@JustMarkov@OneRedFox it’s against GNU recommendations, but the nature of open source is about modifications, adaptations, improvements and sharing… and so there is the non-gnu channel.
While true, there is the nonguix repository that packages both the proprietary Nvidia driver and Steam. Otherwise, you’re probably better off going back to regular distributions based on the others that you’ve ruled out thus far.
Try Puppy Linux on it. It runs with meager resources - ~100MB RAM, 250MB storage (only if you want to install it to disk). Everything runs in RAM and is blazing fast. It is a God send for older computers
Do read up about the philosophy of puppy Linux. They are based on different distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, etc. Puppy Linux aims to make these small and efficient with some minor utilities thrown in. So, for actual support, you can rely on those distributions as such. Any updates, software installation, etc can be had from the base distro itself.
Except the installer requires one specific repo mirror to be up, which can’t be customized, which has been down for weeks and the dev isn’t very interested in providing any fix or workaround so a lot of people literally can’t install it.
It’s a bad suggestion, it’s a beta product not fit for end user consumption yet.
This should add the flathub remote to the system and then install all the existing user packages into the system level. Then removes all the user level packages.
Do you have any other hardware between computer & monitor? (Ie a KVM Switch?)
The other post about display ID jogged my memory that KVMs (etc) don’t pass through the data (sometimes?), so just wondering whether there’s another factor here…
Not sure how it would only trigger this on updates, but just building a complete picture of the issue.
nothing in between the computer and monitor - it’s just plugged straight in. my current guess is that some step of pacman’s install/update process changes something that also gets changed by something else (DE, config file, idk) after the boot.
IMO you should use LVM2 or one of the high level filesystems that have similar features, and then dynamically create partitions and mount them as needed. E.g. Suddenly need 50G for a new VM image? Make a partition and mount it where you need the space.
You are correct, LVM combines 1 or more disks into 1 or more storage pools that can then be allocated out to logical volumes as needed.
If you just up and pull a disk from a pool (volume group), you’re gonna have a bad time. You can, however, migrate the “extents” allocated to that physical disk to another in order to replace the disk, and your logical volumes can be set up with RAID-like redundancy. There’s a lot of options on how to manage it.
No problem! To expand further, I am 99% certain it would be perfectly viable to have a single disk volume group and just take advantage of LVM’s ability to create, resize and delete virtual partitions on the fly. I think you could also put all your disks into a single volume group, then ask it to not spread your logical volumes across multiple disks, if you wanted to. Could get a bit fiddly though.
Highly recommend Guix, been using it as my daily driver for years now.
System Crafters has a really nice series on getting it setup the way you want it. I think it’s fixed a lot of stuff that is a little wonky with Nix – proper separation of config-time things and build-time things with g-exps, no putzing with bash scripts, grafting so you can reuse builds even when dependencies get updated, and just general good documentation and hackable culture with a pretty active IRC. They’ve recently added support for also managing your dotfiles the same way you do packages and system config (Guix Home). They’ve also pushed the boundaries of bootstrappability/reproducible builds so far that bitcoin-core is now building on Guix for security.
The system is pretty well thought through, and has saved me a few times where I would’ve bricked my machine on a mutable distro – now, I can just boot to a previous version of the system from the bootloader whenever my lastest changes are messed up.
It’s finally an opinionated distro I agree with. Of course you can get anything to look like anything but I just like how they picked a path and went so far down it to make their own unique out-of-the-box experience.
I don’t like some of the other decisions in Garuda, but it’s become hard to get away from it when even regular non-technical people who see it are like “Whoa, what is all that” and you literally just finished installing it and didn’t even change the wallpaper. It’s a very different feeling from what I’m used to with Linux and I’m into it.
The distribution doesn’t to too much, its mostly the desktop environment. I like the look of KDE Plasma the most. But usually I craft my own look after a while.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of fun customizing DEs but I don’t really need that on my daily driver. I also have more of a terminal based workflow so perhaps shell customization scratches that itch for me.
The thing I’ve learned in the many years of watching this fight is that the things Gnome people (of which I am one, though I have immense respect and appreciation for the KDE project) don’t like about KDE tend to be the things KDE people like about KDE and vice versa.
It seems to still be strongly gnome-adjacent, which fits with the softer, “calmer” aesthetic Pop has, but with functional tweaks that are more aligned with Win11/KDE (absolutely intended as a positive statement, as far as moving the ball forward on UX design). I worry that team KDE won’t like the “sane defaults” simplicity that it appears to have inherited from the gnome days, but that might just be the part of me that experiences terminal choice paralysis every time I fire up KDE. :)
These projects are almost diametrically opposite. GNOME tries to provide a very simple, solid but not very configurable desktop with good accessibility and stability while KDE tries to make a very configurable and powerful environment that can be customized to anyone’s needs. I don’t like KDE because it’s unstable, way too powerful for my personal needs (their “simple by default; powerful when needed” concept doesn’t really work) and I just don’t like the UI. Though KDE’s better performance is an objective advantage.
