To quote tantacrul:
It is ok … It is ok to be wrong. 
I was not referring to any need for rebooting. My comment was directed at the general need to install software in the form of Snaps and FlatPacks and such, instead of native packages.
I once administered a corporate UNIX system (I won’t name the system) where, instead of installing updates to the packages that comprised the system, you simply wiped the system and replaced it with a new system image. That was the craziest thing I ever saw. And, I think it is akin to today’s immutable Linux systems.
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you dont have to do that. you can also move them into the base image as I said. I would say give it a try on a playground machine. in doubt USB stick booted
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Thanks, but I really don’t care to mess with it.
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While I don’t think that immutable / atomic distributions are a good solution for my purposes, the problem they are trying to address is, nevertheless, real. The traditional approach does not scale well, especially if the user is not a seasoned Linux user and/or does not want to do maintenance.
I can see that in a corporate environment where IT manages the laptops an immutable distribution would be a great advantage: it is very reliable and secure. I am thinking of installing one for my parents.
With the proliferation of Linux distributions, it is no longer reasonable to expect that all software is packaged for the majority of them. Flatpak etc are a good solution to fill the gaps, it’s just that I don’t want all my applications to come from there, it has its own problems.
(That said, I don’t understand the reason for the proliferation of Linux distributions either, at least not at this scale. These days it seems like new distributions are created because someone changed the desktop wallpaper.)
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Yeah, they sometimes have their downsides for sure. The darktable Flatpak does not work with GPU acceleration for AMD cards, which is extremely unfortunate. I have to use the official AppImage with the aurora-dx image, which includes doodads for graphics. Rebasing from the aurora image to aurora-dx was a cli command and reboot away.
I really wish Flatpak succeeds as the dominating software distribution format though (it probably already has), so I’m going to keep dog fooding whenever I can.
The man hours spent to keep every distribution specific package and repository alive seems like one of the worst waste of resources in the world of Linux. And I obviously don’t say that to diminish the amazing work that package maintainers have done over the years… I just think the time could be spent more wisely now that well established alternatives such as AppImages and Flatpaks exist.
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The other day when testing AgX I noticed darktable was really fast when building locally vs the packaged version in the Arch repos. I’d say twice as fast or more.
Maybe it’s time for me to try out Gentoo 
I also upgraded from a 3700X to 5950X a few months ago so compilations should be more or less fast.
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I would doubt the double speed figure. but yes distro packages have to target a broadband of CPU feature sets so they can not use all the optimizations.
But isnt Arch linux also a from source distro where you can easily build during install of packages? Also if you want to speed it up even more there is CachyOS as a more optimized Arch flavor.
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You are right. I ran darktable-cli and can only measure a very small difference of 150ms faster in AgX(master). Which could be explained by optimizations that have hit master and are yet to be deployed to the distros. The UI definitely feels faster though, even if the pipeline is more or less the same speed.
I’m not very interested in niche distros with small userbases at this point. I understand that Gentoo is probably as niche at this point though
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From my understanding cachyos is basically arch linux with some optimizations. that’s why i thought you would feel more at home there.
in case you wonder what e.g. fedora/opensuse do to speed up some things:
for many performance critical libraries we have x86_64-v3 ABI compiled library packages. like
/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libz.so.1
and the loader prefers those over the ones in /usr/lib64
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Have fun! I wish you luck. I tried Gentoo for more than a year, and at least twice, I came up on upgrade snafus that I could not resolve no matter how much I studied the ways to resolve them. I finally gave up.
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I also did, but back in the day, at least for diffuse or sharpen, that was what I saw.
did you test reldebinfo distro package vs release natively build? then it is probably the bigger difference of march=generic vs march=native.
To be honest, I may change over to Ubuntu Studio, as my interests also include audio / music stuff. It’ll probably be easier to uninstall what I don’t need on Ubuntu Studio, than add all the audio production software onto the likes of Linux Mint especially when it comes to Pipewire / Jack etc.
you basically only want pipewire nowadays. it also implements the jack protocol.
for openSUSE you could just add the multimedia pro audio project and get the missing audio packages.
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So I have done a quick install of Ubuntu Studio 25.04.
Perhaps it is a bit “overcomplicated” for my needs with regards to my basic audio production stuff, and I may be better served by sticking with Linux Mint / Kubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Thankfully I have timeshift backs up both Linux Mint 22.1 and Kubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Hi darix,
I have successfully installed tumbleweed on my laptop. Everything went well, even the dreadful davinci resolve installation. However, i have one remaining issue: the laptop has an internal CPU Intel graphics card and a dedicated GPU (Nvidia 1050 Ti). While the internal works and makes the desktop environment useful I cannot run CUDA based code and play games.
There is a lot of information on the internet but I have trouble finding the correct approach and the latest information. This worked in ubuntu sort of out of the box.
Where should I start looking for a proper solution? Do you have additional ideas how to solve this problem?
Many thanks in advance.
Daniel
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you probably want to follow:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers
For your card you need the G06 driver.
there is also a package for switcheroo-control which might be interesting for you.
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I use Manjaro XFCE because a friend helped me with it. Basically, I’m totally satisfied, especially because I always have fairly up-to-date software.
The many updates aren’t always perfect, so you always have to tweak the operating system from time to time - but I’m happy to accept that.