I dislike when documentations add sudo because what if I am root already or what if sudo is not installed on my machine and I cannot just copy and paste the lines because I have to avoid pasting sudo.
Historically I've used debian based distros on my home server. I recently switched to opensuse tumbleweed and Ive been very happy. It's a rolling release, and I've found it more stable and easier to work with than linuxmint
I still favor native packages, but I don’t have a problem with Flatpaks. I’ll use them when a program isn’t available in the repo or there’s a compelling reason to have a never version of an application. I’m on Debian Stable, so I’m obviously not obsessed with having the newest, shiniest version of everything.
Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.
That is cool. I imagine it would be great to have an array of USBs with different distros for specialized uses.
For the most part, I don’t even look at the version number when downloading packages. Most of the time it does not matter. Still, when I need something up to date, all I have to do is choose the flatpak version.
Apple products are too expensive (iphone is 8 months of minimum wage), universities are pushing Linux, some government facilities are using it(Turkey has its own distro for government see Pardus etc
I don’t understand what the benefit for SUSE is of this? Wouldn’t they want enterprise to use their own distros? Gaining cred from the FOSS/Linux community while undermining RHEL economically? Hmm, maybe I just answered my own question.
If I’d buy a new laptop these days I’d go with a framework. Other than that, buying a refurbished ThinkPad is always a great option and they generally run really good with Linux. As for support I wouldn’t be too afraid, almost all hardware is supported these days as long as it’s not something really obscure. The main thing worth checking is probably the WiFi card, I heard there are some that are a pain to set up, but I never ran into that. That being said most manufacturers won’t officially support Linux and if they do they’ll only support fedora or Ubuntu (speaking about big manufacturers, ofc there’s system76 and stuff), but as I said I don’t think I’ve encountered a laptop that straight up wasn’t able to run Linux.
I’m heavily considering just getting a refurbished Thinkpad just because of the low cost, along with the support. And yeah, I’ve been making a point to avoid Nvdia for that reason, lol. Thanks!
IMO refurbished ThinkPad is the way for almost anything that is not gaming, working on huge code bases (without having a build server) or heavy graphical work like video editing or heavy photo editing. For most other things a decently new and well specced ThinkPad will do the job while still maintaining that feeling of a “new and snappy pc”
But I felt this article was written in a sincere spirit to keep Linux open and multiparty. There are obviously many more reasons for such a sentiment than just the natural urge to undress and smoke up (I know, puzzles me too). However in these times of often direct aggression to anything I know and love I welcomed it a sight for sour eyes.
Try Arch Linux. First setup in VM, then on your computer. Been ~8 years on it. Tried to distrohop multiple times - still going back to it.
Plasma is awesome DE which requires bare minimum setup. plasma package pulls basically everything - bluetooth, pipewire, sddm and so on. Then you just have to enable sddm/bluetooth services are you are done.
Fixing broken system is also very easy. :) Just try, don’t be shy!
I haven’t used any flatpacks, mostly because they don’t seem to have a good solution for running terminal programs. (Also I don’t like that the application developer chooses the permissions to expose rather than the user.
However, I have been using bubblewrap which is what flatpack uses under the hood to sandbox. This allows me to run both gui and non-gui programs, and I have the control of exposing the minimum required permissions that I’m comfortable giving an untrusted piece of software.
I will be honest and reveal my naivete about the permissions. I don’t really mess with permission for any program, but I can see how some defaults may be bad.
I will look into bubble wrap, since the sandboxing is important, but the sheer convenience and availability of software is what is appealing.
I’m conflicted on this. I 100% think CLI applications should remain as packages but Flatpak IMO is superior for GUI. It just has a lot of “step in the right direction” sorts of things that address some of Linux’s faults.
The big two positives for me are:
Makes it easier for developers to publish their own software and reach many distros at once. This has really helped with software availability and updates.
Sandboxing (although not perfect and Flatseal is kind of essential here, I hope this gets rolled into software centers or something).
I am on Fedora Silverblue and the concept of a base OS + Flatpaks just feels right for workstations. OCI containers (podman/docker/distrobox) as a bonus for development environments without borking your host.
But with this recent Fedora news (I know nothing has changed YET but I am just sussed out tbh), I am considering switching to OpenSUSE Aeon/Kalpa.
Your 2 big positives are stuff I agree with wholeheartedly. But I’m still holding out on using flatpak because it feels like an incomplete solution still. There’s many things with it I could work around, definitely, but it feels annoying and with NixOS I don’t have to worry about those issues because stuff just works for me.
As for FS, I wanted to love it, but doing some stuff with it is annoying. I wish it let you install stuff with dnf to /usr/local (like how it is on bsds or also macs with brew iirc).
Organizing my thoughs: I would love a future where flatpak just works, the sandboxing is nice and all you need is to click “yes” or “no” when an app wants/needs something, where you don’t even need to use your distro’s package manager (or you can’t even use it because the distro is immutable and it updates on its own), but we’re not yet there. Installing fonts on FS was a nightmare, and I had to layer stuff like powertop and other stuff I don’t remember right now. Also flatpak isn’t yet a good solution for development with VScode or similar stuff.
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