For anyone unfamiliar with how kernel support works, unless you manually installed your kernel you don’t need to worry about this.
Distros that shipped 6.5 will continue to support 6.5 during their normal release/support cycle and back port any important patches as needed (or they will update their packages to 6.6).
That's true, but the syntax is different then. In this blog post I cover fish, and I didn't intent to say that this cannot be done in other shells (and I think I never said so).
Pretty unrelated, but I just wanted to say that I love how bash scripting uses if to open an if statement and fi to close it... makes me giggle every time lol
I’ve been running EndeavourOS (Arch-based with really good defaults and a very helpful community) as my daily driver for two years, and honestly I feel the “Arch isn’t stable” trope to be way overblown, based on my experience. I personally had more issues with Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed than I have with EndeavourOS so far.
Also, if Wayland is a priority then I would suggest sticking with Gnome. KDE has come a long with their Wayland support but it’s still pretty buggy in comparison.
P. S. If you do fancy trying the KDE route anyway, I would disagree with the other commenter and say that Debian is not an optimal distro for KDE. This is mainly due to the fact that KDE development greatly benefits from quick updates via a rolling distro, and Debian is pretty much the antithesis of that.
Wayland is indeed a priority, I appreciate the insight. Your reply has given me some useful food for thought. I was also interested in Endeavour as well, but I may try toughing it out with Gnome a bit longer and keep looking into this.
I’m assuming your problems with Gnome are due to the UI? Have you tried adding extensions like Arc Menu and Dash to Panel to achieve a more cinnamon-like experience?
Actually, the UI is alright in it's default state. Those extensions do look interesting though. I generally like using the super key to search for some programs, while opening others with the CLI. I also liked switching between active applications through this interface + arrow keys as well. Though I did have an issue with trying to navigate between programs if the program I wanted was on the other monitor. I also struggled with alt+tabbing between multiple windows of Firefox, for example. Though now that I think about it, that could potentially be resolved with utilizing workspaces better. I had issues with notifications, particularly Thunderbird and Rhythmbox. The notifications would take priority as the active window, and temporarily disable the input for whatever I was working on prior to its appearance. I tried enabling Do Not Disturb mode, disabling notifications for specific programs, and killing xfce4-notifyd through the CLI. Killing xfce-notifyd sort of helped, but would cause a weird notification that still messed with my active window. Currently, If I want to continue working or playing whatever I was using before, I have to alt+f4 the notification, which is rather cumbersome when I get an email or the song changes. Perhaps the solution is to set another shortcut to close the active window. That said, it's rather unfortunate, because LM Cinnamon seemed to handle these notifications in the same way, while being less obtrusive.
With the first few points, I feel like these are probably things that will either get easier as you adjust to the Gnome workflow, or can be remedied by extensions. I recommend installing the unofficial Extension Manager app my Matt Jakemen, which comes with a built-in search. Makes finding extensions very convenient.
The issues with the notifications sounds a bit weird. They shouldn’t be taking focus away from the app you’re working on. I use Thunderbird all the time and it never does that to me. Also, xfce-notifyd? What is that running on Gnome?
Yeah, that's understandable, which is why I'm not currently opposed to staying with Gnome for the time being. However, Cinnamon also had the option to tile windows horizontally, as well as sectioning the screen into 1/4ths. It's not the most necessary feature, but I do miss it when I'm not on the Cinnamon session. The Extension Manager app sounds useful, though I've been steering clear of them due to the complaints I've read regarding their tendency to break. I'll look into it, thanks.
I had a feeling that xfce-notifyd was something not native to Gnome. To be honest, I don't remember installing the Gnome Wayland session, but noticed it at the login screen awhile back. I logged into it using the same login that I use for my LM Cinnamon session; I've heard this is not ideal, and this issue is probably one of the reasons why. For the record, I've also previously tried installing a LM xfce session, so that is perhaps the cause for its appearance. This conversation has me wondering if there's a proper way to reduce any goofy stuff I may have done because of experimenting with DEs. I don't mind looking into it myself, but would also appreciate any insight as you seem familiar with Gnome.
I logged into it using the same login that I use for my LM Cinnamon session; I’ve heard this is not ideal, and this issue is probably one of the reasons why.
Ah yeah, this will be why. Installing different DEs as the same user is pretty much guaranteed to create conflicts and generally should be avoided. It’s always best to create a new user account for each different DE you want to try out so that it doesn’t screw anything up.
