I mean… “who needs features in 2022” is onto something. But I use both, for various Nvidia and laziness related reasons, and have a dim idea what they do inside, as probably most flamers on the topic.
I had access to then-usual computer-related stuff growing up as a teenager in the late 80’s/early 90’s (C16, C64, Amiga, DOS/Windows on 286/386). One of the nicer things in that environment was a PostScript capable laser (well, LED) printer. At that time struggling with PageMaker and the likes, the possibilities of a page description language fascinated me.
Later, but still in teenage years, I came across NeXT(STEP) - first through a friend who had one, and its manuals and TeX documents out that PostScript printer like nothing I’d ever seen (done in-house) before. I was hooked. ;-)
A NeXT computer then became my daily driver through “college” and university, where at the time there also were Unix workstations by HP, Sun and SGI. DOS/Windows was all happening at that time, and it always felt to me like the VHS of operating systems - the technically worst implementation taking the market share.
When Linux appeared on the scene, I was obviously interested. The first distro I remember was SLS, followed by SlackWare and Red Hat. Mostly for communication/networking (UUCP, PPP, eMail, Usenet, IP connectivity, …) I started to use Red Hat in 1996, with the NeXT keeping its place for its graphical desktop on my personal desk. At the time I started working for a software startup where we used a mix of Linux (Red Hat) and Windows (NT) desktops, and Linux (Red Hat) mostly for servers (some Sun and BSD as well, IIRC). Around 2002(?) maybe I had mostly migrated to Linux also for my home desktop, but I kept the NeXT around for a long time, most specifically because of Diagram!, a predecessor (in spirit) to OmniGraffle.
Moving to Apple/OS X never sat right with me due to its proprietary, closed-source nature. “It works great when it works. When it doesn’t, you’re even more SOL than on Windows.”
When Red Hat went EOL in 2004 I looked around for alternatives and most seriously tried out gentoo Linux. I love the flexibility of being able to use one distro with consistent paradigms all the way from (almost) embedded through various server configurations to a fully multimedia capable desktop. I haven’t looked back since, typing this into LibreWolf on a KDE Plasma desktop running on gentoo.
All the while, I’ve also been using, supporting, and developing for Windows professionally to some degree (in addition to working for/on Linux and other more Unix-y stuff). It’s such a quality of life hit compared to open source - I remember phone calls with prominent Microsoft employees over weird support cases involving DCOM permissions (or rather, bugs therein) - Microsoft’s reply certainly felt quite like de Maizière’s infamous “some of those answers could unsettle too many people” quote, hinting at security through obscurity.
One thing I still miss a lot from the NeXTSTEP desktop is its concept of “services”: Global utilities that could/would operate on anything (of suitable data type, e.g. text, image) that is currently selected (and show up in what today would amount to the context menu of the selection, regardless of which program it’s in). In the simplest case, this could be a Wikipedia lookup of the currently selected word. But, services also had the ability to replace the selection, allowing for all manner of things like unit conversions, ‘intelligent’ expansion (what this could do together with ChatGPT!), at-the-fingertips OCR and so on and so forth.
inb4 but thats a corporate distro, it is just sponsored by SUSE but is community maintained
I agree that there are not many distros that are both user friendly and not forks of something else, but I don’t see it as an issue, imo there is nothing wrong with forks.
Did the telemetry vote already happen and succeed? Last I saw there was only an informal “feeling out” vote, but I haven’t been following closely since then.
No, this is completely false. There was a proposal to add telemetry. There is nothing planned as of yet. In a community distro, we all get to speak. The discussion is ongoing. Those opposed to doing opt-out telemetry appear to be winning that conversation thus far.
Also, other distros do telemetry already. Debian is one of them.
The issue isn’t if something is a fork or not, the issue is if something is a fork of a corporate distro. For instance, there are forks of Arch that still meet the criteria because Arch is a base community distro, whereas OpenSuse is a fork of a corporate distro.
I’d used Linux in VMs since the early 2010s, though only really for curiosity purposes and never did much worthwhile. Got a job that uses Linux pretty extensively back in 2016 and by 2019 once I’d noticed proton was a thing I was using Arch Linux on my own laptop. Distro hopped several times in the following years and now on a new PC I’ve decided to just stay on Debian bookworm and just keep applications up to date using flatpak.
I love vanilla OS, it runs well on my main laptop and is a pleasure to install and setup with every useful options, well made, I can’t wait for the debian version.
I searched for years. Nothing really clicked… I’ve finally settled on ParrotOS. Their flagship is a pen testing distro like Kali, but they have a home distro as well, I’ve been using it for quite some time.
Stability is huge for me, and regular updates. Privacy focused, based on Debian.
Seems extremely solid, ever more polished, and by far my favourite Linux desktop environment. Not so convinced by the additional xdg-desktop-portal integration - I’ve no flatpaks installed, so the only side-effect I’ve seen is the buggy behaviour where Firefox and Steam take forever to open until you disable as much as possible. That’s not on the Mint developers, though.
Which DE do you use? Sadly, on KDE Debian is quite bloated but there’s a trick, I deselected KDE when installing Debian.
Naturally, I booted into a blackscreen but after entering my credentials I ran the following command: sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop
I rebooted into a beautiful and minimal Plasma desktop, it doesn’t even have a calculator but it still comes with a few questionable applications installed. From there I just set up flathub and I’m all flatpak.
I used this page, check the page for your favorite DE/WM: wiki.debian.org/KDE
i3 for while but I mainly used xfce. Hyprland overall feels “new”, unlike X11, Wayland just “flows” better in a way. i3 felt more clunky but overall more stable, if that ever makes sense.
I was using I3 and now sway. But I never felt any real difference in performance. Other than better 4K and multimonitor support, why i switched. I was wondering if Hyprland is just for looks or it brings something important
Want your brains blown? Check out ArchCraft. Yes it’s a pay to download thing but they cover everything, i3, Sway, Hyprland, QTile. You name it, they have it (as long as it’s WM). For people like me who don’t have time (nor skill, I’m humble enough to admit it) this is gold. And you can change themes as you like as long as you have basic intermediate skills. As long as you can use a text editor and have some basic arch skills you can customize upon it.
With that being said, I don’t like pay to download content, reason why I’m on Linux first and foremost. But I gotta give credit where credit is due. ArchCraft is blowing away everything else when it come to pre customized WM experiences. Such an eye candy omg.
I have installed Ubuntu in I think at the beginning of 2020 at the end of my first semester as dual boot, because I wanted to learn it a bit while studying engineering informatics. Later I have installed it as my only distro on my Laptop to have more reasons to learn it since I use my PC mostly for gaming. After some time I was so confident with it that I wanted to try something new and installed Garuda on my PC and learned about proton. Then I learned about how many games I can actually play with it and used it as my daily driver for about half a year. Then I was distro hopping frequently, trying pure Arch, Gentoo and Void, wiped Windows completely at the beginning of 2022 because I didn’t use it anyways if I remember correctly and sticked with Void since about mid 2022 until today for my Laptop, PC and Server.
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