Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.
Self-hosting is right out for most people. It's pretty expensive to even get started without compromising your home network (router with VLAN, switch, multiple servers (at least thinclients)), and then on top of that you need to maintain it, and can't really ever max out your download/upload speeds because people are depending on your internet to interact with the repo.
Gitlab is also for-profit, but also has blackouts and devs going rm -rf on the production DB. It's often in the news for bad things, so I've generally avoided it.
Codeberg is great for personal repos, but most smaller git hosting services have horrible SEO. Like I've had issues finding repos when searching for their exact name, if I had to use general search terms I'd only see github repos.
I would rather Linux just be able to detect what's missing and install it for me. In the case of a lot of missing components, what it says is missing will be named completely different from the package you need to install which makes it really hard.
That does happen, but Linux doesn't have anything to do with installing packages, your package manager does. If this package was installed through apt for example, it would also download all of the dependencies. But this package is using a makefile to build and install, therefore it has nothing to do with your package manager.
Tldr: use the package manager, and don't use DIY packages if you don't want to DIY
Additional package managers like flatpak and nix solve different issues:
dependency mismatch: let's say libreoffice and this package require a different version of glibc -> flatpak downloads both versions and symlinks them in a different location in order for each package to have the correct version while not impacting your system and the glibc your DE is using
newer packages: Debian freezes packages for 2+ years, flatpak gives you a fresh version
easier packaging for developers: you can package for flatpak instead of having to maintain packages for every popular package manager and distro
I'm running MX + nix unstable, and it's pretty great. Although it's got some annoying parts like nixGL, it's nothing compared to simply updating your systyem and it failing to boot.
Tbh home-manager is going to be overkill in most scenarios. A dotfile directory + git is going to be more than enough, and you can use stow to symlink everything.
It's not clear what device you want to install Linux on.
If it's an apple arm you're pretty much limited to what Asahi is doing (Fedora now afaik).
If it's a regular amd64, I'd suggest something more stable like MX, Mint, Suse leap, etc. You can use an alternative package manager to keep what you need fresh, but your base system won't change for years.
I'd maybe suggest starting first with nix and home-manager while you're still on macos. Do note that I haven't used it on mac, but the idea is for it to be cross platform. You can start adding your packages to the list, and have everything you need immediately when you start using Linux. That's going to be your best option for programming, but it's more difficult. This should help you out to get started
As for gaming, I wouldn't have high hopes on arm. You can use lutris to run windows games for example, but if your device also needs to emulate a different CPU architecture, it wont be happy. Docker had serious performance issues before they introduced arm base images.
Pretty much. Plasma depends on regular updates, and is not nearly as good on stable distros that freeze it for years at a time. The version in Debian is almost 2 years old by now, and a new one isn't coming out for at least a year.
“You can do the same things with the aur as without” is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard (sry) Its like saying you can do the same thing with a guitar as with a CD.
Nah, that's coming right up:
For flatpack: I avoid it, as people who are far more deep into the topic than me said its basically snap with extra steps, bloated, insecure, against the Linux philosophy of interlocking FOSS software blah blah. Didn’t understand most of it but followed the advice.
Argument from authority is a logical fallacy, and I don't think basing your entire argument on willful ignorance requires further comment
People have issues with snap due to following reasons, and none of them apply to flatpak:
snap is forced on ubuntu users and apt randomly installs snaps instead of deb
snap slows down boot times because it mounts virtual FS'
snap store and packages are closed source, and while snap is open source, the snap store is hardcoded
Additional package managers are bloated in the same way cars are bloated for having seatbelts and airbags. The only way to reliably prevent dependency mismatches is to have a separate set of dependencies.
For example: you want to install the newest obs, but it requires a higher version glibc than your KDE. Installing the newer glibc in the exact same location as your system could possibly break your system. Pacman simply errors out, on the other hand flatpak provides the correct version to each of the packages it installs. And that's possible because:
Everything is isolated, and generally not only more secure, if the package is published by the developer, but could be even further improved:
each package gets its own private sandbox with a filesystem, libraries, dependencies, runtimes, etc.
there are built in systems to further isolate packages from each other and your system
you can use tools like flatseal to control permissions on top of whatever the base system uses (AppArmor/SELinux).
no sudo privileges required
Pacman can only use AppArmor/SELinux, and AUR is the riskier version of community flatpaks.
The thing is, you can't get better security and reliability without breaking FHS a bit. You also need to consider that they still try to follow it within the additional restrictions imposed on them. You get the same structure, but in respectively consistent places. It's a pretty good trade-off in my regard.
For btrfs: OK, give me the Debian bookworm installer where you can select ANY enrcrypted format that is not luks–>lvm–>ext.
