Keep in mind that there is, in general, a scheduler tradeoff between latency and throughput.
So, if you’re doing audio recording and mixing, this is likely to have very different scheduler requirements than something churning through batch jobs. The former wants low latency, the latter high throughput.
While I know it’s not the best distro, I don’t care to re-image, I left that life behind with Windows.
Manjaro-
I love the fact that I can have “Stable” and “Unstable” kernels installed simultaneously. It’s a nice handy way to recover or narrow down if an issue is related to the kernel. They’ve done an excellent job with the default Grub settings to allow this as well as side-by-siding with Windows if I want (which made transitioning from Windows to Linux easier).
Let me preface this with the fact that I still love and am not switching off of Manjaro.
Manjaro’s been kind of a contentious distro, it uses more bleeding edge than Debian-based, but opts to hold its own release schedule and repo separate from Arch’s which Arch fanboys will swear to the moon and back is just as stable. To their credit, Manjaro’s released some bad updates in the past.
It’s also had some security issues with SSL certs not getting renewed, however to my knowledge, your computer would default to not making unsecured calls like that, and secondly, ended up fixed by the dev soon enough. What really pissed people off was that the devs decided that instead of updating the cert (which would be a quick and easy process), they would demand that everyone changed the date on their computers to a time prior to the cert’s expiry. I didn’t run into this issue because I don’t update the day of, I usually like to give it a couple extra days anyway just in case of situations like this and because, frankly, I get on to use my computer, not watch updates run. I agree their response was in poor taste, but I also kinda figure that’s not exactly out of the norm from Linux devs (ie. Gnome and Linus Torvalds).
Lastly, a lot of people talk about how the AUR handles installs based on Arch versioning, so if you install AUR apps, there’s a chance of incompatibility in Manjaro since Manjaro is usually behind Arch a little bit. I can’t say that I’ve had this issue at all, but
You have to specifically enable AUR
When you do, it warns you of this potential incompatibility
If possible, I’d be using something in the official repo or flatpak far sooner than AUR for sake of support, security, and not having to way for AUR to Build
These are valid complaints folks have had, but none that have really been deal-breakers to me, and not worth the trade-off of a more minimal OOB experience. You have the people that are more used to more stable distros that don’t like it being “less stable”, and you have the Arch folks that don’t like that this isn’t as minimal and DIY as Arch. Way I see it, I like to game, I don’t like having to fix my computer, and it’s struck a nice balance for me. I’m sure Garuda or Nobara would treat me well, but I’ve already customized my environment to suit me, and tbh, distro’s aren’t the end-all be-all of Linux, would you do with it is - kinda the whole point of its modularity 😊
I was excited when I bought an Amiga 500, and ever since then the main thing I noticed is that the EXCITEMENT of getting a computer was always over-ruled by my ability to exploit it’s powers and use it.
So my perspective is that all computers and operating systems SUCK. But some suck less than others…
So using Manjaro KDE, it sucks less because it’s very simple and easy for me to install whatever I like - having AUR available, being able to search with pamac to include repos, AUR and Flatpak (even snap if I was that desperate).
KDE also gives you super powers to fuck up modify your desktop experience and shortcuts.
It’s been good to me for 6 years now. After going Ubuntu>Mint I was excited to leave Debian and try something else, I never made it to the Redhat camp (always interested to try Fedora) and hopefully will never feel the need.
So yes, what I like MOST is - it mostly just works. And when it fails, the forum is awesome.
This is my preferred way off doing things, but trying to glue VSCode + Android Studio + the Flutter SDK + Docker + … together via Flatpack was an exercise in pain and sadness last time I tried it.
Getting all my normal boring desktop apps via Flatpack is awesome, but for a developer it just doesn’t seem practical right now
There’s a benefit to Canonical, the corp that maintains Ubuntu, which is that while snaps are open source tech, the server for the snap store is closed source and snap can’t be configured to point at another store.
In other words, it’s about centralized control.
There are some advantages to the tech itself, like live auto-updating, which is good for security-critical server apps, but over all I’m not a fan.
I don’t think that the board members are sitting there and pondering how they can exercise more control on the user via snaps.
The auto updating is a nice benefit but it doesn’t seem like a big enough benefit to allocate so many developer man hours into. I would think that Canonical would realize that the developers time is better spent making features the users want.
But what do I know? I’m just someone posting on Lemmy not a Canonical board member haha
Snap provides features that users want. Here, I’m a user and I really appreciate those features. Those features have been improving my life for at least 5 years.
I believe you’re completely right here, except that snapd can be configured to point to another store, though it’s not very well documented… I did find the piece of information once :).
But the thing is that the client still only supports one app backing site at a time. So if you pick another one, you lose visibility to the other store. I doubt even updates work as they should.
So it’s really about building technology that is geared towards centralized control, whereas basically anyone can host flatpak packages and give ref links to them.
Because they controll snaps. Their backend is proprietary and they do not support any other way of distribution.