P. S. Gnome includes a Wayland session by default, so you don’t have to install it separately like you do with KDE.
Installing different DEs as the same user is pretty much guaranteed to create conflicts and generally should be avoided. It’s always best to create a new user account for each different DE you want to try out so that it doesn’t screw anything up.
This has been a good first-hand experience. I'll keep this in mind moving forward.
If hiccups are a once in awhile thing, that doesn't sound too bad, I suppose. I've been enjoying learning about Linux, and I could see troubleshooting Arch being fun. However, I'll look into Debian, thanks for the recommendation.
Different people have different opinions, but trust me - if you keep your setup simple (and it’s possible to have all the goods you need without much complexity), it can be really robust. In fact, I had much worse time trying to debug Debian-based distros, as they’re much more complex and hard to understand. If you need additional security for your install if it’s critical, consider setting up snapshots.
I had much worse time trying to debug Debian-based distros, as they’re much more complex and hard to understand
That's interesting. This thread has piqued my interest wrt Debian, so this will be a useful bit of information to consider moving forward.
If you need additional security for your install if it’s critical, consider setting up snapshots.
I am a bit familiar with snapshots--I have them set up on my current setup and have used them to recover from mistakes in the past. I'll be looking into them more as there's probably some good stuff out there that I don't know about yet. Thanks.
I run Arch for 10+ years, currently on both of my computers that are fairly different and the maintenance for me is minimal if any. The opinion thay aRcH iS uNStaBLe comes from people who can’t read Wiki carefully enough to set it up properly. Updates that broke something on its own and not as a result of users’ mistake are really a rare thing. I heard of something like that maybe twice during the years and even then it didn’t affect me.
Have a look at fbida. It provides fbi (an image viewer), fbpdf (a PDF viewer), and a few other apps that all run in a framebuffer.
There’s also w3m, which is a basic web browser capable of displaying images inline; although this requires some hacking in order to work in a vanilla TTY. What could be easier is a using a kiosk window manager (such as Cage) to launch a lightweight terminal (like st, urxvt, or xterm).
KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)
With 8 GB RAM and SSD, it should be plenty. Otherwise, I’d go with something else. XFCE is quite a solid experience, as I recall. No strong recommendations there, though. I’ve mostly used Cinnamon and KDE over the years.
Linux Mint is a classic choice. Positive: It has been recommended to newbies so much over so many years that there are tons of entry-level how-tos. Downside: Many of them are old and might be outdated by now. Be sure to always check whether the guide you are following is from 2010 or something…
Same really for all the Ubuntu distros. Kubuntu (=KDE+Ubuntu) worked fine for me.
I’ve read many people being very satisfied with Pop!_OS as well. Apparently, it’s a good distribution if you want everything to already be set up for gaming for you. Haven’t used it myself, though.
EndeavourOS is the one I’m personally planning to use whenever I next install an OS. The distro and the surrounding community have a great reputation for being user-friendly and reliable.
I recommend installing Ventoy onto an USB thumbdrive and booting into some of your candidates. Since it boots from USB the performance isn’t 100% representative, but you can check if you get any driver issues and how the DEs “feel”.
P.S. Eternity for Lemmy is making its first steps and was forked from Infinity for Reddit (I believe)
Recently I have been seeing some cracks in the dike. As more and more users of FOSS come on board, they put more and more demands on developers whose numbers are not growing sufficiently fast enough to keep all the software working.
I hear from FOSS developers that too few, and sometimes no, developers are working on blocks of code. Of course this can also happen to closed-source code, but this shortness hits mostly in areas that are not considered “sexy”, such as quality assurance, release engineering, documentation and translations.
Recently switched over from Windows to Pop_OS! as a daily for the first time, and I am loving every second of it! As a convert from Windows to Linux who also likes to dabble in some advanced stuff, Pop_OS! was very easy to get into. In the past I've tried Arch but it was too much work to get to my liking.
Totally agree. I’ve tested over 40 distributions over the years with mixed results. I’ve been using Pop!_OS for five years now and still loving every second of it. It has been stable, easy to use out-of-the-box and the devs are cutting edge awesome. Pop!_OS differs from nearly all other distributions due to System76 being an open source hardware sales company - They absolutely need a stable OEM operating system at all times. I could elaborate further, but I think the vote of confidence should be enough for OP to look for themselves.
It wasn't the only application being slow, but it was the one that stuck out the most for obvious reasons. I just installed Mint, updated everything and everything had a few second delay when it concerned the internet. I did some digging around and the problem was so broad that it would've taken too long to pinpoint so I went back to ubuntu.
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