The default one, and therefore essentially everything downstream: guided partition -> change from ext4 to btrfs and set to mount to / -> run the encryption wizard. Do read the maintenance section though, there are reasons why stable distros don't default to it. Besides that, rsync does the job more than well enough. You can use the timeshift gui to have it periodically take snapshots, or easily automate it in different ways.
Honestly, monthly snapshots are going to be just fine. That's the whole benefit of this kind of a setup. Your base system almost never changes, while everything you need to be up to date is completely separate. Half of my packages are nix unstable and just as bleeding edge as on arch, but my system is not at real risk of failing to boot due to an update because it's still Debian, and quite close to vanilla at that. You don't need btrfs and snapshots on every update because both flatpak and nix support rollbacks, and that's the only scenario where updates could be risky.
There are downsides, and possible complications during setup though, but I'd say the trade is more than worth it, especially if you depend on your device and can't have it break down because you ran a system update or installed a package without updating the whole system. Working abroad with bad internet really drew it home for me, and caused me to finally drop arch.
If I want to have glassy themed desktop for example on Ubuntu I need to understand kvantum, which folder need which permissions, download themes from a website, kvantum from the terminal and install them, while on arch I type yay glassy-themeXY
But yeah, the large repo + AUR do make some things easier. Although the additional package managers are quite close, while allowing for a more dependable base system.
When installing teamspeak for Ubuntu I need to understand how to make my own desktop entries, mark files as executable, how to install .deb packages etc, while on arch I type yay teamspeak, done.
flatpak search teamspeak -> flatpak install com.teamspeak.TeamSpeak -> done (I'll get to flatpak later)
Sure aur is not the most secure source, but better (and easier) then blindly copy pasting commands from some forum or manually downloading dubious python scripts from github.
Sure, and that's why you can use something like flatpak in any scenario. I prefer nix, but that's still not user friendly.
For the customization at the time Ubuntu only had gnome,
They have flavours for each DE, same as Fedora has spins. It's an easy way to ensure default apps go with the correct DE.
I don’t know what you are talking about with everything in the same place regardless of distro
Most packages follow FHS and XDG, but there are still plenty of them that just drop it in ~ and call it a day.
The FHS ones (/etc, /usr/share, /usr/local/etc) are where you're supposed to find default configs. But, /usr should be read-only and only ever copied from, while /etc is for system wide configs.
The XDG configs are tied to your user, and only located at your ~. Usually in ~/.config but there are some cases where you might want to use ~/.local/
On Linux, the steam installation via snap has another file structure than via apt, and another for flatpack and another for appimage and another for the aur version which is different from the selfcompiled version.
Yes, but that's got nothing to do with the distro.
Apt and pacman follow the FHS, AUR just provides instructions to pacman.
Appimages contain everything they need to run in a single file that you execute.
Flatpak, snap, nix, guix, distrobox, etc. don't save in the exact same directories because it's much safer that way, but they still roughly follow FHS. For example nix symlinks everything into ~/.nix-profile and provides you with the same structure as apt (/etc, etc.)
When you don’t know about this stuff and don’t have the time to watch tutorials or read man pages when wanting to do anything, the difference between this and “yay teamspeak” was like day and night, a matter of usable vs. Unusable.
GUI stores like discovery allow you to install and update packages from different stores at the same time. You can search for teamspeak and chose to install the deb or flatpak. Can't get more user friendly than that.
In win you have all your settings in the settings app (and the values stored in registry) EVERY file of the program you would need to accsess is in the program folder (or roaming).
No, you have the available windows settings in the settings apps. KDE approaches it the same way, and is far superior IMO. The difference is that if you want to change something that's not covered by the settings apps, windows forces you to blindly copy-paste regedit commands, while linux has a text file.
For packages there is no FHS, they might or might not include default configs if they support text configs in the first place (a BIG part of the UNIX philosophy), or they might generate them when needed. It might be in one of the program files, in multiple locations in my documents and app data, or you might need to once again blindly copy-paste regedit commands. Hell, a windows program might use different 5 location for different configs.
The “why would a beginner need those” question always strikes me as odd, because it always sounds love me people wanna deny use cases. I tried changing my local one time, ...
It's more because Linux has come a long way. For example I can just use MX Date & Time and use a gui to adjust my local and hardware time without ever touching the terminal.
If you think a hyperbolised analogy is an insult, take care of your delicate constitution and don't risk maladies by entering discussions on the internet.
Yeah, a company that's been partnered with Microsoft for a decade, and has had horrible corpo ideas like selling user searches to Amazon and running ads in the terminal, has totally nothing to do with windows. Nope, definitely not spelunking in MS's ass to get defaulted in WSL and Azure, it just happened because it's the most beloved and bestest distro ever...