Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there’s a good argument the author’s concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
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Come the Windowscalypse, I’ll probably be moving to Linux Mint. The only problem is ComfyUI. Managing Python packages makes me want to end myself. I might just keep dual booting Windows for SD alone.
Use docker
Gonna do just that. Thanks!
What does linux need to try?
To stop overachieving
To stop insisting upon itself for like, five fucking minutes.
Shit I was just about to install PopOs! Which is developed by a US company. It’s maddening trying to find the right distro that fits all the requirements.
According to Distrowatch mint and Zorin are from Ireland, opensuse and manjaro are from Germany and more was lazy for more searching
SUSE is now garbage. Not sure about open suse
What’s garbage about it?
When SLES 12 came out they made everything harder and forced everyone to migrate to 64 bit, even if you were doing legacy development
Mandrake/Mandriva is from France
Canonical/Ubuntu is uk
Suddenly Ubuntu doesn’t seem so terrible now, does it??
Ubuntu gang represent.
Well, their “customisation” of Gnome with that ugly bar on the left side is still ugly as hell
That is just a customized version of Dash to Dock. You can move the dock on the bottom if you want or make it auto hide. The same functionality you can expect from Dash to dock but with the Ubuntu theme applied
I don’t want it at all.
But thanks for the Head Up that you can make this ugly thing go away
That’s part of why I use Xubuntu/Kubuntu mainly and Lubuntu for real low end stuff. Straight vanilla Ubuntu is… not super appealing. Ubuntu server that’s just CLI/headless though, that’s pretty tits, imho.
I think I will go for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. But Kubuntu is also nice to keep in mind
Ubuntu server is okay, but I’ve come to really appreciate a minimal, stable Debian install instead.
Snaps still suck
I agree that the backend for snaps being proprietary sucks, but I actually think snaps themselves are pretty useful in server configurations because of the sandboxing and limiting access to system resources. I get the whole argument that it’s doing what flatpak already did yadda yadda, but like… competing standards happens. It’s part of life and always will be.
Stop worrying about the country of origin. It’s a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop’s components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the “USA bad, so product bad” rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?
Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.
They can still sanction your country and then you can’t get updates anymore over official ways, like Fedora and Iran.
It’s just peace of mind to not deal with anything US Based right now
It’s not “USA bad, so product bad”, it’s the concern that the US government can do a lot more to US based projects and you probably wont know untill it’s too late.
That’s really not the case, there’s no proprietary parts to inject this into, and pop is one of the most heavily watched distros for a reason.
The minimal things they add to their particular distro are essentially just theming, and it’d be really obvious if they injected something malicious into it.
It would also NOT be too late because they’re a stable distro and have regular releases, it’d have to be a completely last minute unexpected change for that to be the case.
The code is open though, I don’t check it since I am an idiot but I assume pros would spot irregularities.
Do you have a specific vector of attack here in mind?
I guess most methods of attack on a FOSS projects are independent of the country of origin. But, I could still see them being forced to do things they don’t want in the US, without being able to tell anyone. Hopefully if that ever happened it wouldn’t be too hard to detect, but you never know.
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FOSS has no country lines.
Try out CachyOS
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out
It really isn’t, though
as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn’t notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10
Not gonna bother with the rest of your comment if the start is that weak, tbh
It really isn’t, though
Really? Being sure that your system is essentially unbreakable isn’t valuable to beginners? I can’t see how. It has massively helped the beginners I have given it to feel safe in tinkering with their system.
It was important to me, one day my arch just decided to not boot anymore, so, i switched to nixos.
Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn’t notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10
I explained in my comment why cinnamon is a terrible choice for beginners, if you had read it you’d know, why even bother replying to a comment you won’t read with such a lazy response?
“Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.”
There’s so many reasons to choose kde over cinnamon, there is a massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here’s some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:
- Every single app can read your keyboard input without asking
- Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
- Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.
and in the future the disparity will only go up, just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon… cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don’t believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs https://github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you’ll note kde isn’t developed on github and that’s just a mirror. It’s not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, https://github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn’t even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you’re SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.
