When I was 16 I was working at a grocery store and another worker around my age talked me into trying it out. I had heard of it from a high school class I had taken, so I figured I’d give it a try. I called him on the phone and he talked me through installing Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my laptop. The biggest issue back then was getting the WiFi to work, which required ndiswrapper to used the Windows drivers. We eventually got it working and then played Tremulous together.
I dual booted for a while, occasionally got angry at Windows and nuked the partition to go fully Linux. Occasionally got angry at Linux and nuked the partition to go fully Windows. Eventually settled fully on Linux. I did have a separate drive with Windows installed in my desktop at one point to play around with VR, but I’m not much of a gamer so the only time I use Windows now is in a VM if I need to interface with some device that only provides Windows drivers. Pretty rare at this point.
I will admit I sometimes think I want to boot up windows and play some vr games, but I’m at the point now where I used to be with windows where I don’t really want to spend all that time rebooting lol.
Well I would have normally said Fedora but with the current RedHat issues I’m thinking of making a switch. but in my opinion Fedora was always rock stable and leading edge. currently looking at an alternative.
I try Gnome every year or so, and the first time I encounter the Save As dialog defaulting my text input to the goddamn Search box instead of the filename box, I shut it down and uninstall it. That just drives me around the bend.
Not even close, that would probably be Amazon or Microsoft. Unless you are talking about companies that only do Linux software. How many major companies like that are there, like three? Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE?
That's because podman-compose is not a goal for the project IIRC. Therefore, it will never be feature complete. They encourage using systemd or other tools to manage the pods. It seems that podman-compose is just not an enterprise use case.
Edit: so if docker-compose is important then yea, stick to docker. I moved to using systemd instead. Podman can generate the systems files for you.
Podman could never compare to the quality of docker. I wish people who don’t know any better would just stop comparing the two and suggesting podman as a replacement.
Default workflow with no extensions is never good for me, there are a handful that provide must have QoL improvements. Once you install those it is very nice. Love it and always miss it when I use Windows or OSX.
I prefer GNOME to KDE but while I understand that there’s research and philosophy behind some of the decisions, I just can’t get around some of the quirks. “Workflow” itself is fine, with tiling on top, you can get by. But those window decorations… So much space is taken by a completely useless, fat bar at the top of each window even though it’s not really aimed at being touchscreen native.
I switched back in 2005 (I think), because Windows XP didn’t have the drivers for being installed on an S-ATA drive and SUSE could be installed without any hassle. I feel very old.
My dad always tells me about how it drove him insane for days that Windows XP couldn’t detect the HDD, but it showed up totally fine in BIOS. He ended up taking it to a computer shop, and the bastards didn’t even tell him about the F6 floppy (instead they charged him double what was quoted because their techs had to ‘learn how to do it’).
It was only because they somehow even screwed that up, what should have been a simple setup of Windows XP, and he had to reinstall, that he finally learned from the internet that he needed the F6 floppy.
Yeah, it was nicknamed the F6 floppy because Windows XP setup would say “Press F6 to load a SCSI driver” and you would hit that, select the driver from your floppy, and continue setup.
I’ve even seen vendor’s websites call it F6 Driver because the unofficial name was so ubiquitous
To be fair I remember that prompt, and if I was playing around with some fancy new HDD configuration and the customer bought in a job as “install windows because I can’t even” the ball would have dropped on the first go and I would have worked it out pretty fast I reckon. No way I would have jacked up the price on your dad.
Yeah, I work at a (much more legitimate) computer shop and we wouldn’t have up charged on that either. What we quote is what we quote, even if it blows out to 10 hours instead of 1, that’s on us not on the customer.
That computer shop my Dad went to, he learned afterwards from study mates that the shop had done that to multiple people for various different jobs, and they’re constantly changing names but I’m pretty sure it’s the same business running even today.
I distro hopped a lot in the 2006-2011 era, and eventually settled on Arch. I like the initial simplicity, the wiki was and still is the best resource to this day, and anything I needed from the kitchen sink was accessible via the AUR. I’ve ended up using it on my workstations, work laptops, and personal machines ever since.
Isn’t that the point of full disk encryption, to make sure you’re authorised to boot? That at least is the behaviour on a Mac if you enable full disk encryption. Or do you mean every time you wake it from sleep?
Basically on Mac, your login password decrypts the drive which is what I’m hoping for with a Linux distro, rather than having to decrypt the drive and then log in
AFAIK, if you want disk encryption on Arch, you gotta set it up yourself (i.e. follow the wiki).
