Debian Stable + Backports, with a few customized flatpaks. I don’t care that my desktop apps are not bleeding edge. My system always works, and games run great.
The way it was explained to me was Fedora = RHEL Alpha, CentOS Stream = RHEL Beta, RHEL is Stable, then there are downstreams who build against RHEL. Only those who are downstream of REHL are effected by the changes. Both Fedora and Cent are necessary development platforms to support everything that eventually makes it down to RHEL in stable condition. They both depend on RHEL for funding, but RHEL depends on them for testing.
You can use ubuntu, debian, or a few other live distros with "persistence" which is relatively easy to configure. This is neat because live versions usually come with cool features like auto configuration of devices and displays. You can even create a persistence boot of live isos on ventoy, which is honestly what I'd recommend.
I think you can simply install a Linux distro on a USB drive. You should use something fast like a USB-C hard drive and you’ll have to think about where to put the boot loader. But if you’re careful, what you have in mind should work.
I can’t name specific solutions off the top of my head as I haven’t done it in a while, but Yes. There are many live distros that offer an optional ‘overlayFS’ (I think that’s the right term) which reserves some of your portable drive’s storage for persistent changes to apply over the base live FS.
Combine that with git and/or NextCloud or an SSH file mount or three and you could probably come up with a complete mobile setup that also has quick access to whatever home server infrastructure you need. 128GB or 256GB USB sticks are pretty cheap now which is plenty for a spacious install. Or even a small USB SSD.
Don't use USB stick, it has really awful random read / write performance. I recommend fast SSD with cache. I tried USB stick solution several years ago and it was so laggy it was unusable
I inherited a crappy laptop (4 core atom processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, fear the power!) because Windows was running slow on it. I decided to try different Linux distros booting from a USB and had no issues. I literally ran the system for months off of a Sandisk USB drive, and it was faster than the spindle drive in the machine.
My recommendation is, don't cheap out on the USB drive. No-name drives are fine for word files, but the performance increase from a Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston or equivalent is worth it for any media transfers and will work fine for a bootable Linux.
A good workaround for this is to add toram to your kernel command line. This loads the whole image into RAM before booting, which speeds things up dramatically at the expense of using more of your RAM while idle.
Absolutely doable. I have had an Ubuntu on a 16Gb stick for years that used any time I had to log into my gmail from a borrowed/friend/relative computer.
I don't really understand why you find chrooting hard or what's wrong with the tutorials you found. Can you point out which step of it is difficult. this is the first tutorial I get for Manjaro, is there something missing or left ambiguous?
I use btrfs + encryption. The tutorials just state "you have to do this and that", but not exactly what any of that means or how I apply it to my system, since the commands obviously need tinkering to make sense for my specific use case. It's not really a step by step, but a step by step jump to step X for this and then to step Y for that but make sure to do "something you don't understand / know" to be sure that "something you also don't know". It's basically all just a cryptic mess if you don't know any of it beforehand and I don't think the authors have tested their tutorials on people without prior background knowledge.
When people complain about crashes, that is usually the first thing that springs to mind. Of course, your hardware is fairly new, so I think you should be good in that respect. The problem might just be a Xwayland/Gnome thing, now that I think about it.
Steam can't be closed properly as it ends up sitting unresponsive in the task bar and needs its task to be killed.
Edit:
I found out the Firefox spellcheck somehow fetches its dictionaries from "/usr/share/hunspell". How do I make FF fetch the regular dictionaries I added to it through Firefox, or what is the proper way to find dictionaries for that folder (I assume I can just delete the excess English variants)?
Edit:
You can just remove the folder in about:config, however it now shows only the US spelling, despite having another language installed...
Edit:
Managed to get the other spellcheck dictionary to show up.
Evolution mail client fails at 2 factor authentication. Window just shows "OAuth2 secreot not found" and no matter how many times I try it does not send a verification request to my phone.
