I’ve been distrohopping for the decade+ I’ve been using Linux. Keep coming back to Arch. Once I get the initial install done, everything works and I don’t need to touch anything.
I’m thankful they’re finally doing something about vsync, but I’m still going to need the option for preventing app sleep when outside of viewport. It sounds like an odd complaint, but it means not being able to have a game on one virtual desktop and its wiki on the other. It means not being able to let music run while I’m working on another computer. It’s running better, and I’m glad to see it starting to play nicer with Nvidia, but not quite ready to make the leap 100%
This may seem like a small nitpick, but the way you phrased this is backwards. Keep in mind that the problems with wayland on Nvidia cards is squarely to blame on Nvidia. Nvidia is finally playing nice with wayland, not the other way around.
Interesting! I wonder if it’s a Wayland on KDE-specific thing. I’d read it as a security and efficiency feature of Wayland’s, where it suspends applications that are not in the viewport. An example case is that I’m playing FFXIV on virtual desktop 1. On virtual desktop 2, I have whatever thing I’m looking up or collecting in the browser. While I’m on virtual desktop 2, it suspends the game on desktop 1, which wouldn’t be a big issue in single player games as much, but in games that call to a server, like FFXIV or Overwatch, it disconnects you from the server.
I was able to get around this by using Windowed Fullscreen and turning on Caffeine so that my computer wouldn’t sleep, but the turn screen off feature also changes the viewport, so I’ve had to disable that feature entirely.
Then I work from home, my home computer is hooked up to the sound system, so I’ll play music through it, but then be on my work computer next to it. I’d like my computer to still black the screen and lock, but the moment it does either, viewport changes, music cuts off.
If it’s viewed as a security feature, then the fix should not to have to be preventing your screen from going off or locking. I’d loooove the ability to set certain apps from suspending when not in the viewport. Bonus points if it’s one of the features added to gamemoderun
I’m using Plasma Wayland as well. Games do do that where they minimize on focus loss but I’m pretty sure they did that on X11 as well (especially since they mostly are using Xwayland) and I haven’t had any connection problems in multiplayer games when tabbed out. I’d have to see if your problem happens for me with virtual desktops, I rarely use them. And the music thing doesn’t happen at all, the screen locks and turns off and music/the youtube video/whatever keeps playing as normal.
What distro are you using? I’d chalk these problems up to a distro bug…
Huh, I didn’t realize others weren’t having these impacts, because Xorg doesn’t have these issues for me, it’s just as soon as I move over to Wayland. I’m on the infamous Manjaro, though I had the same issues on EndeavourOS
Debian 12 shipped with the latest kde plasma version, but the distro is designed to be stable, with a capital S. The packages will not update until the version does.
Flatpaks are a great way to get modern software on a stable OS like debian. If neon has a flatpak version, it would be a good answer.
I was using EndeavourOS when I ran into the wall that a lot of stuff didn’t have builds on AUR that I needed (and didn’t feel like compiling myself or they didn’t provide source code)
I would recommend using Linux Mint. It is Ubuntu without Gnome Shell and snaps. They use Flatpak instead. I have been enjoying it ever since I jumped ship from Ubuntu about 2 years ago.
I’ve been using more and more flatpaks lately on arch and fedora based distros, i have no idea how snaps compare but seems similar? Seems an odd push from Ubuntu, but could make more sense than deb packages for non techy users perhaps?
Snap is portable to other distros, look at the official website and you see a list of distros, you can use snap on. That doesn’t mean that there is no vendor lock-in, just a different kind. Snap as a format grew out of Cannonicals effort in the mobile field. Snaps where supposed to be the truly convergent successor to click, the packaging format used by Ubuntu Touch. And this history is baked into its DNA. It’s right there on the snapcraft website: “The app store for Linux”. As such Cannonical has always courted proprietary software and/or software by big companies (VS Code was first released as a snap for a reason). I think that they have always have had an eye on one day adding app payments and the sweet, sweet 30% cut they can take from every sale
Solus and Manjaro are shipping Snap installed by default and I’ve never had a problem installing snapd on fedora. All I ever had to do for that was run a single standard dnf install. Apparmor doesn’t pose the problem you think it does
Running software unsandboxed is breaking most of the value of snap. Not only is it insecure many of the portability promises are actually broken and it can load incorrect libraries, etc.
