but I'll also never understand why it would bother anyone. lol. Like, it's in kick-off. How often are you scrolling through kick-off? Does anyone keep that menu open at all times that it triggers your OCD seeing it? Am I missing something? Or is it just people seeking attention?
When I install a new application, I generally run it immediately. Having the new indicator might be nice to help find it - they don't always drop into the menu where I expect.
I agree, I can't see why it upsets the author so much. "You've installed a new app, here it is." "YYYEEEAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!"
On July 8 and 10, hundreds of healthcare workers in Minnesota could go out on strike. They are nurses and physician assistants who are members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) who are upset about what they say is unsafe staffing, as well as …
The Anti-Defamation League has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for forty years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities, often over the objections of students, paren…
It's an implementation of sudo in Rust (because of course) that doesn't implement every nonsense feature of the normal sudo giving it a smaller attack surface than the normal sudo while still keeping the familiar commands and ease of use (that doas is somewhat lacking)
sudo has a bunch of commands and features nobody (except the person who implemented it) has ever used, giving it quite a large surface of attack. doas is meanwhile much leaner and developed by the OpenBSD community, meaning if a feature has security concerns it won't be implemented no matter how practical. sudo-rs somewhat of a middle ground between the two, not planning on implementing every single feature of sudo while keeping the same core commands and implementing the quality of life features doas doesn't like because they're insecure, and is the solution I personally use.
As far as mitigation is concerned, the only thing you need to do is to confirm that your system's sudo version is at least version 1.9.17p1 or later, which can be done with the command sudo -V. If your version is older than 1.9.17p1, update immediately.
Experience a landmark moment in jazz history.This rare, one-hour video captures highlights from the 1989 edition of the legendary Live Under the Sky festival...
Discourse is modern forum software for meaningful discussions, support, and teamwork that gives your online community everything it needs in one place.
Celestial objects known as dark dwarfs may be hiding at the center of our galaxy and could offer key clues to uncover the nature of one of the most mysterious and fundamental phenomena in contemporary cosmology: dark matter.
The 2015 Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius was thought to be the threshold for averting severe climate change impacts.
Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS
Hello, I've been saying it to myself for a year now, but I'm on summer break rn and I really need to do something with my life. Here's some of the software I plan to host. Goal is to not spend more than $150-200, I do have some gift cards though.
Absolutely Will Run:
Nextcloud & Immich - I want to replace Google and OneDrive
Might do in the near future:
Jellyfin - my mom and I usually just bootleg by using Kodi on our FireTV, so not a major need rn, but might be nice for future purposes.
piHole - better overall ad blocking, so I don't have to use nextDNS on all my devices, and maybe help my mom out.
VPN - I currently pay for Proton, and we use it on the FireTV, but it sucks cause it doesn't have killswitch. I have several devices and profiles that I use, so I was thinking maybe just an overall VPN might be nice
Seeding - I think it would be nice to give back to the community, since I torrent every now and then.
OS Plan: I plan to use Proxmox as I have a little bit of experience using it, and others seem to like it a lot for managing multiple software.
I know I don't need to go full power mode rn, so I wanna stick with something low end that I could maybe upgrade in the future. Should I just buy a used laptop/PC, or get like an Optiplex or ThinkServer? I don't wanna rack up my parent's electric bill. I already got some hard drives a year ago, so but is using an external drive bad?
I know to use the Ethernet ports so my signal isn't shit, but I gotta work out the best spot I can put my server. I do know an okay amount of networking knowledge, and I'm a cyber student anyway so this is like a fun yet educational personal project for me.
When it comes to external access and security of these services, should I stick with Tailscale? Some people have concerns over the proprietary bits and are using headscale instead I guess.
If you really want something upgradeable, used enterprise SFF is the way to go: discountelectronics.com/
However, the hardware market is in a weird spot right now; you’ll get far more bang for your buck with an Intel N150. You can find a 16GB DDR5 w/ 1 TB SSD around the $200 mark, and that’s what I’d roll with in your shoes, assuming you don’t mind living without a spinning disk. Your Jellyfin and Immich instances will run far smoother.
The ocean around Antarctica is rapidly getting saltier at the same time as sea ice is retreating at a record pace. Since 2015, the frozen continent has lost sea ice similar to the size of Greenland.
So this has been annoying me lately; drivers leaving excessive spacing when stopped for a red light. I get it, you don't want to be right on the next guys bumper, you should leave space to escape if the guy in front stalls or somebody tries to carjack you. But 2-3 car lengths? It really bugs me when they do it in a left turn lane causing a back up to the travel lane resulting in overall congestion. Or, if they're first at the light, they don't pull up far enough to reach the road sensors that trigger a light change. I haven't been able to isolate to a specific demographic, seems to be young, old, black, white, you name it. Maybe they're just stoned at the wheel. I'm tempted to roll down my window and ask 'wtf'? I'm in the Northeast US. Has anybody else witnessed this?