Edit:
"Files" can't jump to folders starting with letter X because it immediately uses the (still crashy) search function.
Can't drag & drop files from my Firefox download manager (pop up, not extra window) onto a folder without having to manually tab to it. Tabbing starts AFTER the "Files" process though, so you have to tab all the way through. Under KDE I could just drag it onto the file manager in the panel, which would focus the file manager and then drop the files in or onto the folder I wanted.
"Archive Manager (also known as File Roller)" can't even drag & drop files from an archive into a folder. I don't even know how people can use Gnome with it lacking such basic functionalities. What the hell are you doing with your lives?!
Edit:
OpenRGB now suddenly works as intended. Not sure if there was an update for it or if that's a temporary oddity but for now I'll take it.
Arch which aims to take the latest cut of everything. If you have time to keep your desktop updated and need that extra 1fps in a game, its a great choice.
Debian aims for stability, this means your drivers and text editor might be .. 2 years old! But if it works on install it will stay working
Red Hat Enterprise Linux aims for stability but will try to backport drivers. I honestly believe its packaged to always pull in gtk. It aims to provide tools to encourage people into support contracts.
Almost everything else is downstream of those with a twist. For example
Ubuntu is downstream Debian with 6 month release schedule, non-free enabled by default and other deviations to encourage people into support contracts.
Mint is downstream Ubuntu with the deviations removed.
Stuff that isn't downstream tends to have a highly specific purpose. Fedora started life as upstream RHEL, now it seems to be Red Hat's research plaything (e.g. immutable sounds cool, lets try it in Fedora).
My advice is go to one of the big 3, try them and only bother with one of the million down stream distributions if there is a Unique Selling Point for something you actually care about.
My goal is to have a functional desktop with good gaming capabilities.
EOS / Arch was that until it nuked itself, something that not even Manjaro managed to do, which, for all its bad reputation, had much less issues in a much longer time frame of use. It's not really about having "that extra 1 FPS in a game", but to ensure actual game compatibility, including for titles that aren't 2 years old.
I recommend Tumbleweed. It updates almost as fast as Arch, sometimes faster, but super stable with automated testing and in a pinch, snapper rollbacks. Great KDE integration.
Yast looks outdated but it’s fine for what it is - a GUI for what’s usually command line administrator operations.
Probably my worst experience yet. Couldn't even change my resolution to 1080p and it would also not install a bootloader on my old test laptop. Idea is nice, but the critical bugs and antique software really speak against it.
Try opensuse tumbleweed. It is a bit like arch(rolling release and such) but has more testing and less breakage. It has pretty good KDE support, a very good configuration tool and is one of the most secure distros in its base installation. Also good for gaming imho.
@FaeDrifter
Tried to install it on my old laptop for testing and the installer just gives me this warning before installing:
"Boot from mbr does not work together with btrfs filesystem ang gpt disk label without bios_grub partition. To fix this issue, - create a bios_grub partition, or - use any Ext filesystem for boot partition, or - do not install stage 1 to MBR."
I really have no idea what it wants. I used the guided partitioning so I would expect it to handle that for me? Also, why do they not have a working live environment to test it before installation? Honestly not a great start.
Edit: Oof. So I just tried to install it on my desktop, first one failed tremendously and didn't boot. Tried again and wiping the partitions proper instead of "on demand" of the garbage installer. Got a system, try to switch down to 1080p and it gives me this super stretched pancake resolution instead. Hell no.
You booted in bios legacy mode and tried to install to a gpt formatted disk without a dedicated /boot partition would be my guess.
It’s messed up, probably a bios setting related to uefi. Aeon is still in beta and doesn’t handle edge cases that well.
As for your second issue sounds like a waylaid issue with switching resolutions, usually simply relogging fixes that.
You make it sound as if these are distribution issues, these are either weird bios settings or post install issues with a very recent compositor version. Do you think opensuse ships its own drivers or window managers?
I booted in bios legacy mode?
