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.
This threads got lots of good answers, but I haven’t seen it mentioned that snaps sometimes mean reduced functionality.
Use the docker snap? Sorry, it can only access your home directory so no -v /some/path:/somewhere for you
Use firefox or chromium and keepassxc? Sorry, your browser plugin won’t be able to talk to your password manager
And the updates… dear god. In whose mind was it a good idea to show a “firefox is updating, exit now to avoid issues” TWO WEEKS im advance. Closing the app does precisely fuck all unless you manually snap refresh it
Containerised applications are a fine idea, but snap is a horrible implementation of it
To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don’t know of a fix for the password extension issue.
In general the integration of flatpak is quite good (even more if we compare it with snap), but there are still some gaps. In this case there are some solutions like this one.
I think opinionated is different from being for a non-power-user.
Click ‘brave’ is not opinionated, because I could click chromium instead. “There is a web browser (and it is Firefox)” is more opinionated, and easier at first, then harder if you happen to need a chromium-based browser.
Veeam system image daily; this is a fully bootable image of every drive on my system, kept for things like hardware failure or “oops” moments. It just goes to my NAS for fast local storage.
Online backup of important files daily; this has changed a few times, I was using Restic to B2, then Duplicati to Wasabi S3, now I’m using iDrive to see how that is.
My favorite tools are definitely Veeam and Duplicati, because they both have a good UI and are easy to use, both automatically run in the background and handle scheduling entirely on their own. Browsing snapshots is easy and finding the files you want at a specific date/time is quick.
Restic and Kopia I’ve used as well, they’re much harder to use especially for restores, finding files is a nightmare via CLI. Scheduling is a pretty involved step, and you have to figure out how to run them in the background yourself. Both also performed really slowly for me on my ~3TB backup set of about 50k files, compared to Veeam and Duplicati which are very fast.
I’ve found Restic great once dialed in. I have a systemd service run backups automatically. Super fast thanks to only backing up diffs; only the initial backup is slow.
Yes making a script and service isn’t for everyone.
Finding files in the backup is easy… you just mount the backup and search any way you want, just like any other directory. Not sure why that’s hard?
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