Ubuntu with gnome. Gnkme has memory leaks so you have to reboot sometimes, but its worth it because of how keyboard friendly it is. Lovely ux, after using a few addkns anyway. And ubuntu just works more often than the other distros. I just hate big version updates, those always break things and i need to do a fresh install
Thanks, but I was not asking about how to get into & edit Grub options, I know that. Itās just that Ubuntu has a extra ārecoveryā entries in the Grub menu, and Fedora Silverblue does not.
What happened is that after following recommendations in this topic, I put the ostensibly rock-solid, atomic, buzzword-compatible Kinoite on my parentās home machine. Some recent update apparently broke something in the graphics setup, everything worked fine, except that after boot the screen was dimmed to 0. Took me a while to figure out what is going on, it is good that I was visiting my parents for Xmas anyway.
I added a nomodeset, backed up the files, and replaced it with good old Kubuntu.
On my new work laptop, changing the brightness to 0 completely darkens the screen. I am not sure if this is a bug or intended behavior. It was really strange when I first tried it and the only thing that saved it from a reboot were the keyboard shortcuts.
I think it must be an error of implementation, maybe on the display driver side. With LCDs when the backlight is shut off, you can still read the screen, but do the same with OLEDs (which is my case) and of course the pixels themselves will turn dark since they are the emitters.
I understand and accept that stuff like this happens. What I was missing in Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite is an easy way to debug this. What I do in Ubuntu is go back a kernel version, or if that fails, boot into rescue mode and take it from there. Every Ubuntu installation has these options in Grub by default.
My beef with Fedora is that it had a single menu entry in Grub. Yes, I know I can edit it. But I hate searching for kernel boot options on my phone when the computer is down.
Yeah I completely agree
I was commenting more on the display situation, it is annoying and in no way should 0% brightness remain after a reboot unless there is a specific configuration for devices like kiosks or something
I donāt know whether if its specific to Universal Blues Fedora images but they keep the current and last image in GRUB you if an update fails you should be able to grub into the pre-update state. I get your gripe with a missing CLI option though.
I nuked my Windows 11 install and have been running CachyOS for about a week now. So far so good.
Things I like:
- Using btrfs and limine has sensible subvolumes setup by default and pacman hooks that create a snapshot before and after any pacman action. It appears the default is to save 50 snapshots.
- Itās fast.
- Itās Arch so a lot is possible.
- Gaming stuff is easy to install.
Things I donāt like:
- I already feel the brittleness of maintaining this long term. Flatpak is discouraged and Iām trying to stick to their way but that includes utilizing the AUR for a lot more than Iād really like to. Obviously I can just choose not to do it this way but itās an experiment for now.
I think ultimately Iād like to use one of the Fedora atomic distros like Bazzite-DX (includes stuff like homebrew and distrobox stuff out of the box). But I have some special requirements for work like using the Cisco SecureClient which already requires jumping through some hoops on a non-Ubuntu LTS distro. Gonna try out Aurora on my laptop though and see what I can get cooking.
Ultimately, I enjoy the flexibility of Arch. But I really just want something that works and will be stable long term.
I started with ubuntu many years ago and switched to debian about 5 years ago.
Why? Stability. Runs and runs and ā¦.
Why is Flatpak discouraged?
What made you choice Cachy?
CachyOS is all about squeezing out performance. They compile their own kernels with modern hardware in mind, and have their own repos for packages theyāve compiled. I think Flatpak is just discouraged because Flatpaks naturally wonāt be as performant. Thereās nothing official that says not to use them but itās not installed or configured by default and their docs donāt really mention it much. Iāve seen on their forums multiple posts encouraging people NOT to use Flatpaks.
Now, of course I can use them, and the performance difference is probably marginal. Iām just choosing to try without and see how it goes. Iām smart enough to have a home partition separate so I can bail easily if I want.
Never tried an Arch distro before. It has gaming stuff easily able to be setup. I like rolling releases in theory. Btrfs snapshots configured by default was nice.