Now there are some objective benefits to Snaps compared to Flatpaks, at least so I was told. Apparently they offer significantly better documentation and integrate more tightly with the system, allowing you to do more stuff with them.
This was a while back tho, I don’t know where Flatpak stands today
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it’s almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
A corporation is operated through a series of set rules, which dictate how it runs. It is structured in a way that is tangible, whereas the structure of the human mind is currently only theorized. I am reluctant to use terms like ADHD to describe corporations because that is prescribing a list of abstracted properties to them which we can definitely see that it doesn’t have internally. Unless the there is a set of unchanging principles that is the list of ADHD symptoms, no, not ADHD.
Tbf I think convergence could be the killer feature which pushes mobile Linux into large-scale adoption. Also Purism has its Librem 5 phone as convergent, too. It’s not just Canonical.
They bring their projects about 80% to the point of being good, then let them stall while they focus on the next new thing. Later the project may be suddenly cancelled.
It could be like the old RPM vs DEB arguments. Technically, one could have argued at the time that RPM was explicitly singled out in the Linux Standard base.
However, these days, DEB certainly feels more common (although, from my understanding, Redhat/Slack is big in enterprise, so i’m not actually sure which is more common).
Snaps are used for Ubuntu’s IOT distro, and also for their upcoming immutable desktop. They even ship kernel and mesa as snap, which makes updating less likely to break a system (in case of a crash while updating, user error, …).
That’s why they push snap. Canonical doesn’t mainly aim to make a apps available to all distros like flatpak does. Just like now where all distros need their own packages, snap will coexist with other package formats.
For the user it’s unimportant how apps are installed, as long as they’re available.
Been using Linuxmint as daily driver now for 2-3 years. I can do all my remote work needed (Outlook using Prospect Mail, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom, Libre/OnlyOffice).
Also Steam gaming on Linux has vastly improved incl everything that works with Proton. RocketLeague and a few others I always play run perfect within proton, and I’ve found lot of Linux native A-titles like Tomb Raider, Dying Light,Payday2 and Warhammer that all run awesome and gave kickass graphics running natively.
TIMESHIFT has been a life saver a few times when I was messing with various AMD graphics drivers (kisak) and custom kernel like XanMod. Knock on wood it’s been almost a year since any major issues though. But I know I can roll back a day or two (or max, a week) and have everything restored and running within a few hours. It’s awesome.
I faced this as well on KDE and got around it by creating a window rule to match it by window title and force a .desktop name to the vs code window, so it shows the correct icon on the taskbar. I wonder if there is a similar functionality on Gnome?
KWin allows the end-user to define rules to alter an application’s window attributes.
For example, when an application is started, it can be forced to always run on Virtual Desktop 2. Or a defect in an application can be worked-around to force the window above others.
Just like the holy grail, a stable and up-to-date distro doesn’t exist. Stability and recency of software typically constitute a tradeoff. Human software developers produce some number of bugs per line of code. Unless all changes made to a piece of software are bug fixes, new changes mean new bugs, almost invariably. Therefore the only way to stop the increase of bugs in a piece of software is to stop the changes to it or only do changes that address bugs. In the context of distros, a stable one is a distro where the number of bugs stays constant or decreases over time. This is how Debian, Ubuntu and every other distro that locks its software versions for a certain release work. After a release is out, only bug fix changes are permitted, with some special exceptions. The idea that there are multiple types of stability is a bit of a false narrative. Adding features, adds lines of code, which increases the number of defects. This is a fundamental fact of software engineering that’s actively managed during the development cycle of most software. A collection of software like a rolling Linux distro that receives a constant stream of new features may feel bug-free to specific users, however that is typically a coincidence. Just because those X number of people didn’t hit any significant defects during their usage, doesn’t mean that you won’t. This is true for every distro, however stable distros generally have an ever-decreasing number of bugs over their lifespan. In addition, bugs that are never fixed can be documented, workarounded and the workarounds will keep working for the lifespan of the release because there are no changes.
With all of that out of the way I hope it’s clearer why there’s a tradeoff between stability and recency of software in distros. There are various strategies to have a bit of both and they typically revolve around letting the bits you want be recent, while keeping everything else stable. These days the easiest and most foolproof way to get new software is via Flatpak or Snap.
You could of course abandon stability and go for recency via some rolling release distro and see if you step on any significant bugs. Maybe you won’t and you’ll be happy with that. Many people are.
As a personal and professional Linux user that lives with and maintains a significant number of machines, I typically go for a stable base like Debian or Ubuntu LTS and update only the software I need via Flatpak, Snap and Docker. I no longer use PPAs. This provides a great balance between stability and recency. But that’s just me.
Gentoo. Great rolling release that is stable and had timely updates, but has the flexibility to configure my system down to the tiniest details, with a great and knowledgable community. I love source-based distros and Gentoo is definitely the best.
Yes, though there are some prebuilt binaries for large packages. I use gentoo on a desktop and updates don’t take too long, minutes. Big updates that cause lot of packages to rebuild can take hours.
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