"Space ice" contains tiny crystals and is not a completely disordered material like liquid water, as previously assumed, according to a new study by scientists at UCL (University College London) and the University of Cambridge.
Neither of the people mentioned in the article said anything wrong. Fucking babies can't handle getting what they voted for. They love dead kids anyway, what the fuck is the problem?
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and it's basically the same thing, just faster since it uses native packages instead of Snaps. Ubuntu might as well run all it's apps in Docker containers.
You could rebrand Debian to Ubuntu and most users wouldn't even notice.
Arch requires reading the manual to install it, so installing it successfully is an accomplishment.
It's rolling release with a large repo which fits perfectly for regularly used systems which require up-to-date drivers. In that sense it's quite unique as e.g. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has less packages.
It has basically any desktop available without any preference or customisations by default.
They have a great short name and solid logo.
Arch is community-based and is quite pragmatic when it comes to packaging. E.g. they don't remove proprietary codecs like e.g. Fedora.
Ubuntu is made by a company and Canonical wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best. This makes them develop things like snap to work for them (as it's their project) instead of using e.g. flatpak (which is only an alternative for a subset of snaps features). This corporate mindset clashes with the terminally online Linux desktop community.
Also, they seem to focus more on their enterprise server experience, as that is where their income stream comes from.
But like always, people with strong opinions are those voicing them loudly. Most Linux users don't care and use what works best for them. For that crowd Ubuntu is a good default without any major downsides.
Edit: A major advantage of Ubuntu are their extended security updates not found on any other distro (others simply do not patch them). Those are locked behind a subscription for companies and a free account for a few devices for personal use.
Not really with archiinstall, but indeed as you say reading the manual is an expectation. Their philosophy is "creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools", as well-summarized by Wikipedia.
wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best
tbh that goes for every distro. It's just that Canonical is more hands-on with its approach. The major complaint with Snap besides performance issues is Canonical making it so that only the Snap versions of popular apps (most famously, the bundled Firefox) are available by default.
I don't know about everyone else, but the last couple of years has had the most unstable Ubuntu releases, with the most unrecoverable releases when issues happen.
I've since moved to Fedora for desktop and straight Debian for server.
I used it a little way back in 2005-2006ish, and decided to give it a try again after a third reinstall of ubuntu within a year last year.
though, I'm about to get a "new" laptop and may toy around with Arch on the old one. I had previously tried setting up Arch in a VM but that's not supported and ended poorly.
I don't really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:
I'm a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.
Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it's trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.
Arch isn't particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.
As to why particularly Arch? I think it's just that level of control. I admit it's not for everyone, but again, if you're at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.
Arch has a very in-depth wiki that's the go-to resource for a lot of Linux users, and it offers a community-driven way to have access to literally anything that's ever landed on Linux ever through the AUR. It's also nice to have an OS that you never have to reinstall (assuming all things go well).
Why that turned into such a cult-meme is anyone's guess though.
The way I see it, you can have an OS that breaks less often and is hard to fix, or an OS that breaks a little more often that is easy to fix. I choose the latter. 99/100 times, when something breaks with an update, it's on the front page of archlinux.org with a fix.
The problems I've faced with other distros or windows is the solution is often "reinstall, lol", which is like a 3 hour session of nails on a chalkboard for me.
How user friendly is the installation process? I've never tried, so I don't know. I'm curious now; just based on how people talk about it, I always perceived it as as distro that requires a lot of technical knowledge to use like Gentoo, which I unsuccessfully tried to install way back in 2010. I'm more knowledgeable and patient these days, so I may be able to work with arch.
You can use archinstall and it is dummy simple. Just have another computer or phone around to look things up and go down the menu like a checklist. My admittedly limited arch experience has so far been "run archinstall, use pacman to install tools as I run into things I'd like to have". I have a Framework 16 with the built in GPU, I imagine some hardware complicates this process but just look stuff up it's all out there unless you're on some really wild hardware. Even without archinstall you can follow the arch wiki and you're basically replicating what the tool does but using the wiki as your checklist and needing to type more
This is it mostly for sure. I used to be that True Linux Enjoyer. I still install arch sometimes but I only ever use an arch-derived distribution now that comes with an installer. I already feel like there’s not enough time in the day without having to manually copy files off a USB stick
Well, Ubuntu uses Snap, which is a rather poor packaging solution that basically no other distro has adopted. By default it's a little bloated, it's made some controversial decisions (rust coreutils), and other distros just do what Ubuntu does better (like Mint)
To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn't use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.
One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.
I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the "True Linux Explorer", but the wiki outage accelerated it.
People that got into Linux when most of the main distributions were easier to install than windows in most cases. Some people wanted to show off that they can install a Linux like it was when we did it back in the 90s for some reason I still don't understand till this day. I do like their wiki though. Works great for debian as well as arch.