Iām not tied to it. Historically I find Fedora a nice middleground between something like Ubuntu and Arch and Iāll probably end up making my way back to Fedora at some point, whether itās atomic or not.
Thatās a valid argument. Yeah, the performance gains can be marginal or quite big, but for most software it doesnāt really matter. If there are nice aur entries for what you need I donāt see why not use them. I install performance sensitive stuff from the aur but the rest is all flatpak due to ease of use
We were derailing that other thread, so I hope you donāt mind me moving this conversation here.
Iād also love to try KDE Linux, but will probably wait until it matures.
Strange about the slowdown. Iāve been using Aurora on bunch of computers. One of them is a X220 from 2011.
I absolutely do not mind!
KDE Linux is over 50% finished and will likely see its first stable release before 2027, so Iām not particularly concerned about its maturity, itās also been the most stable distribution Iāve ever used thus far and since it is immutable, I am not particularly afraid of a lack of reliability either
Itās not specifically Aurora, it is Fedora in its entirety, Iāve used Aurora, Bluefin, Zirconium (Universal Blue but with the Niri Wayland compositor and the Dank Linux desktop shell), Fedora Kinoite, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, and probably something else Iāve forgotten the name of⦠they were all painfully slow in the same exact areas - I discovered eventually that it was a lot more smoother and cooler with GNOME instead of KDE, but GNOME is⦠GNOME, so I switched to CachyOS, then to vanilla Arch Linux from there, and then to KDE Linux, where I have been ever since
Another NixOs user here. Itās a very unique distribution: all your system config is contained is a single file and it is āpureā in the sense that packages are installed in such a way that you can have multiple versions of the same lib installed without having conflicts. The advantages are multiple:
- very up to date and huge list of packages, for instances 2 weeks after its release of darktable 5.4 is already in unstable
- you can easily rollback to an older system config: if you realize your system is unstable after a system upgrade, just rollback to a previous config by selecting it when booting
- you can temporarily āinstallā a program in a shell, very practical to avoid polluting the system with stuff youāll run once
- upgrades are way cleaner than in any other system: you donāt end up with a pile of softwares you installed in the past and forgot to uninstall, you install only what is in your config file and nothing else.
I checked the intro slides and the main motivation seems to be the gripe that KDE makes the software, someone packages it up (eg distros), but when users have a problem they complain to KDE.
Thatās literally on the first 13 slides, so it must be a major pain point for the devs.
I can sympathize, but at the same time I donāt see how making their own distro will address this. Users who complained to KDE will still complain to KDE. Are they going to ban people from their forums who are not users of the KDE distro? Or answer every question with ājust use KDE Linuxā?
It may be premature to assume that it will have less bugs than the other distributions, just because it comes directly from KDE (hint: even if they make the KDE part perfect, one can have bugs outside KDE, so they will have to deal with a ton of extra bug reports).
Of course, canonically (haha
) the standard answer to every Linux gripe is that you have to have yet another distribution, because that will surely solve the problem.
Being able to quickly check and say āthis issue doesnāt occur in this distro that weāve configured and maintain specifically for KDE, please complain to your distro maintainers and have them figure it out insteadā probably still helps quite a bit with simplifying the entire process for an integral component like KDE. It likely also makes it easier for maintainers of those other distros because it lets them isolate the issue more quickly by comparing against the KDE distro.
If you have no standardized setup to point to, then the responsibilities are much less clear.
In practice, I think that desktops are too complex to automatically isolate a state that would work as a reproducer. Once you have that, checking is the easy part, eg you can spin up a virtual instance of a particular distribution. But getting there is the difficult part.
I think the best way to deal with a Linux problem is to
- search for the error message, 99% of the time it has been seen by someone else and there may be a solution,
- if (1) does not work, report it in the distributionās bug tracker, they can investigate and upstream it if necessary.
It would only occur to me to go to the KDE forums if I wanted to ask for help configuring it or similar.
Time will tell if having their own distro helps, I am just skeptical.
Yes! If you want to test darktable from source, you can clone the git repo and then cd packaging/nix and then git pull origin master && nix run ".?submodules=1 and itāll build the later master from source and run it.