And last time I installed manjaro (couple years ago), the installer would let you decide whether you want disk encryption or not. So nobody is being forced to use it.
Then again, if you are tired of it, there likely is a way to effectively disable it for your current install. But most likely that will be quite a bit more involved that just unchecking it during install.
I do want disk encryption enabled, I just find the boot & login process on Manjaro a little clunky and I’ve heard its a little simpler on other distros.
I do want disk encryption enabled, I just find the boot & login process on Manjaro a little clunky and I’ve heard its a little simpler on other distros.
I really like it, the constraints works for me to enforce more efficient habits. I would say I’m not a naturally efficient person, I recognise that and, essentially, benefit from having a workflow created for me. With KDE, it has the customisability out of the box to create your own workflow, but I couldn’t personally design a good workflow.
But I’m not everyone, of course, and I would say GNOME is not necessarily for everybody.
Good that you gave it a fair shot. I feel like a lot of people just throw a lot of extinctions at it first without trying to understand the vanilla workflow - I used to be one of them until I tried vanilla for about 3 months.
I feel like vanilla GNOME is intentionally a barbones common workflow, and that extensions are how you customize to fit your needs.
For example, I often switch between desktop speakers and headphones (where the dongle is always connected), and sometimes other audio devices. I installed the sound input/output chooser so I don’t have to go into Settings every time I need to switch inputs. It saves me multiple clicks. But I get that not everyone needs immediate access to change audio devices, so why clutter the UI?
I’ve used both vanilla GNOME and the post-Unity Ubuntu spin on it. In either case I’ve grown accustomed to the Activities screen, quickly accessing it pressing the Super key, and using it to switch windows and manage full screen apps on different monitors.
If I remember correctly, there’s already a system tray icon that lets you adjust volume on your current devices. The extension adds the ability to switch devices from that drop down instead of drilling into the settings app.
I feel that way about the default GNOME apps as well, they all provide the basic functionality that most users need, since specialist users would install specialist apps anyway.
One extension I won’t install is dash-to-dock or similar (I know some people like it and that’s fine), because being made to switch to the Activities view once you have too many windows to alt+tab between provides a useful psychological prompt to close unused windows or move stuff to other workspaces. That’s one of the things I most like about the GNOME workflow.
I’ve used it as a daily driver for a few years now. Here are my thoughts on it:
**Stability:**Generally speaking, I’ve found it to be pretty rock solid for a rolling release distro. Over the years, it’s only really broken a handful of times. Things that break tend to be the same as with any rolling release distro, e.g. pipewire came out which had no immediate impact on pulse, but over time more and more things started to require pipewire, so eventually forcing ones hand with switching.
UpdatesBeing rolling release, everything is relatively up-to-date. The way they manage dependencies package updates with continuous integration is pretty clever and seems to help prevent things from breaking.
System ManagementBecause of the decision to use runit, things are different from mainstream Linux distros. This isn’t bad, just keep in mind you will need to learn to use a new set of tools to manage your system. There are some bits and pieces that bridge the gap, e.g. elogind means you get systemd type session management without needing all of systemd. For system logging, you will need to use socklog instead, which is a very different beast to systemd journal and classic syslogd. For everything else, the arch wiki is very useful for finding light weight utilities to help manage things.
Package availabilityThere are definitely a plethora of options for packages. Because of how their package infrastructure works, it is rare that a package you want isn’t available. And for those that aren’t available, it’s usually a small utility…one with an alternative that is available in the repository already.
User ContributionsIn void, there is no distinction between “official” and “user” contributed packages. Voids package infrastructure feels more like the AUR from the outset, but with github CI doing the heavy lifting of compiling the package for everyone once you’ve upstreamed package changes. The downside I’ve found is that the maintainers seem to be perpetually time/resource constrained. For any package changes that are moderately more complicated than “uprev package”, “fix breakages” or “new package”, I’ve found it a bit frustrating. A few years ago, I attempted to get some changes in for GHDL to enable backtraceing support, but after a few review comments, it just went silent on the maintainer side, so never got merged. After about a month of silence, github automatically closed the issue.
DocumentationTheir docs are pretty good for getting started. I’ve found them great for pointing out nuances and peculiarities of Void. It is definitely not as exhaustive and comprehensive as the arch wiki, but about 75-80% of the arch wiki is applicable across the board for all Linux distros anyway…
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