What "weird bios options" could an old 2009 laptop bios possibly have, that are used by default on top of that and never caused any sort of issues with any other Linux distro before? The only ones that didn't run on that thing were both Nobara variants, which is likely more of an old gpu issue.
I've had many wayland issues on other distros before, but never this specific one. It's usually the same on every one, like blurry scaling, scaling affecting games, fsync causing frequent few seconds long blackscreens, or just a lot of game specific stuff. The issue here did not fix itself even after a reboot. I really don't care where the issue stems from, I can only say that this was very unique to OpenSUSE.
Well the fact that you don’t understand the issue is part of it. See there are several ways disks can be partitioned and several ways a bios can go about finding kernels to boot on said disks, all of this applies to windows as well btw.
Bios legacy + MBR partitioned with a bootloader written into the first 512 bytes of a disk and the bios being directed to that disk. This is the old way of doing it.
UEFI + GPT partition scheme. Here you have one or more partition marked as bios+uefi, formatted in fat32, that the bios will comb for boot entries. It’s the modern way of doing this.
What you have is probably a mix of the two. It’s likely that one of your linux installs partitioned your disk as GPT while your your system still boots in bios legacy. The installer is now getting mixed signals, one one hand the bios is detected as legacy mode, on the other it’s looking at a GPT partition table. Now technically you probably could write the bootloader just like in option 1., but if you ever change your bios to uefi mode, which is required for modern operating systems like windows you would end up with an non bootable system. And not just in a “oopsie, I need to boot a rescue disk and fix this”-kind of way but a “we need to nuke the entire partition table and start over”-kind of way.
So what the Suse installer is telling you is that you really should use a /boot partition if installing on a GPT partition table.
Btw if you check the correct option at install time(the one about using the entire harddrive) it should automatically create a MBR partitioned disk for you which avoids this issue as it’s not a ungodly mix of 1. and 2.
This error isn’t a bug, it’s a feature pointing out a serious problem with your machines setup(the one below the OS level). Yes you can probably ignore it, as other distros might or might not, but it’s generally not a good idea. SuSE has a couple of these hang ups since it has an enterprise background and takes some things more serious than other distros. For example having closed ports for printers in the active on default firewall being one stellar example of this. It cause no end of issues for people struggling to setup their printers, that being said it is a security issue and opensuse decided it wasn’t going to sacrifice security of every system because some people want to use a printer.
So what the Suse installer is telling you is that you really should use a /boot partition if installing on a GPT partition table.
Why is it telling ME that when I trusted the partitioning to the installer? I really don't understand how that should be my fault for the partitioner to act faulty. And btw. there's only two options: 1) to erase the disk if needed and 2) erase the entire disk anyway. I selected the second one because the first one didn't even work at all, so from my perspective it should have not used any potential GPT partitions that the previous distro could've potentially created, but erased the entire thing and start from scratch with everything it would need, including a valid boot partition. If OpenSUSE, for some reason, requires me to wipe my drive clean BEFORE I even start the installer, then they should specify that beforehand - or provide a less antique installer that can actually do it itself.
Nobara being an independent side project based on Fedora and not a full-blown distro on its own - YMMV on all kinds of issues.
That said I’m running Nobara KDE on my desktop and everything has been working great. You should give it a try just to see how many of your issues are specific to Nobara gnome.
I'm aware it is not an official project, but I don't think any of GE's changes should affect much of the issues I am facing with it. And seeing this I will have an even harder time to recommend any sort of Gnome distro towards complete newbies trying to make the switch. Imagine this being their first experience with a Linux ecosystem.
Tried KDE Nobara after OpenSUSE and oh boy...
First Dolphin just crashed, always. Trying to report this caused even the crash handler to crash. Apparently there's a bug with encrypted setups and you have to manually create the thumbnail folder to fix this. No idea why this is not patched yet. Or maybe it is, but I can't further update the system anymore because of all packages throwing GPG errors now. This is all cursed to hell.
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