I've been a slackware user since the late 90s. I take for granted how easy it is to install today. I've been tinkering with a socket 7 build, and nothing is easy. Installing slackware 8 is a pain in the ass. I can't even get half my hardware working on win95! It's not like riding a bicycle.
It's funny because I see the same cult behavior, but for Fedora. I've never understood the point of this distribution that has never worked well for me.
I'm on Manjaro by the way, because I love everything about Arch except the release style.
Funnily enough, I feel the opposite. Manjaro never worked reliably for me, but Fedora works great for my use case. Is it perfect? Fuck if I know. But it's a good, no-nonsense, extremely low maintenance, super reliable distro that I use daily with zero issues.
Also, they pioneered the atomic distro concept that has amazing use cases, and some fantastic projects are based on this technology. My gaming PC runs Bazzite for a zero-maintenance, immediate gaming experience. My dads laptop runs Bluefin and he hasn't broken it yet, and he's capable of breaking every single OS.
That said, never heard of fedora being a cult at all. Hell I feel it gets far less recognition than it should honestly for being cutting edge and stable.
But you're still getting updates every day, just two weeks later than Arch. The "testing" is just two other branches somewhat closer to the Arch package releases.
I'm using Fedora, but I'm not going to say it's my favorite. I liked MX and OpenSUSE a lot. Just had a hard time with running them on a computer. Fedora just worked out the box.
When I got fed up with windows 8.1 (and windows update bricked it), I first used ubuntu. How well or not it worked depended on the version. In version 19 it got some ugly white message boxes. I searched for how to change their color and found an angry dev saying no you cant change that. This was the final bullshit. Then I switched to arch, which lets me choose how my stuff looks and doesn't have the whole 3/4 versions are buggy thing. It works and ubuntu does not.
Arch is amazing for what it is, hence the love. It’s what you make of it; by default there’s nothing and you design your own system from scratch. This leads to a very passionate and enthusiastic community who do great work for one another, for everybody’s benefit. Anything under the sun can be found in the AUR, the distro repos are fresh and reliable, and every issue that arises has a hundred people documenting the fix before it’s patched.
Ubuntu has a bad reputation for inconsistency, privacy invasive choices, etc. I don’t think all the hate is deserved, as they corrected course after the Amazon search fiasco, but I still won’t use it because of Snaps. They have a proprietary backend, so even if I wanted to put up with their other strange design decisions I can’t unless I wanted closed source repos. That goes against my whole philosophy and reasoning for being on Linux to begin with, and many feel the same.
Normal people who use Arch don't bring it up much, because they're all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.
The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.
Unity would be the first example, and although Unity was actually a good DE, it was too bloated and almost non-modifiable.
People jumped ship to Linux Mint that had its priorities straight.
Mir and Snap were bigger issues though as Wayland and Flatpak were great replacements for X11 and AppImage and did not need another competitor.
But the privacy issues were the straw that broke the camel's back. People left windows for linux so they wouldn't have to deal with this kind of nonsense.
I actually jumped when Ubuntu jumped to Gnome 3. Gnome 3 was too bloated for me and it looked ugly.
I decided to see what Arch Linux was about and eventually settled for Manjaro Linux. Arch + Xfce for the win.
I left Ubuntu after Unity, it could have been the greatest thing ever, but Canonical deciding what was best for me felt too much like Microsoft just shoving whatever garbage they wanted to my system.
I'm quite experienced in Linux but I wouldn't use either. Arch is great if you like to tinker, Ubuntu sucks for the not so libre approach , corporate ties, telemetry etc. I distrohopped before but today I just install my debian based distro and shit works.. Ubuntu I've installed twice before when I was new to Linux, and have had a major issues every time due to official updates that broke internet drivers and other things, that's a fun one when you only have one PC . Not to mention its so bloated that shitty computers that I like to thinker with it have a hard time catching up. The arch thing is also mostly a kind of meme, targeting the more unbearable nerds. People I hated when I was a noob (they will let you know you are) But they are found everywhere and in general I don't think there's more of those people in arch community than anywhere else. It's more of a stab at elitism than arch specifically.
I feel like it isn't really specific to arch, every distro has a following, but some are more "passionate" about it than others. I think arch, NixOS, and gentoo are the most notable.
It has: - a great wiki - many packages, enough for anything you want to do - its the only distros that is beetween everything done for you and gentoo-like fuck you. - and the Memes.
While Ubuntu is a desktop distro that does server too and shove their snaps in your face, even though they're slow to use and bound to their (proprietary?) server.
the wiki ~~and forums~~ are the best of any distro
If you don't participate in it that is. If you veer only a little off of their strict rules, then Arch forum will ban you and they won't allow you to even read the forum.
pacman, seriously, I don't hear enough of how great pacman is. Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message "lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found". I haven't had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don't have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I'm lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
Hmm, finding what package a file is in is absolutely possible on Ubuntu/Debian too. You can use the online Ubuntu/Debian packages search, or use apt-file.
