I played with an early version of this 2 years or so ago, and at the time I think it was Debian based, though there’s an Arch version available. Neither one worked great, particularly the Arch version, but it was a very beautiful distro, if severely lacking in features. Still, it looked like it had potential, maybe I’ll play with it again.
VSCode is an electron application, right? Electron apps use xwindow (or xwayland) unless you launched them with certain flags. I’m interested to know if native Wayland app actually works. Or is it possible that distrobox is actually use xwindow and pass everything to the host’s xwayland process? Can’t seem to find anything about it in the docs.
Yes, VSCode is an electron app, and I use flags to launch it with Wayland. I export VSCode to the host system with the flags attached, so that VSCode automatically launches in Wayland. The command I used: distrobox-export --app code --extra-flags “–enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto”
I’m pretty sure it’s wayland because on KDE wayland, with 200% scaling, when the cursor is over an xwayland window, it looks blurry. This doesn’t happen on wayland windows. Also for some reason electron and chromium based apps run at 60 fps on wayland, while xwayland apps run at 144 fps as it should, and my VS Code in the Distrobox with the wayland flags also runs at 60 fps. Weird KDE stuff.
All right, enough of this debian bashing, this isn’t 2007 anymore, they’re actually using up-to-date packages and kernels, you’ll need to find someone else to kick around now.
I … liked… arch for a while, but they broke a few times (library dependency failure, think it was expat) and I’m not in this just for smug.
Gentoo did the same, but probably going back to them as a hybrid distro, debian as the base, gentoo as the lxc working distro with some DE apps.
I daily drive Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and distrobox has been great.
I have layered only two packages: USB Guard and Distrobox. I run syncthing in a rootless podman container, and the rest goes through Distrobox.
I was even able to setup ProtonVPN in distrobox and it functions as if it was directly installed on the host (just need to map your home folder and some permissions).
I hope that immutable becomes either the standard or at least all major distros start offering it as an alternative. Makes everything foolproof and makes me much more willing to try new packages and tools because I can always just roll back.
The only thing that would really make it perfect is if files in /etc/ where also handled in a similar manner. IE: Can make changes to configuration files, and easily roll back to defaults at any time.
I run zfs on my (two) Debian boxes (a thinkpad x1 and a home server). Installing it as the root filesystem was a bit tricky but once it’s done it has been flawless for me. I run the server using 2 ssd in mirror for /etc and all those, and then a couple disks in raidz for data. When one of the root disks died I just swapped it and re synced and was up and running in not time. Unfortunately the laptop only has a single ssd so if that dies I have to reinstall and restore from a backup.
The cool thing is that I can just take a snapshot before messing around and the restore if anything breaks. It has been a really nice experience and I recommend it! I know it’s not the same as an immutable distro, and I tried silverblue but it’s too different from what I’m used to :-)
Silverblue + ZFS would be a match made in heaven, unfortunately Fedora makes it really hard to do ZFS reliably, too many kernel updates that break ZFS. This would be an even bigger nightmare on Silverblue given the distribution model.
If only ZFS was part of the Linux kernel 😑. maybe one day
It looks like there’s also a version 4 that’s still FOSS that I assume would be targeted to new platforms. But I only know enough French to get the gist of their site, I don’t know the more technical words to figure out what’s changed.
I tried running the tgz a few months ago. It needed a shitload of deprecated python dependancies, I’m not well versed in python so after the 10th pip install I gave up.
Version 4 is unfortunately closed source and paid.
I had a quick look at the PKGSRC on AUR. It uses QtWebKit which is the biggest stumbling block, given that most or perhaps even all distributions killed that for security reasons. I recently found out that an “AI and automation” company forked and revived QtWebKit, so there is a tiny chance distros will package it again but don’t hold your breath. There was a promising fork once and I’d guess there will be an attitude by packagers that they’ve fallen for a fork before and that never got off the ground.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is really good at keeping up with the latest packages while remaining really stable. Despite recieving gigabytes of updates since February when I first installed it I had a far better experience compared to the “stable” Ubuntu I was using before.
Jesus bellydancing Christ people, read beyond the title of the post for once. This is good.
This will enable results that aren’t biased by the few users who find the option to opt-in (when it’s not presented front and center) or actively answer to surveys.
They are taking as much care as possible with their words to make it clear that THEY DO NOT WANT TO TRACK YOU OR ABUSE YOUR DATA, it’s just what’s necessary for studies to better understand the users’ needs.
You will have the chance to disable it front and center during the setup process;
No data will be sent before an active confirmation from the user during the setup process;
You will be able to fetch the data at any point to check what’s being collected
They are reaching out to the community for guidance on what type of data we find acceptable or not
You can have an active participation on the building of this tool
And specially this, for the OH GOD, ITS THE END OF THE LINOX DESKTOP among you:
IT’S A PROPOSAL, IT’S NOT BEING ACTIVELY DEVELOPED YET!
Not only there’s no reason to overreact, this could be the start of something beautiful for the Linux desktop, where the users not only actively participate but actively control their data
Right? People are reading this as BIG CORPO DOES BAD DECISION and ignore the fact that they can (and should) go to the forum to actively discuss the proposal with the people proposing it.
dude, i could not have been more simplistic with the title, and added both the threads for the post. yes, people are gonna get mad, that’s what a general thread on the internet is. if you want actual dev discussions, go to the linked threads. if i tried to be more like, “guys don’t harass the devs, they’re definitely not in the wrong here”, you know what that would’ve led to, and i just tried to avoid that. there are plenty of projects that don’t need or use telemetry for development, including linux (i think, i’m pretty sure). it’s great that they’re being honest and open about it, but this coming just after red hat issue is what prompted me to start these threads. so yeah, sorry if this is frustrating for you, but this thread is not a ragebait, and i apologize if this does seem like one…
i thought the whole idea was to be the only one who is using your computer. it doesnt matter if they are taking data that cant be used to identify you personally, the road to hell is made with good intentions. and also, i agree that by using telemetry, great insights can help the devs develop a better Linux desktop, but linux is more about the freedom to be let alone if you want to be left alone.
easy for who? why not use it in the sense of ‘easily turned on.’ and then make it as easy as possible for people to turn it on because it is in the devs and sponsors’ best interest, but making an easy-to-turn-off telemetry is a conflict of interest for them.
This is one of those things that I’d come across and went “huh thats pretty cool” then promptly for got about, so this is a nice reminder about distrobox haha
I’ll have to go back and mess with it, such a cool tool to have
A while back I was into KDE Plasma but for whatever reason had this bug that would cause my system to run at 100 percent at all times. When I looked into it, many stated it was a bug that related to how kde searches for stuff on the system. Dont remember much else but that had me look elsewhere.
Been on gnome for awhile now and havent had any issues.
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