Manjaro is not worth the troubles anymore, specially after the whole money situation that happened a few months ago. Better go for Arch itself or EndeavourOS which is also a great choice.
Flatpak is great and definitely the future for linux GUI applications.
My “new” computer will be two years old in August, 2022. I run Arch Linux with an nVidia RTX2060 and the proprietary nvidia driver, and also openCL. I have had no real problems with it that I can think of, especially since I learned to properly deal with the driver updates. All there is to that is to make sure I run mkinitcpio if the nvidia driver is updated and the kernel is not updated at the same time.
I run Debian stable too, Darktable is the only software I build from sources to keep up with the latest release.
afik there is a deb-package for all Debian verision in the OBS repo, so no need to build from source
welcome to pixls.us!
I’m going bored with windows and thinking of giving Linux a whirl again. My laptop has an 11th gen i5, 16gb Ram and intel iris Xe max graphics.
To start with, I’m thinking of either dual booting win11 and Linux. Or maybe put in a second nvme and install Linux on that. I’d like my “data” partition to be accessible from both windows and Linux. Which file format is best for this?
I dabble with dt ( of course), and want to try out blender and resolve. On windows, I use Affinity photo, so I’ll need to learn to use gimp as well. I have played around with Ubuntu, mint, fedora and even opensuse for short periods. I can generally Google around for solutions to problems, and have to managed to solve some issues by copy pasting code into terminal. But it’s usually a lot of trial and error. I don’t have any coding knowledge and haven’t attempted building from source.
So, which Linux distro?
Honestly I don’t think anything is that good. exFAT is the general cross platform filesystem, but its old and I wouldn’t want my data in it long term.
Ubuntu or Fedora.
So, stick to the native file systems of both OSes?
Yeah, that is what I would do. If you have another machine and disk space to spare, you could use something like syncthing to keep all of OS’s in sync.
Good morning, Rohan (local time),
In your case: why not put a live system onto a USB stick
and try for a while to see whether you like it or not,
and that it works for your intentions?
Garuda Linux, for instance, which is my present favourite.
Most distros work more or less the same — unless you
have a Ryzen CPU and an Nvidia gfx; that’s when
odd problems™ start to appear.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I am using ntfs for data shared between windows and linux on dual boot (though I hardly every boot to windows these days). I was already happy with ntfs-3g and now there’s even an in-kernel filesystem. Works just fine.
Regarding distros what Claes said: There are differences, but more similarities. The more impactful decision is which desktop environment, because that will be what you see and interact with. Basically gnome and kde are the big, simple options, I’d recommend going with one of those to start with.
I’d suggest Linux Mint or Zorin as two distro’s that are friendly to new users. Mint has the cinnamon desktop which is similar to Windows, and easy to configure. Zorin Core uses a modified Gnome which is easily customized to a window like desktop using their built in appearance configurator, and it’s a very well designed system. Also easy to set up a dual boot. If you do go do boot, install Linux second on a separate drive if you can. Good forum support as well.
As suggested in earlier posts, booting a live environment off a USB3 stick is a great way to check things out before installing.
I’m a Manjaro user and I haven’t noticed anything. What “money situation”?
I agree. Speaking of Manjaro… They’re working on a pacman-less version of Manjaro that focuses on Flatpak.
I’ve had good results with my Flatpak apps, and have been replacing distro packaged apps with Flatpak over time. I don’t mind giving up a little disk space to do so. I think that this is a big step forward for Linux, and hope more become available. I’m very happy with my Zorin OS install, and since I run older hardware, the older kernels are fine. There are a few hiccups here and there, but nothing really bad. And I find the upgrades easier to deal with.
This sparked a lot of controversy at the time and a lot of people jumped ship.
Going full flatpak is an interesting idea, is it going to be a competitor to fedora silverblue or follow some of its nature with an immutable OS?
My understanding of Silverblue is that it’s meant to provide a stable system for developers, with the ability to roll back to various system installations. I’m not sure it provides many benefits to a more common user like me.
I’m exploring Flatpaks because after leaving Manjaro and access to newer packages, I wanted to be able to use more current releases of some applications. I’ve utilized the OpenSuse build service in the past for access to newer verssions of darktable, for instance, but my last attempt failed, so I went to the Flatpak as a workaround. So far, so good.
I guess from a users perspective, the advantage of Flatpak is the ease of install, and the lack of problems with dependencies.
From a developers standpoint, I hear it’s easier to get your application out for users on many distro’s at once.
I also use a couple of appimages, and they seem to be ok as well.
For end users, its really hard to break your system and if you somehow do, you can just roll back. It makes upgrades painless. And you’ll always know what is in your base system. I don’t think its mature enough yet, but when it is I think it’ll be nice.
Although with Flatpaks (eg darktable), can they support things like hardware OpenCL acceleration? That’s a major issue if they don’t…
I run a flatpak dt and opencl works on it.
Ah, thanks.
Sorry, I have no idea. That forum post was the last I heard of the project.
Speaking of immutable. Has anybody tried Fedora Kinoite? What are the trade-offs and inconveniences like in daily use? Silverblue seems to be rather established while Kinoite gives the impression of being more of a fringe phenomenon at this point.