The packages don't exist on Debian, they'd need to be built from source. Dependencies are a bitch on Debian (apt will remove things by itself). That's why I like the AUR.
"I run Arch btw" became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. "Look at my l33t skills."
Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical...well...petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They're increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole "Not Invented Here" thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they're still clinging to.
For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.
I left Ubuntu for Arch because I got sick of Arch having everything I wanted and Ubuntu taking ages to finally get it. I was tired of compiling shit all the time just to keep up to date.
Honestly glad I made the change, too. Arch has been so much better all around. Less bloat and far fewer problems.
I installed arch before there was the official install script. It's not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)
All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you
IMO Despite some unjustified rumors Arch is a very stable distro. For me it feels the same as Debian stability wise while still being on the cutting edge side. The Arch wiki is the second most important reason.
The problem there is that stable vs unstable distro uses a slightly different meaning of the word stable than you would use to talk about a stable vs unstable system.
In distro speak, a stable distro is one that changes very little over time, and an unstable one is one that changes constantly. That's sort of tangentially related to reliability, in that if your system is reliable and doesn't change then it's likely to stay that way, but it's not the same thing as reliability.
I think Arch is so popular because its considered a middle of the road distro. Even if not exactly true, Ubuntu is seen as more of a pre-packaged distro. Arch would be more al a carte with what you are actually running. I started with Slackware back in the day when everything was a lot more complicated to get setup, and there was even then this notation that ease of access and customization were separate and you can't have both. Either the OS controls everything and its easy or you control everything and its hard. To some extent that's always going to be true, but there's no reason you can't or shouldn't try to strike a balance between the two. I think Arch fits nicely into that space.
I also wouldn't use the term "cultists" as much as "aholes". If you've ever been on the Arch forums you know what I'm talking about. There is a certain kind of dickish behavior that occurs there, but it somewhat is understandable. A lot of problems are vaguely posted (several times over) with no backing logs or info to determine anything. Just "Something just happened. Tell me how to fix it?". And on top of that, those asking for help refuse to read the wiki or participate in the problem solving. They just want an online PC repair shop basically.
I'm not sure either. I think arch used to be one of the less popular distros (because of the more involved install process, solved now by the arch-based distros with friendly installers), despite having some of the best features, so it required more "evangelism", that's unecessary now. Arch-based distros are now some of the most popular ones, so its not necessary.
Others have commented on why its so great, but the AUR + Rolling releases + stability means that arch is one of the "stable end states". You might hop around a lot, but its one of the ones you end up landing on, and have no reason to change from.
That is the main reason I use Arch. I am not a Linux expert but I am able to solve most of my problems reading the wiki. I used to use Ubuntu and Mint but those ended with me copy pasting stuff into the terminal and not really learning anything. When I switched back to Linux this time I went with Arch.
Because there are still people who have not yet seen the light. Once everyone has joined the fold they will not be able to remember why anyone resisted in the first place.
I think so. I lost count of the little things, it really was death by a thousand paper cuts.
I was a pretty rabid fan of Ubuntu, still have an x86 and ppc CD of 5.04 somewhere.
But by the time snaps started appearing, and then Ubuntu pro, Ubuntu decided to revert some of my customized configs in /etc after an upgrade, I had had enough. When snaps were reinstalled after an upgrade in 2021, I just flipped over to Debian, which has come a long way in being usable out of the box.
There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.
Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.
In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.
Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.
There's also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.
And the Amazon "scandal".
And then there's the telemetry stuff.
Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him... unapproachable and edgy.
Nix is great but not the saving grace I thought it would be. I daily it. Like it. Run cinnamon coming from Mint. But to be fair. It takes real effort and time to setup your config file, comment it thoroughly and then master the system. Once it's fully automated backups and all you can hop machine to machine and it's like you never left your OG machine. There's pros and cons for sure.
And here I am, just planning on going to Mint or something whenever win 10 support finally actually ends. I had Ubuntu like 15 years ago for a while, but I'm at a point where I want to do less learning about my operating system.
I have been using ffmpeg to convert audio files to MP3 format for my commercial web service and have found out that ffmpeg is no longer available in my version (12.
I've started with ubuntu/mint and it was always a matter of time before something broke then i tried everything from then all the major distros and found that I loved being on a rolling release with openSUSE Tubleweed (gaming and most new software works better) and BTRFS on Fedora (BTRFS let's you have boot time snapshots you can go back to if anything breaks).