Fedora deleted snap from its repos years ago then it returned. It is a broken mess.
Canonicals response has been: We don’t care, fix it yourself.
It is an awful non-portable solution when a real portable solution exists.
Because it’s extra work to make it open source and few outside of Canonical are interested in contributing. Open sourcing an existing component and maintaining it as such has non-trivial overhead. In that case that work is better spent on other, higher priority items. My guess is that they’ve gauged that the cloud end being open source won’t move the needle on who uses Snap and Ubuntu so they’ve deemed it low priority. Personally I’m using Debian and Ubuntu and therefore Canonical has root on some of my systems. Given I can implement a cloud end for Snap, it bares very little importance to me that today the cloud end isn’t open source since it’s run by the folks that have root on my system anyways as well as supply all other packages on my Ubuntu systems. In fact we don’t even know what the cloud end for the apt repos is. It could easily be Sonatype Nexus. For me the important bit is the client and installer side of Snap since I can’t implement that in a relatively small amount of time. :)
Ubuntu / Canonical were working on Snap for some years when Flatpak came on the scene. They’ve been shipping Ubuntu bits using it since 2016. In addition to the legacy, Snap is more versatile than Flatpak in that it can be used to package pretty much anything, including system bits. It’s also had a secure sandbox from the start. Changing to Flatpak would be a functionality downgrade for Canonical and Ununtu maintainers using Snap. In addition Flatpak can be used along with Snap on Ubuntu so there’s no need to not use both for whoever finds that useful. Snap lets Ubuntu ship software using less work, which means more up-to-date bits in Ubuntu. Users can install other software via Snap or Flatpak, whichever they find more useful.
In my experience, performance of snap apps is just abhorrent. The consume a huge amount of disk space and, whether it’s due to that or not, they have extremely long load times.
Principles aside, this just makes them unusable for me. I use flatpak when there’s no other option, but strive to use deb either natively or through PPA.
Honestly for new/average users, those who tend to use Ubuntu, I always would recommend Manjaro. Since I use arch btw myself I have a bias but using pacman, being rolling release, and having access to the AUR (+ Flatpaks) set Manjaro apart from other distros for average users.
But frankly I never understood why Debian itself is considered an “intermediate” distro since it’s no harder than Ubuntu to use IMO.
Debian is more bare bones then Ubuntu, that’s why. Ubuntu comes with a lot of packages already installed by default. In Debian you have to install a lot of that stuff manually. You might also have to edit some configs for example. It’s not that hard, but maybe a little too much for a beginner.
I upgraded Debian to 12 last night, which required manually updating the source.list for the apt repos for example. It’s been a while but I’m pretty sure Ubuntu gives you a UI for upgrades? Upgrading Debian was simple for a techie who’s played around in Linux already, but it could be more intimidating for a newbie.
I’m kinda baffled people would jump ship because of this matter
Snaps have been a thing for 7 years and before that Canonical did similar really weird things (Amazon shopping lense a decade ago anyone?)
anyone who really cares already uses something else
It’s just because I’m a newbie – having been using Linux for one year, and started with Ubuntu simply because that was shipped ready with my laptop. I haven’t found the time to try any other distro yet, because of work & lack of time.
Indeed I remember I was thinking about moving to Linux years ago, exactly when the Amazon-Ubuntu craziness happened, so I thought “some other time”.
Regarding snap & flatpak: I simply don’t like the redundancy philosophy behind them.
Trying sth new is never a bad idea. From live cd’s, over vm’s or distrobox containers, it makes you more comfortable in switching between environments.
I went from decade with dwm into Alpine + Sway and had zero issues. Actually the opposite, all the screen tearing and multi screen issues are now gone.
I used Manjaro for a while. Twice I had updates break stuff so thoroughly that I had to reinstall the OS entirely. The second time, I installed Pop OS instead and it’s been smooth sailing since.
This is my experience with Manjaro. Really good OS, with gaming that tends to work out of the box, nice choices in UI environment. It's great right up until it breaks.
Now admittedly I've generally not used much Linux on desktop I have been using Linux on servers since the 1990s (the original redhat 5). But it took me a weekend to get the thing properly working again.
It’s not a click bait per se. Even after deb support they will use only snap for applications that has a snap package and only debs if it hasn’t got any snap package afaik.
