I recently came across openSUSE again and decided to give it a try this time. I am daily driving Fedora 40 right now and before coming across openSUSE I wanted to switch to Fedora Kinoite or uBlue Aurora (i.e., immutable / atomic). That’s why MicroOS piqued my interest but I had a hard time find information if MicroOS is...
I can’t speak to MicroOS but I have been running Tumbleweed for about a month. normally I run arch.l, but wanted to try something new for a change, and I was interested in trying out a full DE as I typically run sway.
I’ve been extremely impressed with KDE; I assume you feel the same if you’re looking at Kinoite, but feels worth saying out loud for other readers.
Tumbleweed, for an Arch user, is fine. it installed fine, was reasonably sane out of the box (although defaults to X11, not Wayland) and it’s been perfectly stable for the month I’ve run it. Doing development on it is very easy, and it comes with a non-root docker setup script out of the box which is nice, and I’ve had no issue building software on it. YaST is powerful but has an awful UI.
However: it has the same problem as Ubuntu for me, which is that if you want software from outside the repos you have to trust other repositories and trust their keys, and they often want to replace packages, and finding out if they are built safely can be quite challenging. compare this to Arch, where you can easily read a PKGBUILD and they almost always download sources direct from the developer/vendor, and they very rarely replace other packages. So I find it hard to trust this system’s integrity over time; where are my packages coming from? So in the end I’ll probably go back to Arch, or maybe try out Endeavour, but if this doesn’t concern you then I think Tumbleweed is a capable distro that’s easy to get up and running.
I’ll check that out, thanks for the recommendation. as for it defaulting to X11, it’s no issue because the Wayland session is also available and has been absolutely solid for me, I was just surprised that it wasn’t the preferred session by the distro.
I mean that’s a fair question, because I feel like mostly the advantages are, hm, not “theoretical” because it’s an actual advantage, but not something you’ll really encounter day-to-day. better security for example. but generally who cares because if I interact with something malicious I’m probably owned anyway.
originally I was interested in it because of fractional scaling, but I think that works in X11 for the most part now?
at this point it’s mostly about using the bleeding edge stuff so I can help find problems. I do find that when it works it works very well, and the experience of using a Wayland desktop is less wonky: fewer weird rendering glitches when dealing with multiple monitors, connecting and disconnecting my laptop from a dock, etc. I find this works better with Wayland, but I wouldn’t say “so much better that you must move to it today” if you’re happy with what you have.
similarly full-system stability has been better, and I have fewer crashes that take down everything, I feel. it’s perhaps subjective though: I’ve been running it for so many years maybe all I’m experiencing is that the software I run has become better in general.
so: I don’t think it’s a night-and-day life-changing experience or anything, but it does feel modern and stable, and it’s definitely where things are heading so why not get used to it now, and help to improve it, is my thinking.
yeah with the exception of krita (which runs fine on xwayland, even with a tablet) I’ve been able to run 100% Wayland, with sway for work and KDE for home, but my needs aren’t too wild. I’m sure a lot of users feel like the rug was unnecessarily pulled out from under them; change that feels like a regression even for very good reason will almost never feel like reason enough if it’s your shit that gets worse, definitely.
still, I think you’ve got to get people using the thing if you want the thing to get better. probably more casual users didn’t even notice when gnome moved over, for example. but probably even the most casual user ran into some problem, and that’s a bummer.
out of curiosity what use cases/software has stopped you from running Wayland? I do miss the magic of tunneling an X session over SSH, that felt like dang magic in the early 2000s.
ah definitely. I haven’t tried it out yet but I think they improved that in plasma 6.1. although that’s absolutely the point you were making: lots of things that used to work fine on X11 that Wayland just doesn’t have yet.
they make bad products that are media darlings because it’s fashion more than anything. they’re treated like consumer advocates but they are one of the absolute worst companies for vendor lock-in, and are absolutely anti-consumer, but will have innumerable articles written about how they’re “the best” for any given measure. it drives me nuts how the public perception of them is the complete opposite of what they actually are, and i don’t get it.
also their software is bad. all due credit their hardware impressed but it doesn’t matter if the software is crap.
and they aren’t private: they’ve got all your data but have somehow convinced everyone that it’s fine that they have it because they’re somehow better than every other large tech company.