After some research I found I can get both with arch so installed arch as a learning process via the outstanding wiki and have never looked back. Nowadays I just install endevourOS because it's just an arch distro with easy BTRFS setup and easy gui installer was almost exactly like my custom arch cofigs and it uses official arch repos so you update just like arch (unlike manjaro). It's been more stable than windows 10 for me.
Tldr: arch let's you pick exactly what you want in a distro and is updated with the latest software something important if you game with nvidia GPU for example.
I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.
When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, "humanity towards others" etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.
The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn't really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don't get why people would use it.
Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don't do this bullshit.
Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn't have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.
I don't really understand either. Where are the Gentoo and LFS elitists? It seams like there should be more of those than arch elitests. Maybe it's just because more people use arch.
At the time, canonical was throwing its weight around and essentially bullying Debian upstream repos. Around this time, there was a mass exodus of the Debian leadership over this kind of thing.
The old guard of Debian wasn't as... enthusiastic about systemd either, but look what they use now.
Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it's missed on other replies.
I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that's right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I'm talking about the original ncurses installer here).
After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with "I use arch BTW", which meant you didn't need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.
Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of "it doesn't happen on my distro" effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.
This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the "I use Arch btw" replies and thought they meant "I know more than you because I use Arch", so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using "I use Arch btw".
That's when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn't break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn't help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren't cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.
At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I've tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it's a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it's also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other "noob" distros because at the end of the day it's all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).
As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same "I use Arch btw" guys dumping on Ubuntu for being "noob", other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.
I used Ubuntu as my first distro out of curiosity sometime around 2006. I've tried others (Mint, Pop OS, Debian, Fedora) but mostly settled with Ubuntu because it was just kind of ok for me and as another user said, there was a lot of articles that helped with getting things working because it became popular.
I had heard of Arch and to your point the it's complicated thing very much kept me away from it even though I have been using computers for around 30 years and was comfortable using a terminal.
The other thing is gaming, I consistently had problems with the nvidia cards that I've had over the years and never really cared to dig into trying to get things to work so Linux was kind of my testing ground for other things and just general learning about how things work.
Then I finally just had enough of Windows a couple of years ago, and with gaming support getting better I went back to Ubuntu and it just didn't feel good, I wanted something different that was setup how I wanted it so I looked into Arch.
I tried a couple of times to manually install it but my attention span (ADHD) kept me from focusing on the documentation enough to actually learn what I was doing. In comes the archinstall script, it was basic enough for me to follow and understand to get my system up and running.
I went through roughly 3-4 installs using it and testing stuff after I had it running and breaking stuff and just doing a fresh install since the script made it very easy. Since then I have learned a good bit more, and honestly don't think I will ever use another distro for my desktop. Just the ability to make it exactly what you want and things just work. Not to mention the documentation is massive and the AUR is awesome.
I do use Pop OS on my wife's laptop since it decided to automatically upgrade to W11 which crippled it and I just wanted something that I could just drop on there that would work with no real configuration since the only thing it needs is Citrix which works ootb and she can use all her office tools through that and has libre office if she wants to do something locally.
I do have a separate drive with W11 on my desktop, its used for one thing, SolidWorks. Which I use enough to merit having windows.
Arch was and still kind of is seen as the "I use Arch BTW" crowd, but it really shouldn't be that way. The install script isn't fancy, but it works. I think that would be one of the biggest barriers to break that mindset and open it to more people that are still fresh to Linux. I think that having even the most basic "GUI" for installing Arch would do wonders.
I don't use either now. I have tried both. When I started with Ubuntu i was great; fast, light, all the good stuff. Then it started to get bloated and wouldn't run on my old machine... So I moved to Arch and it saved me and I used it for years.
My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.
That's why I have issues with many of the "easy" distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste. Don't take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all. I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.
I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.
That's why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch is not easy, that it doesn't try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system do behave that way.
Ubuntu? Its a can't make up its mind what it is trying to be while always becoming a crashy mess. When it first came out I remember trying it and immediately broke it.
The last time I installed it recently it had issues out of the box.
I have a similar need for a "niche" install. I need Arch for it. I'm doing a laptop installation with LUKS2, TPM2, Secure Boot, systemd-boot with UKI, BTFRS, Apparmor and it has a Oculink eGPU dock station.
I wonder if it's just me or if other people who were around before Ubuntu feel the same way but the reason I hate Ubuntu is that it seemed to take over the Linux world.
A lot of the information about how to do something in Linux was drowned out by how to do it in Ubuntu. When searching for information you have to scroll down in the search results for something that sounds unrelated to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu material was often titled "how to do it in Linux" and you thought you had a good long tutorial until you read a few paragraphs in and realized it was for Ubuntu and wouldn't work for you for whatever reason.
Even some software that says it's available on Windows and Linux just means they have a Ubuntu package and if you're really good there's a chance you might be able to figure out how to use it on a non Ubuntu system.
