Alacritty is really nice and easy to configure, and isn't "tied" to any desktop environment, like Konsole is. Kitty is really cool for its implementation of image display. Foot is a Wayland-native alternative that is also really nice to use.
I think the videomaker may be failing to account for swap space. The latest Fedora releases use zram (swap that lives in memory instead of hard disk) by default, while the rest do not. Windows in particular does not take 72G and tends to be aggressive in swap allocation. The fact that he presents this data as “free space available” adds confusions while seemingly burying the simplest answer.
PipeWire wins in the feature-set game, which is why it is being preferred over PulseAudio.
According to the inventor of PipeWire, this is the wrong perspective to take. PipeWire is preferred over PulseAudio as a server, clients (apps) should continue to use the PulseAudio/JACK APIs because the PipeWire API is not designed for general use (it's designed for things like pipewire-pulse and pipewire-jack).
So the middleware stays the same but the underlying server changes? That's an amazing strategy I wish Wayland did this instead of breaking damn near everything with it's strange restrictions on behavior and overlays
Really? Like not letting apps draw over other apps? As far as I know Windows still allows that, so does even Mac OS. I don't know who in the industry decided that screenshotting is a bad behaviour and needs to be removed but maybe they should find a new industry, like fast food line work for example.
Allowing any app unrestricted access to the input and output of any other app (like in X11) is a terrible security practice. It allows for trivially easy keyloggers and makes horizontal movement to other apps after the first has been exploited super easy.
Many people's answer to this is "then just don't run untrusted apps, duh", but that is a bad take since that isn't realistic for 99% of users. People run things like Discord or Spotify or games or Nvidia drivers all the time, not to mention random JavaScript on various websites, so the security model should be robust in the presence of that kind of behaviour. Otherwise everyone is just a single sandbox escape in the browser away from being fully compromised by malware installed with root privileges. Luckily we know better now than when X11 was designed and that is the reason for things like Bubblewrap (used in Flatpak for sandboxing), portals and the security model of Wayland.
And in the end: the people who decided this are the people actually willing to do the work to build and maintain the Linux desktop stack. If anyone knows what the right approach is, it's them.
Really, it's as simple as that. Pulseaudio tried to be the systemd of sound and failed succeeded pretty horribly. Even its packaging was horrible, back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
No idea if that's the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the "Icaza pest", trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that "users have no right to change their settings" when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it'd interact with stuff like screen and dtach, were discused.
How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?
I only used AUR for a few packages (<5 at a time). It's to be avoided and only used if the other options are a massive pain (unless it's an official package).
Then I left Arch and eventually landed on MX. During that time Nix with home-manager has slowly replaced flatpak, and I don't even have it installed anymore. Nix is better in every way, except for ease of use.
Flatpak has great gui integration (for gui tools). You can click through everything, and the updates are unified. It usually works perfectly fine if you just need to install a few programs.
With nix, there's a lot more setup, but there are many benefits. You end up with a list of packages, and that's really useful because you can take a fresh install, install nix and home manager, and then run a single line to reinstall everything. You can rollback updates, pin specific versions, install packages from a repo (if it has a flake.nix with outputs), and also configure them. I'm using the unstable branch, and it's giving me bleeding edge packages on Debian. And there's no risk of outdated system libraries, like with flatpak, because it provides everything.
The home.nix should be automatically generated, and that's where you put all of your packages. I left a few as an example.
NixGL is needed to use openGL (nixGL lutris for example). It works in most cases, but I couldn't get alacritty or kitty to work. There are some ways to have packages automatically use it, but I still haven't tried them out.
Flake allows you to select the correct nix repo (stable/unstable), appropriate home-manager version, and add outside packages like nixgl. It's technically not necessary, but I wouldn't go without it. Here I'm using the unstable repository, check the relevant docs if you want to go with releases instead.
The equivalent of apt update && apt upgrade is nix flake update && home-manager switch --impure. I like cd-ing into the nix dotfile directory (all of the files are in there and symlinked to ~/.config/ locations), but you can also use command line arguments to point to the flake.
nix flake update updates the package definitions to what's in the repo
home-manager switch install them, and also updates any configs it's managing. The --impure is only needed if you're using nixgl (bad build commands depend on system time).
nix-collect-garbage to force a clean up of unused packages
The obvious answer is people who grew up using Macs tend to like the Ui and workflow.
Even though I've never enjoyed my times using MacOS, I'll still sell being able to perfectly clone it's desktop as a feature of Linux for those who do.
Depends. Are you happy with MacOS and want to stay in the Apple ecosystem?
If yes, then just keep it. It is perfectly tailored for your hardware.
If you are annoyed by it or want to try out something new, then try Linux.
The 2015 MBA has a Intel CPU afaik and general hardware support should be fine from what I've heard.
Instead of Ubuntu, I would recommend Fedora, either the Gnome or KDE variant. If you prefer minimalism and the coherence/ well-thought-outness of MacOS, then use the Gnome ("Workstation") variant, and if you prefer customisability, then the KDE-spin.
You could also take a look at the Atomic variants, they are a newer concept with a few benefits (and also drawbacks) compared to the regular versions.
As a small tip: no matter if you decide for the mutable or the atomic versions, use Distrobox! While Python is pre-installed, it is a system dependency, and you wanna keep your dev environment isolated from your host OS. If you wanna change the Python version for example, this might otherwise brick your install.
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