Stupid color management/Distro question

I think I just realized that it would not be so difficult to create a new Linux distro for photographers - just take Manjaro as the base, add all relevant software and some new themes to it and that’s it. Maybe Manjaro is already working on it?

Abends!

Hm… Isn’t that something like Ubuntu Studio and Fedora Spin are aiming at?

Yes they are! But they are - as distros - not as good as Manjaro. Fedora has that confusing installer and Ubuntu is not up to date as far as hardware is concerned. There is no Arch based graphics distro.
I don’t know - just thinking loud.

Eek. That is a highly subjective statement.

Rather than another distro, it’d be nice to put effort into up-to-date distro packages, a la PPA, copr, or OBS, or into distro agnostic packaging, e.g. flatpak, appimage, or snap.

1 Like

What @paperdigits said. You will not get a community of any appreciable size to all agree that such-and-such distro is best. Ever[1]. Providing up to date packages that can be used under different distros will serve more users. And it’s my impression that the good folks here who are working on photography-related projects have their hands full already, and would probably not be eager to add distro maintenance to their workloads.

[1] I have used Manjaro, and liked it. But by no means is it for everyone. To see the level of consensus out there, have a read of this thread:

Well Manjaro is Nr 1 on distrowatch, and recently the journalists at c’t also stated that Arch is the best or at least the most fashionable distro currently, especially as far as hardware is concerned and my experience confirms this. E.g. I have this cheap Epson printer, it could never print properly in color with Ubuntu or Mint but now with Manjaro it does. (However, I also have to admit that a few days ago I got an update from Manjaro and after that my touchpad did not work. I got an external mouse and switched back to an older kernel.) But maybe a Debian (MX?) based “design suite” would not hurt either. If there are people who want to work on such projects.
The important thing with such graphics distros is that fact that you do not need to download and install your programs after the actual installation. They are already there.
All those things that @paperdigits mentioned, appimage, flatpak etc. are important, too, there is no doubt about that.
I mean this is really just… you know… loud thinking :stuck_out_tongue:. Right?
One could even found a hardware company for this new OS … :smiley:
One would only need to find some billionaire sponsors :smiley:
Well… I kind of (almost) always chose the nr 1 distro on distrowatch and the party that was providing or was going to provide the chancellor…

Even distrowatch itself admits that they’re distro ranking is sort of… funny. I heard an interesting theory a few weeks ago on a podcast I listen to & it said “Distrowatch rankings tell us the best distro with the worst SEO.” That is, for all your super large distros, if you search for them, you get their home page, as is the case with Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc etc. (This is all tongue in cheek, of course).

THE BEST is so nebulous that you’ll never get anyone to agree on it. The “best” for me is Debian Stable with flatpaks and AppImages. The best for others is OpenSuSe Tumbleweed. The best for X is Y. :wink:

1 Like

Well, I did not start this, I am just continuing the TO’s thoughts… honestly, I knew about Ubuntu Studio but never thought about trying it before I read this thread.

I agree.

1 Like

OK. I think I am going back to Ubuntu until further notice. I do not know where the good non-rt 418 kernel is but it is just gone. Apparently it has updated itself again. With later kernels, touchpad does not work, with earlier kernels, sleep mode does not work. It is kind of a pity. I liked Manjaro until this happened. They have messed up something.
However, I think I have not explicitely checked sleep mode with Ubuntu 18.10 yet. Maybe I will just have to go back to Ubuntu 18.04 and redo the complicated Wacom installation.
Anyway, so much for Manjaro. Unil further notice. :disappointed: :confused: :unamused:

My Wacom Intuos works out of the box under xubuntu and ubuntustudio 1804; no installation whatsoever. But I agree that 1804 comes with a lot of issues. Power management for my screen is lost - I can’t dim my Lenovo U410 screen anymore since swapping from 1604 to 1804.

Scrolling on the right edge of a touchpad isn’t supported in 1804 neither. I had to get used to that two-finger scroll, and even that required some tweaking because initially there was also no tapping on the touchpad.

I tried Gnome and Gnome-shell (beautiful) and switched for about a week or so, but I had severe (!) problems with the graphic tablett then. When you connect the tablett and use the pen, you get a second mouse-cursor, and after a minute or ten, one of the two will not work anymore - like a crash. I was told that this is a problem with wayland and I shoud just start “gnome under X-Org”, but that wouldn’t start at all on my laptop. I checked the box on the login-screen and after a few seconds the system landed again on the login screen. When chosing the (beautiful) dark theme, some textboxes in forums switched to black letters on anthracite background - not a good thing at all! The best looking theme isn’t ready for use.

I finally realized that my system was fucked-up and needed to re-install everything from scratch. Not THAT big of a deal; I am a strong believer in regular back-ups and firefox allows you to ex- and import your browser settings (bookmarks, passwords etc), so i made an ubuntustudio bootstick and went back to XFCE with RT-Kernel.

Either ubuntu is not “easy” anymore or the 1804 version is a particular bad one. Gnome is beautiful and easy to work with, but as long as that Wacom Pen vs Touchpad/Mouse issue isn’t solved, I can’t work with it. Right now it’s pure rubbish; XFCE can, Gnome can’t.

I think MX ist interesting, too. It has old software, but a new kernel. I had the impression that hardware-wise, it is good. The only question is whether you can live with old software. Appimage-software is good, too, but as far as qt5 under gtk is concerned, I am annoyed by the fact that I cannot do much about the size of the fonts in qt5-apps. In some cases, appimages are ok, but I do not want to use exclusively appimages.
At the moment, I am happy with Ubuntu 18.10 I think

Apparently, creating a “new” distro is really easy with MX Linux…