It's like when Ubuntu came out, people just assumed that Linux was Ubuntu. I've never used Ubuntu so a lot of the information I've came across regarding it has just been in the way of me finding useful information.
Arch has a cult like following because it emphasizes simplicity and customizability. If you have the time to fully administer your own system, there is no better choice.
Ubuntu is corporate, frequently out of date, and sometimes incompetent. They got big a long time ago when they were a significantly easier option than their competitors, but I really don't think there's compelling reason for a new user to install Ubuntu today.
To add to the arch management, after a while you learn the golden rule - set it and don't fiddle with it too much. Nowadays there is very little maintenance to it. I run an update followed by shutdown. Once every 2-3 months there is some issue, that takes a forum search to fix and once a year it breaks to the level where I need about half an hour to an hour to fix it.
Maybe it's masochism, but I like Arch because it forces me to make mistakes and learn. No default DE, several network management choices, lots of configuration for non-defaults. These are all decisions I have to make, and if I try to cut corners I usually get punished for it.
However, I think the real reason I stick with arch is because this paradigm means that I always feel capable of fixing issues. As people solve the issues they face, forum posts and wiki articles (and sometimes big fixes) get pushed out, and knowledge is shared. That sense of community and building on something I feel like Arch promotes.
For me, Ubuntu is ugly as all hell and comes with so much I dont need. It also ran slow on the first machine I ever installed it on. I like Arch because I got my feet wet there. It was my classroom.
Last time I used EndeavourOS, I managed to get the graphical installer to install BTRFS on LUKS, it did require custom partitioning in the graphical installer, snapper just worked after that.
Zram (or was it Zswap?) was pretty easy to enable after installatiok
The bootloader might be beyond what the graphical installer can do though... I never really bothered switching...
The Arch users being so vocal is more of a trope to me. Never fails to make me smile.
Ubuntu started as a great endeavour. They made Linux much more approachable to the less tech inclined user.
It is an achievement to get a distro capable of basically work out of the box that hides the hard/technical stuff under the hood and delivers a working machine, and they did it and popularized Linux in the process.
Unfortunately, they abused the good faith they garnered. The Amazon partnership, their desktop that nobody really enjoyed, the Snap push. These are the ones I was made aware of but I risk there were more issues.
I was a user of Ubuntu for less than six months. Strange as it may sound, after trying SUSE and Debian, when I actively searched for a more friendly distro, I rolled back to Debian exactly because Ubuntu felt awkward.
Ubuntu is still a strong contributor but unless they grow a spine and actually create a product people will want to pay for, with no unpopular or weird options on the direction the OS "must" take, they won't get much support from the wide user community.
I don't know if that ever was true but I definitely disagree with that nowadays because Arch is in my opinion significantly more approachable and easier to daily-drive than Gentoo.
GrapheneOS is currently under a state sponsored attack attempting to misrepresent it as being for criminals, which we covered a bit at grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/…. These poorly researched, biased and inaccurate news stories have led to more harassment towards our community and team.
These attacks are taking a multi pronged approach including pushing existing fabricated stories and harassment towards our team. We'd appreciate if our community was more active than usual in debunking misinformation and attacks on our team. It's a very abnormal wave of attacks.
European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals. GrapheneOS is opposed to the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone.
Los Google Pixel son los máximos representantes de Android, con permiso de Samsung. Es por ello que convencen a los usuarios entusiastas del sistema...
GrapheneOS based on Android 16 has been through extensive public Alpha/Beta testing and should reach our Stable channel today. We'll continue fixing various upstream Android 16 regressions such as the back button issue impacting the stock Pixel OS we fixed in our latest release.
July Android Security Bulletin will likely be published today. We obtained early access to the signed partner preview and confirmed no additional patches were required, so we set the 2025-07-01 patch level last month after we backported Pixel 2025-06-05 driver/firmware patches.
Tomorrow will likely be the first monthly update of Android 16 with a new Android Open Source Project and Pixel stock OS release. We won't need to backport Pixel driver/firmware patches since we're on Android 16 and can simply incorporate and ship the monthly update within hours.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to backport driver/firmware patches due to dependencies on the new major release. We were only able to backport everything required for the 2025-06-05 security patch level because Android 15 QPR2 is much closer to Android 16 than Android 15.
After our Android 16 port was completed yesterday, we started fixing an Android tapjacking vulnerability disclosed last month:
We have a fix implemented and it will be included in our next release, likely with the monthly Android 16 update tomorrow.
This vulnerability was disclosed to Google in October 2024 and Android still hasn't fixed it. Security researchers should report vulnerabilities to GrapheneOS in addition to Google. This now joins our many other GrapheneOS exclusive fixes for serious Android vulnerabilities.
