Distro Focuses

It's amazing how OpenSUSE got my laptop's valve covers to leak oil.

Hey the BMW engine that had 2 redundant everything was pretty awesome because half the engine could die and it'd keep going as an inline 6. It was 2 of everything. ECU, Distributor, even fuel pumps and rails

Except they seemingly come without the right blinker, but BMW drivers only ever need the left one anyways, and it might as well be stuck in "on".

Thank you for the nostalgia

I can hear this gif. I guess it’s time to have my colonoscopy.

Ohhh ich spreche auch Wurst. Wie geht es ihnen mein Herr, toetet den fuehrer und benutzt Linux statt Fenster.

Falsches s, 7/10

Konsole must be a KDE app, but since KDE is a German project...

do you use lynx for web browsing?

NixOS is for people who have accidentally uninstalled 90% of their system because they didn’t pay attention to what other packages depend on the thing they were uninstalling and were desperately looking for a an undo button.

So I've only been using nix about a year and only used flakes. I use in two ways.

First, I have my main nix flake. Most everything is controlled from that. It has several outputs from full blown nixos builds per host or some home manager builds for non-nixos systems.

Third-party flakes I use as inputs to my own flake then use the override system to inject them into nixpkgs. Then I just install whatever like normal from nixpkgs. I can either override an existing pkg (neovim nightly replaces regular neovim for me), or you can just add as a new package to nixpkgs by using a different attribute name.

Second way is for projects with their own repo. I'll add a project flake that has a devshell with direnv so as soon as I enter that directory it sets up a sort of virtual environment just for that project. You can add outputs to it so others can use as a third-party flake.

My main starting point was https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config for this design.

Right!? Almost everything I need is one dnf command away with minimal setup on my part.

This is a YMMV situation. I had Gentoo running on a minipc for a while and it never had any random issues pop up. Any screw up was fully traceable to configuration and entirely my fault. It was kinda funny. Hope your server stays healthy.

Maybe they mean four year uptime...

Couldn't Distrobox get you through that?

I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I've ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it's died horrifically... I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.

I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it's update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.

The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.

I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch

If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ

It's definitely not something that will happen 100%. I've also had long standing debian systems that seem to not care. However I've had plenty that, for whatever reason couldn't handle multiple major version hops and just eviscerated themselves, I've not had that with arch personally. You may need to download the latest statically built pacman depending on how old it is but that and a keyring update usually has you covered

Fedora is good on laptops since it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest driver fixes (which are needed for laptops like the Framework where they're actively improving things). On the other hand, it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest bugs.

Why wouldn't you just use a password?

Probably only affects a small number of AMD machines.

Seems to be specific to some AMD models. I'm running it on a ~ten year old Asus. Timeout waiting for tpm as seen in someone else's post at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/much-longer-boot-time-after-updating-to-fedora-41/132603/15

Problem only occurred after upgrading from 40 to 41 - can be seen by pressing Esc while it's booting.

It has always worked exactly as I expected it to

Just expect it to break, then it will behave as expected taps head

I've been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I've had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they're usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.

My experience with Arch is basically: it's all very predictable until it isn't and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.

Do you use your computer for things that rely on specific library versions and functionality?

imagine if you update it after 2 weeks. Arch is okay, if you keep backups. otherwise, you are basically playing a russian roulette

Just use kvm/qemu and install it. When I want to play with detailed setups I install slackware and start configuring/compiling.

i started learning about linux 4 months ago. Installed Arch with archinstall pretty easily to a VM, it booted up no problem. But you have to manually install the desktop, if you want a gui (who doesn't lol). But there are many desktops for Arch, the most common ones have pretty good documentation. But if i were you, i'd experiment with some more niche desktop emviroments

Weird. I promptly tried Fedora and switched to Tumbleweed after Fedora kept crashing soon after startup. Hardware configuration probably affects the outcome a lot.

oh my girlfriend's laptop also just keeps freezing with opensuse. do you have an nvidia card by any chance?

As slow as you expect, at least on anything that requires gpu such as watching videos

It's decent as long as you have adequate numbers of cpu cores and memory for the apps/VMs you run

I'm sorry....but what? It containerizes everything!?

It really isnt that slow virtualization overhead is pretty minimal nowdays.

That seems pretty arbitrary

Outside of everything else that has MAC enabled by default. It doesn't even ship with a Firewall.

Fedora doesn't have any more of a security focus than anything else in the industry

Debian? Insecure? It's only as insecure as you make it. The default minimal installation from the netinstall CD has barely anything running - not even SSH unless you explicitly select it during installation.

Why do you think ubuntu and debian derivatives are unsecure?

Tack för denna manual

I know, but I don't get the joke. We don't do these around here

SUSE was a German company a century ago, then it changed hands more than a soap bar in a public restroom and now I have no idea if it’s even a terrestrial company anymore

The main problem is the way YaST2 is (not) integrated with the modern KDE and Gnome settings. Gnome 40 then screwed things up even more for them as every item is now part of the overview, there ain't the classical menu anymore.

If you know where to find things it's great, but right now it indeed feels quite messy with lots of settings hard to find and split in lots of submenus.

Thanks 💖

Sure, it's still just certainly a choice. It took me multiple years to realize why it's so broken on TTYs, as well as when you run newgrp and probably other places.

I thought Linux just sometimes goes into this buggy state, where you can't make any typos. At one point, I broke my GUI session and had to fix it, typing commands off of my phone screen, without making any typos.

Learning that this is Working As Intended™ just killed me...

These days, I know that you can just run bash (or your shell of choice) to get out of this buggy state, and I still set bash as the system shell when I have to use a Debian-based system, because I just do not care about however much performance it brings in.

still much more customizable than GNOME

no, Qubes, Bazzite, Garuda were made with security in mind. Containerization, selinux enforcing, hash checks, address space layout randomization is also built in. These are all more secure than Fedora. Qubes for example, uses vm containers to completly isolate every app, so the system is almost impossible to compromise by malware or hacking. Bazzite uses immutable root file system, much like stock android. it may not along well with unix philosophies, but there isn't really a way for a malicious code to run with elevated privilages or to manipulate system files. Garuda automatically creates snapshota from the system, so if it is compromised, it can be rolled back quickly. Snapshots for external devices or cloud are supported as well. It uses zram compression on swap, this helps avoid data leakages to the disk, so makes sure that after a reboot, every session quits, since data from ram can't leak on the disk. it also uses firejail and chaotic aur sandboxing. There is a smaller support for secure boot too. So these are all highly secure operating systems. And to some degree, privacy and security overlap each other.

While distros you mentioned are great for preventing ISPs and governments from spying on you (privacy),

How do they do that?

It is not