How are you, @Brian_Innes? If you do not mind, I think it is time for another Distro Fever . If you are up-to-date with my detours, you would know that I just procured a new Lenovo laptop to succeed my ancient, low-powered entry laptops, which will still be in use, but for more dedicated roles.
I call this edition “Midwinter Spring” because it is a new start for me, and perhaps other PIXLS friends. I want to enlist you all to help configure a system that would make the most out of what we discuss and do here.
For me, Windows will still be a part of the solution — at least for now, one of the following:
Clonezilla failing to download… anyone know a fast, reliable mirror or method? Alternatives for imaging/cloning default factory disk?
PS. I acquired it via torrenting and then checksummed it. I do not think I need a backup anymore as I can download a Lenovo recovery tool in case I want to go back.
Back to deciding how I would like to configure the device for PIXLS-friendly fun:
Average, I suppose. Linux is however my version of doomscrolling. I spend more time reconfiguring and trying new things than doing fun things.
MS, Adobe and less used apps such as for taxes. Others just help ease my computing and user experience, which I have not yet found equivalents to in Linux.
No idea. Last serious use of VMs or Wine and friends was almost two decades ago. Likely, things are much better now than they were way back when.
I would not recommend dual boot on the same drive. There is a risk with corruption of the Grub bootloader with Windows Update. If you have two drives then it is less of a concern.
I have a couple of Windows apps that I use infrequently, so I have a Win11 VM that I spin up when needed. I’m running Zorin OS, based on Ubuntu.
One issue with VM’s is memory allocation. Win11 is a bit of a resource hog, so I run my VM with a stripped-down version of Windows.
If your use-case is more towards Windows, then you can run Linux as a VM. If that is how you plan to run darktable, remember that it uses a fair bit of memory.
I’ve been pretty busy working at my new job. which I can’t believe I’ve been in for 16 months! Since I’ve been doing plenty of extra shifts down t’ mine, I’ve had less time for Distro Hoping (despite the itch for it still being there). I’m still mostly on Kubuntu 24.04 LTS, although I am intrigued with Debian 13 KDE.
a few weeks ago, I was browsing a Linux users group on Faceache, where one of the “Top Contributers” said he doesn’t use Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition because of it’s “bad memory leak” which “they’ve given up on fixing”, and the settings for “kill cinnamon desktop when it reached X memory” is an “embarrassingly lazy work around that fixes nothing”.
Since then I’v been thinking “well, I’d better not go back to Linux Mint Cinnamon from Kubuntu as some bloke on social media hates Linux Mint”.
But I’m increasingly annoyed at how frustating KDE Plasma with it’s billions of settings for the preferences for the options for the options can be. Conversely things like Gnome with it’s lack of setting are annoying as well.
So this makes me think, if there was a Linux Based “Photography Distro”, what would it based on, and what would it’s essential features be?
Definitely it would need to support monitor / printer colour profiles, and display calibration (so perhaps something with a Gnome based DE).
Resonably easy to get up to date versions of applications such as darktable / gimp, but without running a rolling release distro which does 6gb of updates every day, yet isn’t too stale that it’s not possible to install up to date versions of darktable etc due to dependency issues.
But this imagined “Photography Distro” also doesn’t rely on bloat of basing everything on flatpaks / sandboxed containers due to the difficulty in getting OpenCL hardware acceleration enabled.
What does everyone else think should be in a “Photography Distro”?
Yes, I know there is “Ubuntu Studio” but I find that bloated with too many unwanted (by myself) virtual drum machines / guitar tuning apps.
I’ve been on Linux Mint Cinnamon exclusively for at least 8 years, I have no recollection of a memory leak. I was fine with 16GB RAM and no swap.
We are still stuck on 24.04 base and GIMP needs to be installed via Flatpak to have v3 (distro repository is 2.10…)
You can upgrade the kernel to 6.17 at the moment (base is 6.8). Maybe we’ll get a new version in July with a newer base??? I’ve stayed on 22.1, instead of upgrading to 22.2 or 22.3, I just don’t feel a need for the changes.
I’ve been using AppImage for DT.
At least some of this DE is GNOME based. Drawing tablet settings, Colour management setting unless I’m mistaken.
I’m sure you can find bugs in any distro. Every distro is a trade off between features, performance, ethics, etc… I’ve used mint for years and not noticed memory problems, so it’s fine for my usage, but then I do have 32gb ram.
. If you are up-to-date with my detours, you would know that I just procured a new Lenovo laptop to succeed my ancient, low-powered entry laptops, which will still be in use, but for more dedicated roles.
More than a decade ago, I used Window’s bootloader to launch Linux. I wonder if I should do that again.