I tend to agree. I mean, the gnome workflow is more appealing to me (though I have since moved to a WM), but my dislike of KDE comes down to (a) too many options everywhere and (b) it looks too “sharp”. If KDE had an “I’m done fiddling” mode that hid most of the options and I found a softer theme, I’d probably like it fine.
Absolutely nothing I just said should take away from others’ preference for KDE. I’m glad we can like what we like.
Agreed. I think it’s not about distros we should have pay attention, but desktop environments.
And about “most appealing” DE I think it’s subjective. Surely KDE has the most flexible structure and may be exactly what you want, but Gnome is also appealing for some people (myself included).
Again, there is no right or wrong, just personal preferences
Can’t. feddit.de can’t upload images and in browser i suddenly get a server error(?) with my lemmy.ml account.
Well uh, left bar with virtual desktop overview bottom, window buttons top, autoexpand
right bar with network and systemload bars top, sensor numbers bottom, fixed size
top bar Android style with left hand clock and date, whiskermenu (symbol view) as the empty space in the center (title only and whitespaces as title), right hand systray with mail and connman-gtk, pulseaudio plugin. Bars are on intelligently autohide, theme is Adapta.
This is on my notebook with touchscreen.
Nice thing is, XFCE can pin bars to specific displays or main display. Meaning, if i plug my ultrawide in, the top bar stays on notebook while left and right bar switch to the ultrawide, a center bar with Wiskermrmu with list view for desktop usage appears.
Somebody needs to tell me what they’re doing to Plasma to make them like it so much because when I install it with Breeze it just looks like Windows 2000.
I don’t really care how it looks precisely, so long as its semi-professional and consistent in its style.
Like, I change the font to Fira Sans, because Noto Sans gives me depression, but the rest of my customizations are all just to carve out my ideal workflow.
I took it as a question of which distro looks nicest out of the box (like, which distro manager has made real effort to make something particularly nice looking).
I tried their icons on KDE (there is a theme) and these old, very detailed icons just dont make sense. Too much color, very incoherent style and way too much detail that you cannot see anyways.
But I have not tried it, as I was too dumb that you need Javascript to have the payment download button work.
Hmm there is stuff like Archcraft (maybe it has a different name now idk) that is made specifically for visuals. In terms of usable distros I’d say Xero is the best I know. It seems to be discontinued though. CachyOS has some nice WM setups too but the appealing visuals can’t be consistent in that case because they are not full DEs and the unreasonably tiny calendar pop-up window from Xfce always ruins everything.
<span style="color:#323232;">Layer 2b: ->> User applications (flatpak, nixpkgs, etc.)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Layer 2a: ->> User data (mutable, persistent no matter what your system layer is)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Layer 1: -> System (immutable/read-only/updated "atomically" meaning all at once)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Layer 0: Hardware
</span>
Or, alternately, it’s what macos has been doing with absolutely no fanfare for several versions now. That’s not a knock, btw. It’s an illustration that it can be completely transparent in use, though it may require some habit changes on linux.
It’s a distro that makes all but a few system directories immutable. This means you can’t just install whatever you want in the same way you would install in a traditional Linux system.
This comes with some benefits:
Malicious and buggy software can’t permanently fuck up your installation. Even root can’t edit those directories.
Each system update replaces only the system layer, but you can rollback to the previous one if something breaks.
You can rebase to other images (like going from Fedora Kinoite to UBlue Aurora) with a simple command, and you don’t need to reinstall anything or worry about backing up your /home directory.
Most software is installed via flatpaks or appimages, keeping a layer of separation between your system and your applications.
Distroboxes/Podman containers can handle a lot of additional software while keeping it safely containerized.
The system is generally reproducible, so the core of what you have is the core of what everybody else has.
Some drawbacks:
You can’t install whatever you want however you want. There are some hard limitations on where files are allowed to go, and installing certain software that interacts with the kernel can be tricky (I’m currently trying to figure out the best way to install my VPN provider’s client).
There’s a definite learning curve to working with containers. It’s not always as simple as "create container, install thing."
There’s a definite learning curve to retraining yourself to think in layers/containers.
There’s also the Wayblue family of Wayland distros, based on Ublue.
It’s hard to say for certain whether a distro will work for your hardware, even the Nvidia-specific images can have bugs related to the Nvidia drivers or their interaction with compositors.
I’ve used NixOS for a year.
I also tried Fedora Sway Atomic for a week or so. It mostly worked well, but I eventually found that it’s really hard to use Nix for development on a graphics application, because linking with the system Vulkan drivers is near impossible. The loader used by Nix’s glibc will ignore FHS locations. That seems to rule out a lot of the benefits of using Nix.
So I gave up on using Nix + Fedora as a failed experiment and went back to NixOS.
My wish list for Nix, Wayland, and Sway is pretty long. I kinda wish I had the time to make a new distro.
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