boredsquirrel

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boredsquirrel ,

I really need to try the KDE remote desktop solutions but the need for IP addresses was always a problem.

I don't know anything about Linux and the idea of installing it frightens me. Where do I start?

I bought a laptop yesterday, it came pre-installed with Windows 11. I hate win 11 so I switched it down to Windows 10, but then started considering using Linux for total control over the laptop, but here's the thing: I keep seeing memes about how complicated or fucky wucky Linux is to install and run. I love the idea of open...

boredsquirrel ,

Note that what you will experience is just the Desktop, as the details of the distributions are more "which one has less errors over time and not outdated or unstable packages"?

boredsquirrel ,

Linux is easier to install than Windows nowadays.

This.

Go with Mint or OpenSUSE or Ubuntu

Not this. Mint maybe, even though their Desktop looks dated and is not Wayland ready. But OpenSUSE is strange (what to use, Leap? Good luck with outdated packages; Tumbleweed? Well you are now rolling) and Ubuntu is basically dead.

boredsquirrel ,

I really like System76s work so even though never used PopOS it is very likely fine.

But Zorin, hell no. It is a randomly patched outdated GNOME and their installer is Buggy.

Just use Fedora with Dash to panel and you have a better experience.

boredsquirrel ,

On Windows, Rufus is better. On Linux, use Impression Flatpak, or the KDE IsoWriter, or FedoraMediaWriter, all better than BalenaEtcher.

boredsquirrel ,

The installer is actually pretty easy, even though a bit strange in some parts, really stable.

Like, better than Calamares in my eyes.

But yes, on Fedora you basically need

flatpak remote-delete -y fedora
flatpak remote-add flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

And on NVIDIA good luck, I would honestly just use uBlue there.

boredsquirrel ,

just use Debian.

If you only get your stuff from homebrew, Distrobox of Flatpak, yes.

Debian has severely outdated packages, like 2 years old on Bookworm. I would never recommend anyone to run outdated software.

Not every software vendor publishes LTS releases. Firefox, Thunderbird all fine. But the rest is randomly frozen, and this will result in unfixed errors for years.

boredsquirrel ,

Its an electron app and has ads. But for sure it works.

Fedora media writer also has only a few buttons and has mac and windows versions too.

boredsquirrel ,

Just download the iso from your browser? Strange bug though.

boredsquirrel ,

Linux is not a company lol I hope that was a joke. Also Linux is not new.

Now to the software: it will likely run everywhere. Davinci resolve is a bit picky but also fine.

You have quite some Windows-only software. Check https://alternative-to.net or try running it through WINE with Bottles

To the Distro: this is complex. Many people will recommend Linux Mint and it is easy to use but very restricted. I dont think it is great really.

There are many many parallel efforts, so on Linux Distributions (Linux + packages + desktop + ...) you can get very different software.

For a painfree experience running Windows software and Davinci Resolve I recommend to try Bazzite

It is very different from others:

  • it updates automatically in the background. But completely different from Windows. Updates always work and are efficient and stable. No 10 times rebooting
  • updates finish and you can reboot any time to apply it. Literally a week later, nobody cares
  • the reboot takes just as long as any other reboot, no downtime

The system is way better and more stable than "traditional" ones. This is quite complex but lets say while on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora etc. you will have an indivudual system, with individual packages and in the end some strange errors only happening on your setup, with Bazzite you will have exactly 1:1 the system that the developers create.

It is based on Fedora Atomic Desktops which are pretty great. But for your use case I dont recommend them.

I recommend the Bazzite Desktop version with the KDE Plasma desktop. This will be Windows-like in a very good way, but incredibly more efficient, faster and also more powerful. Like a Filemanager with tabs and extensions, that is not written in whatever bloat Microsoft uses (their Win11 stuff is so slow...).

To sum it up, on Linux you have to decide:

What Desktop environment?

  • I recommend KDE Plasma a lot
  • GNOME is also good but veery opinionated and minimalist
  • I dont recommend others like Linux Mint's Cinnamon yet, as they dont support modern standards (Wayland)

What Distribution family?

  • Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE
  • they are all a bit different but basically doing the same
  • Ubuntu stems from Debian and became popular as "the beginner Linux" but they do very controversial stuff nobody else does (like the Snap store) and have tons of bugs. I used it a lot with bad experiences and dont recommend.
  • Linux Mint and others also use Ubuntu or Debian under the hood
  • Arch is very manual and difficult for new users, dont use it
  • OpenSUSE does whatever they do, not recommended
  • Fedora is pretty modern in their software, has a nice community and a big variety of options. They are not allowed to ship restricted media codecs for stuff like h264 video though
  • uBlue (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) is a project using Fedoras versions and adding nice stuff to it, making them usable out of the box. This is their goal, and they do it really well.
boredsquirrel ,

https://vscodium.com/

boredsquirrel ,

No...