I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don’t think it’s a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues. Also mixed dpi displays are extremely common, many people have 1 4k and 1 1080p screen, for example, or maybe they plug into a tv… it’s much more common than you think.
In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they’re mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.
As an XFCE user, I dislike the reputation that xfce is only useful for low end old hardware. It’s a fully complete desktop just like cinnamon, kde, or gnome. lxqt however, I would not wish on my worst enemy.
As an XFCE user, I dislike the reputation that xfce is only useful for low end old hardware.
We’re talking about specifically for beginners, it’s not nearly as good for beginners as KDE is. You like xfce because you’re used to it and it works for you, but KDE supports a vastly wider variety of usecases, for example, try having two-screen setup with one screen having a 4k display at 144hz, and the other a 1080p screen at 60hz
This will be impossible to get working properly on xfce. There’s not even a warning, it’ll just act very strangely without explaining itself.
there’s also the same issues with security that cinnamon have. XFCE does work, but there’s no reason to recommend it to someone who doesn’t already use/like it over KDE.
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”?
Gee, it’s common even for ‘experienced’ folks. I just went to update to the 6.14 kernel this morning (everything that I use [and monitor for conflicts] was supposedly finally working with it), and apparently that didn’t play well with my desktop manager. Cue the tty at boot and trying different DMs until I finally said screw it and went back to the previous kernel.
I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it’s perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don’t give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don’t want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how “experienced” I get, that’s always going to be the case. Maybe I’m just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.
I think it’s overblown for the most part. Yes, the OS should just work… but it does, for 99% of users, on windows, and linux, and probably macos, which I haven’t used so can’t speak on.
The ones who blow up their systems are either techies who like futzing with stuff, or are using a ‘bad’ distro for their needs. If you’re switching over granny, you set her up with a long term stable kernel, a vanilla distro, and a browser. The few other stories are when people switch from windows and want something specialized to be the same. Those will need a customized solution, but it’s not much different than windows when something breaks. Whoever is playing IT gets to poke at a stupid amount of settings, registry edits, or esoteric drivers/dependencies.
You should be using OpenKylin or something like that.
I 100% agree. Immutable is the way to go for beginners. Source: started on Mint and actually had a few problems. Now I’m on Bluefin (previously Aurora) and I have none.
I switched from Fedora to openSUSE recently and it has been painless. Would recommend to anyone who are looking to get away from US companies and US jurisdiction.
Tumbleweed or Leap or something else?
Most likely Tumbleweed. As it is the most modern of them. Because it is rolling.
Correct, Tumbleweed is the one I started using.
As a long time debian user, I have my eyes on Leap. I value stability (in the unchanging functionality sense) over latest versions.
For me Tumbleweed is rock solid even though it is rolling. But if you don’t like subtle changes it might not be fore you.
I don’t mind changes, but I want to be able to decide when they happen. Maybe I’m just traumatized from the last time I used a rolling release distro and suddenly Gnome 3 landed and replaced Gnome 2. I did not like that.
Can I ask which rolling distro that was. I presume arch?
No matter which OpenSuse people end up choosing, it’s a super solid decision. Even though it relies on infrastructure by SUSE S.A., a company that unfortunately has ties to the US (mostly hosting with offices and employees in the US) but got its HQ in Europe, it’s the most solid and user-friendly distro out there if you look for rather independent distros (the only user-friendly one that’s fully independent would be Mageia, but that one really isn’t where it would have to be imho). And the existence of bootable snapshots in case something happened is extremely useful. The biggest problems I’ve found are just 2: Problems with the Nvidia driver (especially if you use said snapshots), and Flathub not coming preconfigured (not a Problem in KDE since there’s a button new users can stumble over, but for Gnome you have to know something rather important is missing to look up the command to add it since there isn’t a GUI to add Flatpak repos yet).
Other than that the whole OpenSuse ecosystem is just great.
