The AUR still has a lot of niche software that hasn’t been Flatpakked, but yeah. Flatpaks are way more convenient, especially for large software where AUR compilation can take a long time.
you probably only compile on one thread if you have a default /etc/makepkg.conf
though compiling a firefox browser on 12+ threads still takes several minutes up to half an hour
(try doing that with a chromium browser, thats hours rather than minutes)
Agreed. DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic hardware drivers are examples of that kind of niche software that I use on a regular basis. The only supported route for that stuff is RHEL/CentOS, and those don’t seem particularly well-suited to my main machine’s other purpose, which is games. If someone’s already done the legwork to solve the problem for Arch, and the build files check out, why reinvent the wheel?
Additionally, it’s the only distro I could get Resolve Studio working on with an AMD GPU consistently.
For the most part, though, the official repos and Flathub give me what I need.
Agreed. DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic hardware drivers are examples of that kind of niche software that I use on a regular basis. The only supported route for that stuff is RHEL/CentOS, and those don’t seem particularly well-suited to my main machine’s other purpose, which is games. If someone’s already done the legwork to solve the problem for Arch, and the build files check out, why reinvent the wheel?
Additionally, it’s the only distro I could get Resolve Studio working on with an AMD GPU consistently.
For the most part, though, the official repos and Flathub give me what I need.
Flatpak acts like its virtualizing the applications, AUR shipped binaries are build by trusted arch users. Those eco systems operate on totally different levels, there are (more) audits in AUR.
Flatpak or god forbid even Snap are fucked up software distribution platforms you should only use as last resort and when the software you are trying to get is not available on your OS repository/package manager and should be simply avoided.
Ah, it’s subjective. You trust AUR users rather than flatpak users. Flatpak and snap are hardly comparable. The flaws of Snap are not the flaws of Flatpak. You also prefer binaries to sandboxed apps. You’re old school?
It is not subjective. Its not any AUR user, there are big streams tested especially for that certain system by trusted people before releasing.
And for the record, your sandboxed apps are also binaries and to set it straight, flatpak is mostly not really virtualizing your app. It’s complete garbage, have a look at how flatpak achieves this “virtualization” and how it’s implemented in 9 out of 10 flatpaks.
A subset of AUR PKGBUILDs are downloading a prebuilt desktop application binary packaged for another distro (deb, rpm, tarball, appimage) from upstream and then unpacking it. Those packages are trying to solve some of the same problems as flatpak, distributing a generic desktop binary but often do it worse and people should be weighing the alternatives. More broadly AUR packages aren’t comparable with flatpak but some are.
I tried arch and got rid of it after a couple months because of the aur. Do people just not check out what they’re installing? Every time I wanted a new software i’d have to check it out to make sure it was legit, and every time I updated i’d have to check the diffs to make sure it was still legit. Otherwise, who knows what you’re actually installing.
Main reason I like the AUR is for really niche packages that aren’t in any main repos. Smaller github projects, forks of main projects that fix bugs, basically anything that you would otherwise have to compile from source is on the AUR. And while you still might have to compile it, it’s all setup and managed for you, which I really like.
Thats a very creative way of using old Laptop parts where I would probably not manage to pull one of them off. I have already ordered 8gb of ram and a 500gb SSD to give it a few more years of life.
A thing you didn’t mention to improve thermals is to take it apart remove the dust from the cooler and maybe change the thermal past, that laptop came with windows 8 (released in 2013) literally 10 years ago.
Flatpak is fast, lightweight actual open-source and provides security via isolation. Snap is the usual BS Canonical tries to get people to use, has a ton of bloat.
Personally I’ve had zero issues with Flatpak under Debian for desktop usage. It integrates nicely with the GNOME Software “store” and allows you to get the latest and best of everything you might need without polluting your system. Flatpak solves the usual complaints about Debian only having “old” software - allows you to run the latest and greatest while keeping a clean and rock solid Debian system underneath.
Why? Because it works and is reliable. I’ve been using Opensuse now for ten years on a server and it updated through all the releases over the years without problems. The machine is getting retired now, though. But the replacement will get Leap again for sure.
Well I’m sticking with it for a while at least. Usually I don’t need to Google much to get a Distro going but for once in a long while a lot of things feel new. And that’s always been fun.
Maybe eventually I’ll get my servers switched from Debian if I get used to it
I have a fairly opinionated stance on this. Except in your sudo example where you’re specifically using sudo for a reason, I document all commands as non-root, and do not instruct them to raise privs. Whether or not they have, want or need privs, and how they raise them, is their system not mine.
It’s not exactly user friendly, but I don’t like to encourage people to blindly copy & paste commands that raise privs. That should be a conscious decision where they stop and ask themselves if & why it’s necessary.
What SteamOS uses is largely irrelevant to the end user as Valve likely uses it as a base to build and test the versions of SteamOS that make it out. What ships out is likely not the same as running the latest Arch. Kinda like using AOSP because Samsung uses AOSP to build their Android OS.
But to be fair, openSUSE was my first linux distro after Windows and YaST had been helpful to me before I learned how to use console commands. And then I switched to another distro.
It’s ok if you prefix with $ and #IF it’s not selectable. It should only be a visual reference for those who know and only helps keep your documentation complete.
I can’t make any hardware recommendations. With Linux you are only limited by your own understanding. Learning is a matter of discovering enough information to ask good questions, and even simply learning where to look. Like all of the distros have unique use cases and documentation. Becoming an intermediate user is partially just learning it doesn’t matter what distro you use, you still use the documentation for all of them.
If the mouse has extra buttons or whatnot, there is a signal in the Linux kernel. You just need to figure out what to do with this in your use case. It may be easy, where someone else has posted how they did it somewhere on the internet or it may require a super deep dive.
This is where I would start looking for info about what is possible before I bought anything:
PrivateGPT thank you very much. Wrote a dumb blurb before realizing you know a lot more than me. The Arch Wiki has a bunch of info on mouse settings and optimisations that are likely to be helpful BTW.
Some rolling release might be good for driver updates, so arc si good for that or manjaro for easier use, but I guess it doesn’t really matter if hardware isn’t the cutting edge and even like mint might do and it might be a bit more stable.
People have already made lots of good replies but here’s my summary:
tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It allows multitasking in command line only environments. For example if you have to do a sudo apt upgrade but don’t want to leave your ssh client logged in until it finishes, you can run it in a tmux session so it will happen in the background even if you’re not logged in.
To start a new session, type “tmux”
To view running sessions, type “tmux list-sessions”
To switch to a running session, type “tmux attach-session -c N” where N is the number of the session.
To exit a tmux terminal and go back to the main terminal, do ctrl+b and then press d.
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