Because they something to lock you in to Ubuntu. They want Ubuntu to be the only thing that uses snaps. They want to get snaps to be an Ubuntu exclusive feature, and once they can start convincing some random closed source devs to ship in only the snap format they have a hook to keep you on Ubuntu. And they want those random random closed source devs to be focused on more of the corporate world so they can sell some support licenses.
because they won’t need to maintain it, they won’t even need to maintain the dependencies, some guy online will maintain the package and it’s dependency for them, whether it’s updated or not, it’s going to launch, that’s the whole point of those style of packaging
Because maintaining snaps is a lot less work for whoever maintains the package, upstream developers, volunteers, or Canonical. If I’m shipping software for Ubuntu and I can use snap, I sure as hell will use it instead of deb.
Flatpaks are so much better than snaps. There’s nothing that Snaps can do that Flatpaks can’t do better, aside from CLI tools. But CLI tools should just be in Docker anyways.
Flatpak is mainly for packaging desktop apps, whilst snap can update the entire distro (kernel, mesa, system apps, cli). Snap does things Fedora needs rpm-ostree for.
In my opinion docker isn’t as useful for cli tools. I need easy access to many little tools, and this results in me having one container with everything. But that doesn’t work well with network capture etc. In the end being able to install packages system wide quickly is really useful.
You could do it of course but it’s far from ideal for the purpose of a general case CLI. Unless your script yourself a wrapper, the invocation is fairly verbose. It also leaves containers behind unless you specifically pass –rm which isn’t default. Then there’s the intricacies of the different ways of passing data to it. Oh and let’s not forget that unless you setup rootless Docker, or you do something dangerous like adding yourself to the docker group, you have to always invoke with sudo. Therefore I wouldn’t say that Docker is an appropriate tool for CLI apps in general. For dependency-bundled CLI apps, Snap doesn’t have these gotchas and is therefore much closer to ideal CLI UX.
Definitely give Debian a shot, there are just so many more, up-to-date resources available due to the popularity. Handles great out of the box and is super stable.
I use Ubuntu in the cloud, Raspbian for my home server and Ubuntu via WSL on my PC. So, all headless, I’m actually still looking for a desktop environment that I would prefer to Windows (which is slowing devolving…)
This post reminded me of getting free distribution CDs in the mail back in the day.
Yeah I’ve been pretty happy with Mint. It’s a deb/Ubuntu base but they add some stuff plus still provide packaged versions of various desktop apps that Ubuntu has pushed to using snaps for (which I hate)
Red hat is super well supported and documented, and more importantly for me, has the amd proprietary drivers for my card. I do ai stuff so I really wanted rocm set up nice.
Just use Manjaro, it’s a great distro. I switched from Arch a few years ago because Arch kept changing the tools from the installer so every time I had to read the wiki to know how to install it, and that’s not fun.
In general people don’t like Manjaro because it’s a week behind Arch, so if you install things from the AUR you’re likely to break stuff (although that has never happened to me, it is a possibility). Also because since it’s simple to install a lot of people without technical knowledge have started using it and they say they use Arch, so they get replies which assumed they read the wiki, and they get angry, which makes them seem more annoying, which makes the whole thing escalate.
Things in the AUR are built for Arch, so they use the libraries that Arch uses, which means that whenever Arch increases major versions of libraries AUR packages get rebuilt for that version and fail to work on an older one. If you use the packages that build from source you’re less likely to be affected, also this is not such a huge issue because AUR packages take a while to get updated and most of these changes are backwards compatible (so they don’t break on Arch), but I’ve seen it happen plenty of times, almost every week someone using Manjaro would come to the arch subreddit to ask help because a package from AUR had stopped working. And if you don’t believe me, at least believe the guys who wrote the Manjaro wiki
When Manjaro is updated, AUR packages might stop working. This is not a Manjaro issue
I don’t necessarily hate Manjaro, but I do think people shouldn’t use it. Besides the things people have already said, Manjaro goes against the spirit of what Arch is supposed to be. Arch has everything you want and nothing you don’t. You set everything up for yourself so you know exactly how your system works and why X package is installed. You tailor the experience for yourself rather than having someone else tailor it for you. If you wanted that you could just use a distro meant for that in the first place like Fedora.
But even if you really, really, want preconfigured Arch you could just use EndeavourOS. It uses the normal Arch repos and has basically none of the issues Manjaro has in terms of security and stability. There is not really any good reason to use Manjaro over it.
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