Ubuntu is not very cool but they are not Windows.

boredsquirrel ,

I say KDE Plasmas Dolphin is the best File manager :D

boredsquirrel ,

You can try the GIMP beta Flatpak.

See instructions how to do this in my repo

After adding the repo, do flatpak install --user gimp and use the gimp-beta version.

They add tons of stuff to it like color profiles and nondestructive filters.

boredsquirrel ,

Linux mint is pretty outdated and restricting. They using GTK while fighting GNOME is not a nice place to be.

Also their extension store looks like "nobody uses Linux" unlike the KDE Plasma extensions.

Fedora is not user friendly out of the box due to their legal issues and their strange Fedora Flatpaks. I recommend uBlue instead, even though somehow they removed instructions to install the main variants and only advertize Bluefin/Aurora and Bazzite.

boredsquirrel ,

There is a Flatpak for Android Studio and I had it installed. It likely works very well.

boredsquirrel ,

Davinci doesnt just work. They are proprietary so packaging as a flatpak is near impossible, which makes bundling drivers difficult.

They require proprietary NVIDIA drivers afaik, but people also run it on AMD GPUs. No idea of Intel GPUs.

boredsquirrel ,

I started using Linux 2 years ago or something. Linux Mint, Kubuntu, MX Linux (wtf Distrowatch), Manjaro, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE...

broke all. On Fedora Kinoite since then, switched to uBlue Kinoite, no complaints.

Currently using secureblue but many things I disagree with, planning a fork.

boredsquirrel ,

Fedora has 2 versions supported, the current release and the old release. It is pretty modern in packages, but this is normally not a problem at all.

I never used the old release but that would give more stability. On the atomic variants this means though that you dont get automatic updates, as using latest will auto update when upstream sets the new version as latest.

boredsquirrel ,

No. This button is completely uninformative and enables only proprietary but free stuff like Chrome, Jetbrains, Steam and NVidia drivers.

It does not

  • enable flathub
  • enable rpmfusion

I use Fedora and I know what I am talking about. The KDE people are currently adding the same "add external repos" button to the Plasma welcome screen, at least something.

But you still have

  • "flatpak apps" but from the wrong source and sometimes broken (just imagine how confusing this is for new users. Having "the flatpak alternative" but its also wrong.)
  • no flathub
  • libavcodec etc. that interfere with ffmpeg
  • no nvidia drivers
boredsquirrel ,

Oh nice, didnt know that.

I am not sure how well that works, as NVIDIA drivers need a karg and a blocklist of nouveau.

ffmpeg needs to be installed mit --allowerasing

While yes for sure flathub apps have support, you still have a preinstalled Firefox and a flatpak remote that both dont have the nonfree stuff. This is just very confusing.

But btw Firefox RPM has support for user namespace sandboxes, allowing process isolation. So just using the official Flatpak is not a real solution.

boredsquirrel ,

Works very well. Only issue is missing ported extensions and the cursors lol.

For some reason all cursors made for plasma 5 are blurry, so the existing "breeze plasma 5 cursors" dont work that well.

And I miss "minimal desktop switcher" as the Plasma 6 alternative just makes Plasma desktop crash for some reason.

boredsquirrel ,

And then such an AKMOD would be a good candidate for ublue hardware enablement

boredsquirrel ,

When using ublue, they have a ujust clean-system that may interest you.

boredsquirrel ,

Do you have any containers? Do you use homebrew?

Please report this to ublue as if this is an actual problem, it might be important.

boredsquirrel ,

Maybe open a Github issue

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/issues

I think this is the correct way to report stuff like that.

Instead of showing podman processes, list all containers. There may be some. But I really have the feeling this is homebrew

boredsquirrel ,

Starting to write about this, it is actually really complex as rpm-ostree is really powerful. Read the man entry, it tells a lot.

Ostree can use ostree remotes (like git repos) or "ostree native containers" i.e. OCI containers (like Docker, Podman etc. which uBlue uses.

the rpm part meanwhile allows to add any RPM to the image, but it takes way longer. So doing this centrally is more efficient.

This has tons of benefits like adding packages that Fedora cannot legally add, or doing opinionated changes, or unstable stuff like drivers.

Instead of having every user apply them, this does them once and by that increases reproducibility.

boredsquirrel OP ,

Very interesting, please report that to them, it may be because of some experimental stage.

