I want to preface this by saying that Red Hat absolutely deserve your ire in light of the recent news.
I appreciate that Fedora has relatively recent packages for a fixed release distribution. I really appreciate how they’ve pioneered in desktop-oriented technologies to help make Linux a more palatable experience for regular users, and I’m glad to see these gradually be adopted by others over time.
I’m happy to hear that the Fedora project still mostly operates Independently under redhat / IBM, but I’d be lying if I said the IBM acquisition didn’t worry me to the point of looking into alternatives.
Agreed. I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue for about a year. I love the immutable OS paradigm but IBM/Red Hat’s recent actions have left me feeling uneasy and I want to find an alternative.
I’ve also been using silverblue for about a year, it works well. Didn’t know about IBM acquiring Rad Hat, sad news.
For a similar experience there is Vanilla OS that I tried briefly and that seams to have similar immutability features and hastle free setup with a vanilla gnome desktop. It’s based on Ubuntu.
There is also NixOS which takes the immutability to another level. The entire system with all packages are configured in a config file. Which is nice if you want to have an identical setup on multiple machines but makes it a bit less user friendly imo.
That was my “entrypoint” distro to start fiddling with Linux. So I’d say, go for it until you are feeling confident enough to take the next step – Linux Mint.
Based on Ubuntu, is KDE's "flagship" OS (so I trust they know what they're doing with their own DE), and is the first to get bleeding edge KDE updates. Everything else is pretty much standard Ubuntu.
I don’t like that the very first thing you see when you click on download is “purchase for $40” and then they list the benefits of doing so, which basically boil down to:
1- custom gnome themes 2- Professional-grade creative suite of apps 3- Advanced productivity software
Number 1 is a joke. Number 2 & 3 I think are basically scams. What apps? They don’t list them at all. If they are proprietary then how can you support these apps with this pricing model, if they are not, then are they just downloadable by anyone on almost any distro for free?
The entire thing smells bad. I vote to stay far away.
I think it’s OK for them to try and sell extras, but I do agree that it shouldn’t be the first thing on the downloads page. At least put the paid and free options side by side, then have the lite version down below that.
just choose the 0 dollar option and install that stuff yourself. They are looking to sustain their development, and users coming from Apple are used to paying fees; Windows users… maybe.
This really is my favorite Garuda feature - it’s saved my install more than once so that I can roll back a messy update, figure out what broke and why it broke, and then make sure the next update works
Nvidia driver installation options that correctly set the mode setting, dkms drivers installed ootb, common apps like GreenWithEnvy ootb, great Nvidia support
Besides Wiki and AUR that all Arch derivatives share, they have their own wiki that documents the changes they’re made to Arch and a very good forum for help
I have been thinking to give NixOS a spin but feel like it’s above my brain capacity for me to handle. Do you also use homemanager and Flakes? Homemanager kinda makes sense (manage packages for non root users) but what does Flakes do?
I am already trying it and I am still no expert. How I understand flakes is that it is a file with inputs, like nixpkgs and other flakes or repos you might depend on and some outputs that can be things like a nixshell with packages and environment variables, custom packages and configs like your NixOS configurations and home manager. When you use your flake for the first time, by entering a nix shell with nix develop, building a package with nix build, rebuild your NixOS system with nixos-rebuild --flake .#<hostname>, etc, nix will generate a flake.lock file that stores the hashes of all of your inputs and thus pinning the input versions. This means that if you ever run any of those commands again, you should get the same result because the inputs are pinned and the same version. If you want to update, you just run nix flake update and it will regenerate the flake.lock file with new hashes for the newest version. The advantage with flakes is that it is fully reproducible, even if one of your dependencies changes, because the hash is specified and centrally managed in the inputs of your flake.
Nix flakes can be used for your NixOS system by adding the nixos configurations in the outputs of your nix flake and adding the dependencies like nixpkgs to the inputs. You can also combine it with home manager by either specifying it as a separate output or adding it as a nixos module inside the nixos configurations output. You just copy your existing nixos and home manager config to the folder with your flake and reference them inside the flake.nix. If you added home manager as a nixos module, you only need to run nixos-rebuild switch --flake <path-to-flake>.#<hostname> and it will automatically rebuild both your NixOS configuration and home manager configuration. You can then backup the folder with your flake and configurations by uploading them to GitHub for example.
It’s a very clean and simple to use out of the box experience but beyond that it has no real use, it’s a good choice to give your mom or for refurbishin laptops but for personal use it has little to no point
Absolutely! I haven’t had any problems setting up dependencies for various projects and have only needed overlays a few times. Sometimes USE flags can be tricky but most things are pretty well documented
There are dozens of us! And you can join us at !gentoo if you haven’t yet!
I love it because it’s super configurable, lets you choose compiler optimizations (and through USE flags, features that you need in your packages - you don’t have to include everything).
My Linux knowledge has skyrocketed compared to before I used Gentoo. Which of course means it’s NOT the distro for people who want something that just works, but honestly, now that it’s working properly, I feel it’s actually pretty hard to break, and when it does break, I know how to fix it! Versus with Linux Mint a decade ago, if I broke it, I had no idea where to get started and just reinstalled it.
Of course, about half a year ago I decided to move from x11 and OpenRC to Wayland and systemd. And I use KDE. And have Nvidia graphics. Soooo it was a fun ride both relearning how my init system works, and also running into problems with Steam, etc.
I also try to keep my kernel in single digit megabytes, but occasionally I find something missing and have to recompile with more “bloat”. So right now I believe it’s around 11 MB, but I’ll see about improving it over my next vacation. Not that 11 MB takes long to load off a gen4 NVMe drive, but the ePeen needs to be stroked! Also no initial ramdisk, to save even more boot time.
Great to hear! Though I will admit that it took me HOURS of reading the kernel config options I was disabling. But it was also very informative so it didn’t feel like a waste of time at all.
I usually run some commands while running the binary kernel that will disable every module not currently running in the config file, and then build the kernel from that.
I’m guessing you prefer building everything as a module if your kernel is that small?
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