We've decided to make another release today with our fix for the Android tapjacking vulnerability because we need to fix a DisplayPort alternate mode regression specific to 8th generation Pixels which doesn't impact 9th generation Pixels.
partially revert upstream changes in Android 16 breaking parts of the lockscreen layout including the date and media info
Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL: add back feature declaration for Pixel Thermometer support lost in our Android 16 device port migration which prevented fresh installs of the app
Terminal (virtual machine management app): disable VM console feature since it isn't supported by the stable release of Android 16 outside of debug builds and trying to use it breaks installing the new images (the feature can be enabled once the core OS supports it in production builds)
update Pixel HAL compatibility matrix version numbers for Android 16
add lockscreen synchronization failsafe to protect against unknown vulnerabilities
improve code quality and add unit tests for our strict CVE-2024-50089 protection
kernel (6.6): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 6.6.94
fix port of our 2-factor fingerprint authentication tests to Android 16
GrapheneOS based on Android 16 is now available in our Beta channel. There are 2 main known issues which will be fixed in the next release: lockscreen date and media info are not properly displayed due to an upstream AOSP bug and Pixel Thermometer doesn't appear in our App Store.
Last month, we provided the 2025-06-01 Android/Pixel security patch level early in the month before the stock OS release as preparation and then backported Android 16 firmware and kernel/userspace driver patches to provide the 2025-06-05 Android and then Pixel patch levels.
Our 2025062700 release raised the overall patch level to 2025-07-01 since we got early access to it with a verifiable signature and know we already provide the patches. We usually do an early Android Security Bulletin release before the stock OS but it was done for July in June.
Android Security Bulletins are backports of High/Critical severity patches to older Android. Starting this month, the initial release of Android 16 is one of those older releases. It's split into AOSP userspace patches (YYYY-MM-01) and driver/firmware/Linux patches (YYYY-MM-05)
YYYY-MM-05 patch level has a device-specific portion with more driver/firmware patches. For Pixels, it's the Pixel Update Bulletin. Most Pixel Update Bulletin patches aren't specific to Pixels but the Android Security Bulletin doesn't cover Samsung cellular, Broadcom Wi-Fi, etc.
Pixel Update Bulletin patches are what we had to backport to Android 15 QPR2:
These were for firmware/drivers/services for Samsung cellular (including the Radio Interface Layer), Broadcom/Qualcomm Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, NVT touchscreen, fingerprint and TPU.
The only part truly specific to Pixels was the TPU patch. Bear that in mind when you look at those Pixel Update Bulletins. Other devices are meant to have their own bulletins covering the same things if they use those components and also further patches. It's fully up to OEMs.
Android Security Bulletin (ASB) is published on the first Monday of the month unless it's a US/Google holiday in which case it gets pushed ahead a day or two. The Android release for the month is a separate thing from the ASB backports, usually published the day after the ASB.
ASB is likely July 7 and the Android OS release is likely July 8. Our aim is to have Android 16 in our Stable channel prior to July 8 so we can ship the initial monthly update to Android 16 instead of needing to backport Pixel Update Bulletin patches which could be infeasible.
Each month, Android has a new stable OS release. It's a monthly, quarterly or yearly release. Quarterly and yearly releases move along the development branch about the same amount and have a similar amount of changes. Those have months of public Developer Previews / Betas first.
Pixels ship the latest monthly, quarterly and yearly release each month. Non-Pixels ship an initial yearly Android release and then only Android Security Bulletin backports until they ship the next yearly release. ASB backports are a subset of the AOSP patches, not all of them.
GrapheneOS needs to follow the stable releases in order to provide the full AOSP privacy/security patches. It also needs to keep up with them in order to ship Pixel driver/firmware patches which are made for the latest stable release, but we'd still need to do this on non-Pixels.
fix upstream Android 16 issue causing very large Binder transactions due to the size scaling based on the number of apps installed across all users including base OS apps
reduce virtual memory reserved for Binder buffers back to 1MiB now that we have a direct fix for the upstream issue causing more to be required and using a larger virtual memory reservation size appears to have a small chance of failing
revert our fix for a screenshot process crash that's now fixed upstream in Android 16
Android regularly adds and splits permissions for new API levels. Legacy apps are handled by treating them as requesting the permission to provide a toggle for it. For example, Android 13 converted the existing toggle for disabling notifications for an app into a new POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission.
The Android Open Source Project has infrastructure for this since it's a regular part of the app sandbox and permission model improving. We add Network and Sensors permission toggles in GrapheneOS where Network is based on the existing low-level INTERNET permission and Sensors is entirely new.
Nearly all apps are unaware of these non-standard permissions just as they're unaware of new permissions added by Android before they get upgraded. Therefore, we enable them by default for compatibility but provide the ability for users to disable them at install time like the standard permissions.
For Network, apps request INTERNET, so we provide a toggle for rejecting that request in the initial app install dialog. If it's added in an upgrade, it's disabled by default. For Sensors, apps don't request it so we handle it similarly to how Android handled POST_NOTIFICATIONS for existing apps.