What is the best cloud storage that gives a nice balance between features and privacy? I know you can manually encrypt files to use any provider, but I would prefer an open source E2EE for the sake of convenience....
I want to extract and process the metadata from PNG images and the first line of .safetensors files for LLM’s and LoRA’s. I could spend ages farting around with sed or awk but formats of files are constantly changing. I’d like a faster way to see a summary of training and a few other details when they are available.
I’m sick of Windows, and especially what it’s become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I’ll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I’d like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I...
The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it’ll do games.
I’m a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can’t speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it’d be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn’t worth mentioning it’s so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.
On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn’t in the official repos. It’s a great developer environment.
I’m very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I’ve been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.
Disclaimer: I know there’s a lot of questions and posts like this but generally they’re aimed at noobs. I consider myself an intermediate user, and I know generally distros don’t matter much and you can have anything another distro has on any distro but I’m looking for something a little “specific” that better suits...
I have left arch installs un-updated for months and had them be fine. I did leave one for a year once and the update hosed it, but it was still recoverable and runs fine to this day.
so, I wouldn’t worry much about the “update every week” thing. even on my daily driver I forget for a month sometimes.
Just got a steam deck and immediately checked out the desktop mode, and I was somewhat surprised to see KDE and pacman as opposed to GNOME and apt, I have nothing against the former though a strong preference for the latter, anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
I feel like this is the answer. if you’ve ever had to maintain a build pipeline or repository for .deb or .rpm, it’s not exactly pleasant (it is extremely robust, however). arch packaging is very simple by comparison, and I really doubt they’d need much more.
Like the title implies, I’m looking for a way to keep track of places I go. If the ratings system doesn’t exist, that’s okay. The important part is keeping track of places I’ve been, on what date and how often. I know this could be done with a spreadsheet, but that’s sounds like work, and I’m lazy. I couldn’t find...
openSUSE Tumbleweed vs openSUSE MicroOS
I recently came across openSUSE again and decided to give it a try this time. I am daily driving Fedora 40 right now and before coming across openSUSE I wanted to switch to Fedora Kinoite or uBlue Aurora (i.e., immutable / atomic). That’s why MicroOS piqued my interest but I had a hard time find information if MicroOS is...
Why don’t you like Apple?
Real question. I would like to know what drives you to hate Apple? (In terms of privacy of course because in terms of price it’s another story).
What is the best cloud storage provider right now?
What is the best cloud storage that gives a nice balance between features and privacy? I know you can manually encrypt files to use any provider, but I would prefer an open source E2EE for the sake of convenience....
How are you parsing JSON on the command line?
I want to extract and process the metadata from PNG images and the first line of .safetensors files for LLM’s and LoRA’s. I could spend ages farting around with sed or awk but formats of files are constantly changing. I’d like a faster way to see a summary of training and a few other details when they are available.
Building a brand new machine and leaving Windows for good
I’m sick of Windows, and especially what it’s become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I’ll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I’d like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I...
Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe': industry expresses fury and heartbreak over closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey studios (www.pcgamer.com)
Help me choose a distro/stay on NixOS
Disclaimer: I know there’s a lot of questions and posts like this but generally they’re aimed at noobs. I consider myself an intermediate user, and I know generally distros don’t matter much and you can have anything another distro has on any distro but I’m looking for something a little “specific” that better suits...
Does anyone know why SteamOS is based on arch rather than Debian?
Just got a steam deck and immediately checked out the desktop mode, and I was somewhat surprised to see KDE and pacman as opposed to GNOME and apt, I have nothing against the former though a strong preference for the latter, anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
Looking for a FOSS replacement for Yelp/Mapstr
Like the title implies, I’m looking for a way to keep track of places I go. If the ratings system doesn’t exist, that’s okay. The important part is keeping track of places I’ve been, on what date and how often. I know this could be done with a spreadsheet, but that’s sounds like work, and I’m lazy. I couldn’t find...