What linux distribution do you prefer and why?

Software
242

This is only true if you and your users never ever want to have flatpaks interact with other apps/flatpaks.

think gimp ↔ darktabe
gimp in flatpak where users want more plugins.
you have seen all those discussions here on the forum more than once.

flatpak adds just another runtime/library tree which needs to be maintained.

243

Isn’t this just an implementation problem? For example, when you install obs gamecapture with flatpak it will be used by the obs flatpak version. The darktable lua script that starts gimp could also easily check if gimp is installed system wide or through flatpak, etc.

At least the darktable issue with gimp seems easy to solve, someone just needs to put in the work :smiley:

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244

Definitely. But at the same time it reduces the maintenance burden of those thousands of Linux distributions under the sun (which they cannot live up to anyway, with a few exceptions), and makes latest versions available quickly.

You make a very valid point, and I wish I had an answer that keeps users, upstream authors, and distro maintainers happy, but I don’t. We just have various compromises.

245

Yes but you need to package the plugin as a flatpak extension. Then you can get it the same way you get other flatpaks.

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246

I would recommend Arch.

Couple month ago I bought the new Lenovo laptop with Ubuntu (that was installed by lenovo) and it has some problems with Suspend mode. So I tried reinstall Ubuntu - same problem, tried to install Debian - got problems with other drivers, installed Arch with Xfce4 - all works out of the box.

Arch also has good documentation so it isn’t the blackbox, if something go wrong you always know how to fix it.

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247

@darix
Can you explain the difference in the update process in tumbleweed between „software update“ and „package update“. Both seem to result in different actions.

248

May I ask how?

249

I have to admit I am not really using any of the gui tools. I just do zypper dup once a day.

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250

If I didn’t already have an Arch system that’s set up the way I like, Tumbleweed would almost certainly be my choice. Not sure how I would manage without the AUR, though :grimacing:

I did try Fedora Workstation once, but it came with a ton of useless applications already installed and when it wouldn’t let me uninstall the Gnome spreadsheet app, because that would also require removing the base system (not even kidding here), I decided I had had enough and gave it the boot.

Arch is a binary distro. You might be thinking of the AUR, where it’s a bit of everything - binary, source, AppImage, extracted from deb, Windows apps running in Wine… - you name it, it’s probably there.

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251
  1. for all some multimedia bits we can not ship there is packman (there are other mirrors too). Think rpmfusion on the fedora side.
  2. for the rest you have software.o.o that will search build.o.o. for anything that starts with home: as project i would do my due diligence to check the quality. non-home: projects usually see peer reviews.
    If a package is still missing you can sign up to opensuse and build the package yourself on build.o.o. and then you can even contribute it into the distro quite easily.

package dependencies can be “fun” at times. I am sure Arch has similar problems where you want to provide everything with all the features turned on, but then your dependency tree is rather big.

Oh AUR also took rpms from openSUSE and unpacked them. this is a bit ugh. :slight_smile:

252

I don’t remember which instructions I followed, probably ones in some article about getting Firefox as a deb.

These look similar, from what I recall:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1035915/how-to-remove-snap-from-ubuntu

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