When Network is disabled, we act as if the network is down for compatibility. We won't run network-dependent jobs, various APIs will report it as down and we give errors matching it being down. When Sensors is disabled, sensors not covered by standard permissions give zeroed data and no events.
For usability, apps trying to use those sensors when Sensors is disabled will trigger a notification from the OS which can be disabled on a per-app basis. This informs users about what's going on so they'll know the app is either doing something sketchy or that it may actually require it.
F-Droid has an incorrect approach to installing apps which wrongly warns users about the standard Android POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission, our OTHER_SENSORS permission and previous Android permission additions/splits. They wrongly blamed GrapheneOS and didn't fix it:
They're now realizing that it happens with standard Android permissions added / split in new releases. Their approach to installing apps has been incorrect in multiple ways for many years and this is one of them. Their approach to listing which permissions are used by apps is also very incorrect.
F-Droid has a long history of denying issues including covering up serious security flaws. In some cases they eventually ship a fix but still deny it. It's a major factor in why F-Droid is not a safe or trustworthy source of apps due to major security issues not being acknowledged or addressed.
Multiple of the F-Droid developers wrongly blaming their app bug on GrapheneOS in that issue are Calyx contractors. They prioritize attacking GrapheneOS with inaccurate claims and fabricated stories about our team over fixing a bug in their app impacting both GrapheneOS and non-GrapheneOS users.
We've repeatedly brought up F-Droid not properly listing permissions or checking for them. Their understanding of Android's permission model is wrong. The way they list permissions misleads and misinforms users. It's one of many major F-Droid flaws they consistently don't acknowledge or fix.
Due to F-Droid deliberately causing friction and annoyances for GrapheneOS users, we'll be implementing a feature similar to our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer for it. We'll can resolve deliberate issues created for GrapheneOS users ourselves as we did with Revolut.
Search efforts continue for a fourth day as a girls' summer camp confirms 27 children and staff are dead, with 10 campers and one counsellor unaccounted for.
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Dotcom
in reply to monovergent 🛠️ • • •like this
Andreas Gütter and themadcodger like this.
IHave69XiBucks
in reply to monovergent 🛠️ • • •I find i to look on forums for solutions less and less anyway. Once you've been using a distro long enough unless your trying to do something you've never done before it's usually pretty simple to know what's wrong, and fix it. Because you'll get the same things popping up over and over again.
I also like to keep like a little doc of fixes I've done on each computer so that if a year later i need to do a version upgrade or reinstall i can look back to it, and see what i did last time if i get repeat issues. Especially useful on stuff like laptops where you'll have really specific hardware issues that reappear years later, and normally take hours and hours of trying to figure out what is broken.
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Mordikan likes this.
Blue_Morpho
in reply to monovergent 🛠️ • • •rollmagma
in reply to Blue_Morpho • • •slacktoid
in reply to monovergent 🛠️ • • •Usually the best fixes are the simple ones. And it seems like even with the longer ones you're able to figure out your simple fixes which is awesome!
GenderNeutralBro
in reply to slacktoid • • •Kind of funny how quickly we've flipped from "you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger" to "you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output".
Either way, it's the right idea. If you can't understand what you're doing but you do it anyway, you're going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.
Mordikan
in reply to GenderNeutralBro • • •In a round about way, that does fix the problem you have, though. Just randomly changing things or installing/uninstalling packages until the whole OS is borked and you have to reinstall thereby clearing the problem.
Doesn't teach how to fix the problem, but at least they'll get real proficient with setting up new system partitions.
slacktoid
in reply to GenderNeutralBro • • •Lolol yes, it's a weird straight circle indeed.
However applying those fixes and then learning to fix it is a great way to learn how to troubleshoot and unb0rk your system.
MachineFab812
in reply to monovergent 🛠️ • • •The difference between workable and non-workable usually boils down to whether I can understand each step and how they arrived at their solution(that is, can I fix my own fuck-up if I miss a step or impliment it wrong for my own situation), which I will know pretty quickly. That said, with my limitted knowlege, I can still spot the 50% that have no chance in hell of working pretty quickly.
OTOH, if a solution is succinct, upvoted, and still looks wrong, I'm at least going to look into the problem further with that as a reference point before I write it off completely.
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Mordikan likes this.
Random Dent
in reply to monovergent 🛠️ • • •The usual tech support search:
So to answer the question, I can usually tell I'm getting close to the solution when I say "Oh for fuck's sake" as I'm closing tabs lol.
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seralth
in reply to Random Dent • • •I love to go with just rip out what ever is broken never look at it again and till eventually forgetting something was broken reinstalling what ever I ripped out only for everything to work again
Despite trying to reinstall things like 3 times before.
The key is you HAVE to forget about the problem or it knows your trying to trick it and it breaks it self again!