Flathub not coming preconfigured
Huh, that’s odd. I’ve been test driving different Linux distros lately for my move away from Windows, and Tumbleweed was one of the ones I tried. KDE Discover in Tumbleweed had Flatpak options for software, and I’m pretty sure it was tied to Flathub and not a different repo like Fedora does. Maybe I’m misremembering? Or did you mean that it doesn’t have the Flathub application itself?
Like I said it’s less of a problem with KDE, they even got a button to add Flathub specifically in Discover. It’s more of a thing with Gnome and Gnome Software where no “Add Flathub” button exists (and also no GUI to add repos -> they have to look up the whole CLI command), so newer users won’t necessarily be aware that something rather important is missing.
Mmm interesting. I have not hat any issues with rolling back and snapshots. Even though I do use nvidia. Configuring flathub shouldn’t be too difficult I think. But I don’t use a DE eather
Which Nvidia driver setup do you use? The problems arise with the proprietary driver; if you roll back or use a different kernel than the current default (as specified by the repo) both my brother and I had the unfortunate situation of the driver kernel module missing. Nouveau or NVK probably don’t cause such issues.
I’ve been wondering about a similar change, or possibly to Arch. What I’m still wondering about is security: Fedora has Selinux enabled all over the system, and Opensuse and Arch do not. Anyone know what level of risk this mitigates?
I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has SELinux enabled now too. I’m not sure what you mean by all over the system, as I’m not that familiar with SELinux yet. I believe that Tumbleweed used to use AppArmor but recently switched to SELinux? I also believe that Leap (the stable version of OpenSUSE) still uses AppArmor.
Based on opensuse’s docs, it seems to be in permissive state, whereas on my Fedora by default:
$ selinuxenabled && echo yup yup $ getenforce EnforcingNot sure if the warm fuzzy feelings I get from this are justified (like what are the actual applied rules on apps? I have no idea), but it is a bit warmer and fuzzier.
I’ve wanted to switch to OpenSUSE for quite some time now from Fedora for the same reason. Should really do it now
Its so beautifully stable, without giving you ancient software like Debian. Never had an issue using it n its got a grandma level installation.
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Said a person in denial lol
Yeah, the government and corporations would never spy on us. What a ridiculous idea!
Why not Haiku 🙃?
(Also this won’t really help you because Linux is a mainstream system with big corporate input. Backdoors hidden in plain sight are a thing.
This will make you feel better though, Windows sucks.)
If your posting a message that has any importance at all, at least pretend to try to fix your before sending it.
“try, Linux”
“working closing”
I mean come on.
There’s more but you get the point.
“try to fix your before sending it.” uh huh
Also “if your”
Lmao
This isn’t meeting the level of importance for me.
Yore
What exactly in the privacy agreements is this person worried about? All I’m seeing is PANIC but without a reason given…
I work for Meta (Facebook).
For example, the word “protest” will now get your account and activity monitored.
Let’s see what people will do at October 14
FUCK YEAH, YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
Look, Software shouldn’t be free and open Source. I really like that we probably have a decade left of it before it gets bundled with ad services which it should have been from the start. The more people that adopt it means that it’s only a matter of time as long as we all just passively watch it get usurped
The fediverse isn’t ready for this level of sarcasm. Look at those downvotes, lmao.
It’s hard to tell sometimes. Especially when it’s such a sensitive issue where normies will parrot the same ignorant crap over and over again. I one went off on someone, not even considering it was in-jest, because is was so convincingly written.
The /s is important people. I know it slightly reduces the impact of the joke but some people believe that shit 110%.
even if they are not joking, its not necessarily their fault they think like this
Ok fed
It’s feRd
Are you a not, a troll, or an idiot.
you should add a /s
https://distrosea.com/ this is amazing for previewing linux OS flavours right in your browser, no need for a USB stick or installation! Linux Mint, Zorin, Ubuntu and Fedora are the winners for me in terms of being normie friendly.
YOU CAN’T DENY THE WAVEEEEE
I’m been using linux mint for over a year now, and it is legit liberating.
