The 500 arch based distros that bring nothing to the table except a fancy theme 
Manjaro, EndeavourOS and Artix are fine as they all bring something to table but besides that…
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And sometimes it’s good to just install a distro and have a functioning system, without worrying about getting the latest versions of darktable etc installed.
Plus real time audio (particularly pipewire
/ jackd etc) is somewhat easier if it’s installed with the distro rather than adding it to a distro.
I’m leaning towards going with Ubuntu Studio now rather than Kubuntu, as it seems to better match my needs, photo editing, design / cad, audio and video editing.
– Edit --. I did an install of Ubuntu Studio 24.04 in a virtual machine. It seems to install and update OK.
Except Displaycal does not work due to the shipped version of Python3 being greater than the Python3 required for Displaycal…
Not great for a distro supposedly meant for creativity work!
oh, and it seems the same issue on Kubuntu 24.04 instead…
File a bug please.
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If only Ubuntu used flatpak instead
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That’s really cool! You can install the whole thing from scratch if you’re just getting started, or if you’ve already got Ubuntu installed there’s already a single package in the official repos that will add all the goodies to your existing system. (or at least provides a guided process to select the bits you want?)
That’s a lot of work, both to build the custom distro, but also to make all their work compatible with the wider Ubuntu ecosystem.
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I’m not sure where or how to file a bug report.
I wasn’t aware that they also have a deb repository. That ameliorates most of my “angst” with Ubuntu Studio. Back in the day when I used mythbuntu, they did the same thing: deb repository and custom os installer. My opinion of that hasn’t changed. It’s nice to have the debs, but the custom OS installer, .iso downloads, etc. is mostly wasted work.
That’s the beauty of Free Software. Other people are welcome to spend their time on things that I think are a waste.
That’s a complete straw man argument. Nobody, AFAICT, is suggesting the packages they create are not real work or don’t take any time.
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So I thought I was being “clever”, by going back to supposedly good old Linux Mint 21.3
Except I’m now hitting the usual issues with older distro releases (Mint 21 is based on Ubuntu 22.04), is dependency issues when trying to install more up to date versions of software… Flatpaks aren’t an ideal situation either, as since they are sandboxed, the for example the Gimp flatpak doesn’t see the darktable flatpak and vice versa…
So where to go now…
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You need to adjust the lua scripts in darktable and it should work fine. Instead of calling ‘gimp’ it should call ‘flatpak run com.(yada yada).gimp’ or something like that. Maybe an alias would work as well, given that you don’t have the regular versions installed.
Besides that the answer is compiling your own darktable/gimp, or a rolling release. Debian based distros are too slow for the modern personal desktop. Good for institutions, most workplaces, people with slow internet and so on. But besides that, the fedora model is the way forward. For me even arch is perfectly stable and I haven’t had a problem in years, even with constant updates every week.
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Except Fedora pushes Wayland, which isn’t feature complete for colour managment etc.
And flatpaks are pretty bloated.
Flatpaks are only “bloated” in so far as they occupy more space than regularly distributed software. It’s a small price to pay for not having to deal with dependency issues, especially in the modern age where 1TB SSD’s go on sale for 50€ or less constantly… I’d reckon you can even get 500GB of very fast storage for less than 25€. Fits hundreds of flatpak apps
They push wayland but they don’t remove the option for you to use x11. All it takes is a single command, a reboot, and you’re back using x11 without issue.
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Although another issue with flatpaks is the duplication of their libraries. One Flatpak app may need the Gnome 46 Platform, and another may need the Gnome 45 Platform
Eh I don’t think you should worry about this too much. The gnome flatpaks are maintained by ybr gnome team, and if you were using distro packages you likely wouldn’t have the option.
Although when you combine various versions of Gnome Platforms, with various versions of Nvidia OpenGL platforms and various versions of KDE Platforms, you end up with more chunky platforms than a 1970s Platform Shoe shop!
If you mean Debian/stable has infrequent releases, you are correct, but Debian/testing and Debian/unstable are comparable to other solutions. In fact, most mainline distributions have a way of opting into a similar solution (few months lag with occasional breakages, which are fixed relatively quickly, in the meantime you can roll back).
I update my debian/testing desktop about 3-4 times a week. No problems for ages. But at the same time, we should understand that not all people want to keep up with a rolling release. The crowd here is of course different because a lot of people on this forum are software enthusiasts, and do not mind the extra work to keep up with the latest and greatest features of their favorite programs.
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Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t debian freeze its repositories for a good while every time they are preparing a new release?
Furthermore stability does not equal bug free in regular debian, it’s just that things don’t change, and for the desktop user, do we really want to wait months or even a year plus for bug fixes and similar things?
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You are right, but since Debian releases happen so rarely, it only happens once in a while 
That said, if a user wants a true rolling distro they are better of with something else.
Also, I wonder if users really do need the latest versions of everything. Personally, I like to keep up with a few programs (Darktable, Emacs, Julia, …) which I compile from source, and don’t care much about the rest.
However, you suggested Fedora for desktop, but my understanding is that they have the same release model as Ubuntu (release every 6 months).
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Although cadence might be the same, everything else is different. Fedora releases are supported for about 13-14 months (w/ real updates and packages version changes), so one could upgrade about once a year (e.g. every other release). Ubuntu interim releases are typically supported for 9 months only, unless it is an LTS release (which rarely get backports). Most Ubuntu users only run LTS and upgrade every 2-4 years (very few upgrade every 6 months to every interim release because it is a hassle), hence the “too old” stigma.
For example, you’ll typically get latest darktable (also on 6 months update schedule) in Fedora’s last 3 releases (e.g. F38/39/F40 for dt 4.6.1), while it is only in Ubuntu’s last 2 (and 3/4 of the time neither one of them is an LTS release). (And yes, I’m purposefully not considering 3rd party repositories here.)
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Thanks for the explanation, you guys have convinced me to try out Fedora on my next install.
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I wasn’t trying trying to convince of anything, just providing the information.
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