Tried a lot of distros and finally settled on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Rock solid for a rolling release. If anything ever goes wrong, there’s Snapper to rollback without a breaking a sweat.
Fedora XFCE, The only 2 times I ever have to touch the command line are for flatpak and for updateing, so I am not sure if I would recomend the XFCE spin, but I would recomend Fedora, probably the KDE, only because I for what ever reason cannot stand Gnome, I do not know why, but I just cannot get my workflow to work with gnome
I would only recommend it to Windows users looking to start using Linux. The average Linux user is a lot more tech-literate than me and can use the more difficult but more customizable and streamlined distros, and the average Windows user has no chance on Linux, not even Ubuntu which was already a lot of work for me to switch to
I installed Arch on all my PIs just so I can reinstall every single one because they have abandoned new packages. But it also was unofficial. Now I just generally want to move to Star64 because Risc-V sounds interesting.
Same. I end up either grep -v -e tmps and loop mounts or mount -t for each type of physical mount. I suppose lsblk and findmnt might have better options and views.
When I run lsblk with no flags/parameters I get 18 lines of loop devices. Sure I could issue the command again and pipe thru grep to remove all the lines that have “snap” since I forgot to do it this time. I propose “snap” because couldn’t I have non snap-related loop devices?
EndeavourOS is definitely my favorite desktop distro I’ve used. I’m pretty heavy on command line because my brain likes it and I really enjoy the lack of any graphical package manager where you just have to use command line to update/install stuff. Feels very clean and I haven’t had any stability issues that I haven’t seen in other distros.
It’s there no option to update things with a GUI or do you just prefer to use terminal. Currently trying to decide between mint and endeavor. Haven’t used Linux since Ubuntu way back in college in like 2011
Small(er) community than what you might be used to since you’re coming from a more mainstream distribution.
Smaller selection of software available than Arch (due to AUR) but I dabble only with essentials so hasn’t bothered me. You can always compile from source.
Good documentation. It’s not at the level of Gentoo or the BSDs but good enough for anyone to get a hold on it and start learning.
For SBC, you can’t beat Raspberry Pi. The ecosystem is just there and the support outclasses every other board.
For hardware based on SBCs, Pine64 hands down. Devices like the Pinebook and Pinetab are SBCs in a hardware shell and as such should feel like cheap gadgets, but their build quality is excellent and these feel like premium devices. I have just started messing with the Pinetab 2 and it feels like a device 3x its price, to the degree that I don’t mind that the drivers and software for it are still a work in progress.
God, tell me about it. I did not fully appreciate the Pi until the Beagle, which has an ecosystem that seems to be following some branch of chaos theory when it comes to organization.
Pine64: I honestly regret I didn’t follow up on this more before now because I had no idea about the Pinebook and Pinetab and I’ve been thinking about diy tablets, since diy laptops are still–really not a thing and it occurred to me just recently to see what’s up with open source tablets. I use a kindle for reading but when I went back to school, most of my books aren’t really Kindle-compatible so I bought a Galaxy Tab Ultra (10 inch, as eyesight) both so I could use Kindle search functions and a readable text size and so I blow up the diagrams. It wasn’t as horrendously expensive as it could have been because, like my phone, I trade in yearly to upgrade, not because i need to but because–depressingly–it’s more affordable when I can get max trade-in value and watch carefully for Samsung’s random discounts.
So yes, I am excited about this. My tablet is a very different use case from my phone (which no, no way to switch to open-source or Linux there at this point); migrating to an open source tablet is actually a possibility. So very cool.
Do yourself a favor and nab Pinetab 2. The wifi and bluetooth drivers aren’t ready yet (you’ll need a dongle or to tether a phone,) but that’s part of the fun: you can join the Discord channel and watch the discussions and commits happening in real time.
That’s because they sell at community prices for little to no profit, either at cost or close to it. They’ve talked about eventually trying to get their prices into retail outlets with a retail markup, which would also pay for retail-level support rather than community support.
In other words, if you buy community, you’re buying just the hardware, and the community provided the software.
I’ve used it as a daily driver for a few years now. Here are my thoughts on it:
**Stability:**Generally speaking, I’ve found it to be pretty rock solid for a rolling release distro. Over the years, it’s only really broken a handful of times. Things that break tend to be the same as with any rolling release distro, e.g. pipewire came out which had no immediate impact on pulse, but over time more and more things started to require pipewire, so eventually forcing ones hand with switching.
UpdatesBeing rolling release, everything is relatively up-to-date. The way they manage dependencies package updates with continuous integration is pretty clever and seems to help prevent things from breaking.
System ManagementBecause of the decision to use runit, things are different from mainstream Linux distros. This isn’t bad, just keep in mind you will need to learn to use a new set of tools to manage your system. There are some bits and pieces that bridge the gap, e.g. elogind means you get systemd type session management without needing all of systemd. For system logging, you will need to use socklog instead, which is a very different beast to systemd journal and classic syslogd. For everything else, the arch wiki is very useful for finding light weight utilities to help manage things.
Package availabilityThere are definitely a plethora of options for packages. Because of how their package infrastructure works, it is rare that a package you want isn’t available. And for those that aren’t available, it’s usually a small utility…one with an alternative that is available in the repository already.
User ContributionsIn void, there is no distinction between “official” and “user” contributed packages. Voids package infrastructure feels more like the AUR from the outset, but with github CI doing the heavy lifting of compiling the package for everyone once you’ve upstreamed package changes. The downside I’ve found is that the maintainers seem to be perpetually time/resource constrained. For any package changes that are moderately more complicated than “uprev package”, “fix breakages” or “new package”, I’ve found it a bit frustrating. A few years ago, I attempted to get some changes in for GHDL to enable backtraceing support, but after a few review comments, it just went silent on the maintainer side, so never got merged. After about a month of silence, github automatically closed the issue.
DocumentationTheir docs are pretty good for getting started. I’ve found them great for pointing out nuances and peculiarities of Void. It is definitely not as exhaustive and comprehensive as the arch wiki, but about 75-80% of the arch wiki is applicable across the board for all Linux distros anyway…
Enabling G-Sync and increasing digital vibrance on my second monitor. Everytime I need to increase the vibrance on my second monitor I have to first boot into xfce, open nvidia settings until the profile loads then log out and then log into hyprland. It’s very annoying.
I have to log in to xfce for the profile to take effect. I set Nvidia settings to start at login, even though the process does start on Wayland it doesn’t apply anything until I enter xfce, then I can exit it and start my Hyprland session
I love GNOME more than any other DE. I like how it works very well with keyboard shortcuts. The only extensions I use are the weather and the tray icons.
@dustyData I have hundreds of thousands of files that need to be backed up locally and in the cloud. I use either Vorta or Pika. Both are interfaces for Borg. Easy to use and their deduplication feature manages to save a lot of diskspace. I tried so many backup solutions and none worked as reliably.
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