For example an installation media needs some form of accessible first user creation. Anaconda etc may be more advanced here.

boredsquirrel OP ,

This means there are C functions that are documented and used, but insecure.

In Rust there is simply an enforcement of certain conventions, which will make code cleaner and prevent a whole class of errors.

boredsquirrel ,

Never heard of nmtui and nm is a pain, thanks!

boredsquirrel ,

So the question is what the hell is "Ubi server" and why doesnt it preinstall network-manager?

I would install both tools.

boredsquirrel ,

If you have an android phone and a usb cable for it, use usb tethering!

Connect it to the PC, and in android under connections switch to "usb tethering" under usb options.

But if you dont even have networkmanager installed (which is really really odd) then no idea if autoconnect works, likely not.

boredsquirrel ,

Aka Russia. They will have cryptographic authentication lol

boredsquirrel ,

Ublue does more

  • hardware enablement with nonfree packages Fedora cannot ship
  • experimental images
  • opinionated configurations
boredsquirrel ,

Updating and rebooting before using is basically just paranoia. And Atomic Fedora now has automatic updates (by default, was just a settings switch before).

Note that automatic updates have many issues which ublue fixed in their ublue-update

boredsquirrel ,
  1. Agree that this is not typical use
  2. But also agree that doing this is very slow and sometimes nice for testing
  3. But this is not about dnf but rpm-ostree, which is slower. Note though that there is an --apply-live setting to not need a reboot
  4. Distrobox / toolbox are intended for that, Distrobox is way better for UX. Not everything works here but most.
boredsquirrel ,

I also disagree with some Fedora devs that "development should be done in containers". This works well for apps, but results in duplication and does not allow editing the OS itself.

boredsquirrel ,

Snapshots are a lot more flexible. You can make any modifications to your system without issue.

The issue is the lack of any versioning and control. It works "without issue" just as it works on traditional distros, it works until suddenly you have strange errors, devs tell you "I cant reproduce this here and btw modifying the base OS is not a supported use case" (it actually isnt) and as there is no way to revert the "issueless changes" you need to fix them manually or reinstall the OS.

boredsquirrel , (edited )

rpm-ostree --apply-live dosomething

I havent tested that, but I also think nonatomic ostree is already really great and I want to try to only do that for some time.

Note that this is will not create a snapshot afaik so if an update breaks, it breaks. But installing a package might be worth it.

Edit: seems to only work for installs?

boredsquirrel ,

Yes I have. I think they do the same as OpenSUSE microOS basically.

The live system is immutable, when updating they clone it to the other partition and run regular apt in there. (Not sure about that but I think). Same issue as on OpenSUSE [whatever they want to call these variants].

It sounds like the thing Android is doing, but in detail it is way less secure. I only know of rollback prevention and signing, so an update needs to be an update and cannot downgrade components. This may not be available there but idk.

And the entire boot process on any Linux distro is extremely insecure compared to Android/GrapheneOS on a Pixel.

Their "apk package manager" is just a wrapper for Distrobox, not solving any fundamental problem. But Distrobox for sure is awesome for closing the gaps.

I think uBlue with homebrew is doing something more sustainable here though, as homebrew is independent, well maintained (cross OS!) and does not rely on having a separate OS run in parallel. So if you imagine Fedora would only supply base packages in some future, a project like homebrew could take care of the rest.

Also I couldnt even get the Debian version installed in a Qemu VM, same as with EndlessOS, so yeah so much about "alternative immutable distros".

boredsquirrel ,

Not true. There are tons of things like Wayland support that are only good in GTK3, and even then likely not complete

boredsquirrel ,

13 years, damn...

[Resolved] After updating through both APT and the Software Store, I can't play mp4 videos with VLC anymore. The screen goes blank for a second or two then the audio starts playing without the video..

I'm using Debian 12, Ryzen 7 5700X processor, and Radeon HD 5450 graphics card. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling VLC but it didn't resolve the issue. Here's an excerpt from the VLC's log file:...

boredsquirrel ,

Try Celluloid Flatpak. It is slim, perfectly packaged and uses MPV.

Saves you a lot of troubles.

boredsquirrel ,

Conservatives dont like that attitude!

boredsquirrel ,

Very interesting. I heard F2FS has no journalling, but afaik Fedora Atomic doesnt rely on it?

It might be worth looking into, as it beat many tests.

boredsquirrel ,

Edit: BTRFS has advantages that likely make it better for me.

It has compression and allows flexible partition sizes. The compression may explain the speed decreases.

boredsquirrel ,

That is true, not for Flatpaks but for sure.

I wonder how much of a pain it would be not having BTRFS subvolumes on atomic Fedora. Will try F2FS in a VM.

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