Sure you’re absolutely free to do as you please ;)

From personal experience tho, anything connected to the TV should Just Work^TM. Nothing more frustrating than just wanting to watch an episode or play a quick game before going to bed and having to spend this time doing updates and maintenance instead.

As this is for a HTPC, I would rather go for uBlue Bazzite instead of Nobara. Same Fedora base, super gaming oriented too, but atomic/immutable so 0 maintenance.

Plus, uBlue projects are not distros but an alternative build pipeline system for Fedora Atomic projects. That means that the projects scope is tiny and much easier to maintain, and that the real distro maintainers are still the Fedora team. From a user perspective, it’s much better in the long term than a single-person effort like Nobara.

Installing Fedora. I had almost nothing to configure, it worked out of the box. How frustrating! I had the whole day planned and now what? Enjoy my free time like a pleb !?!

(/s just in case anyone was wondering)

On my previous laptop, the trackpad had a bug that made it spam interrupts after waking up from sleep. It ruined battery life and basically kept one core at 100% permanently.

So I duct-taped a systemd script that unbound and bound the trackpad after each wake up.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
        post)
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/unbind
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/bind
        ;;
esac

“Cloud Native” means uBlue’s OS images are basically Docker images, but meant tu run on bare metal instead of inside virtualization, that are built automatically with GitHub actions.

The project itself is super interesting. It’s not a distro, it’s an alternative automated build pipeline toolkit for Silverblue/CoreOS that lets anyone build their perfect atomic image. It’s still 100% Fedora+rpmfusion under the hood.

UBlue’s official images have massive quality of life improvements over Silverblue.

Yes. Tuxedo is German, Slimbook Spanish, Starlabs British, NovaCustom Dutch… Framework is US/Taiwanese but sells within select EU countries and the UK. AFAIK S76 is US/Canada only.

Edit: most of these actually ship worldwide but won’t collect VAT and probably won’t honor warranty claims outside their territory.

Tuxedo, Framework, Slimbook, System76, Starlabs are Linux-first vendors with an excellent track record.

“Hate” is a strong word. I don’t hate Ubuntu. It’s just irrelevant.

It’s not alone anymore in the realm of “easy to install and use”, and ongoing enshittification nagging you to upgrade to Pro™️ makes it an objectively worse product than its direct competitors.

Thanks !

I think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it’s neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I’d even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.

The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn’t always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux.

I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.

What’s bad about Ubuntu is that the “free” version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).

The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don’t currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently.

Fortunately that knowledge can be used downstream and often upstream too. After all, most Ubuntu issues are Debian Sid issues.

This is REAL Linux, done by REAL Linuxians.

“Hello I would like sudo pacman -Syyu apples please”

They have played us for absolute fools.

3.5 Lennarts.

Will report :D

The only thing that scares me a bit is that not only he’s a newbie, he also actively refuses to understand how computers work ^^;

Fuck I wasted 30000 characters when I should’ve posted this instead :D

FWIW I ran my gaming rig on Manjaro for a couple of years.

It doesn’t need constant maintenance, and it doesn’t break. The whole point of it is to be a stable variation of Arch.

It does need regular maintenance, as highlighted in every single stable update announcement. It doesn’t break if you follow these maintenance steps when relevant to your install. It is absolutely not stable (as in Debian Stable or RHEL or SLES stable) as things are moving quickly. It might be “stable” as in “crash-free”, but it is not “stable” stable. And as I said, after running it for 2 years, I’m not convinced it’s that crash-free either. I remember an era (I think 5.9-ish kernel series) that crashed all the time.

It doesn’t have a highly irregular update schedule, it’s quite regular — every two weeks

Okay, almost-semi-regular then.

AUR doesn’t “expect” anything, it’s a dumping ground where anybody can put anything.

True, AUR is not sentient. AUR creators, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly Arch users who builds their scripts targeting an up-to-date Arch system.

I’m doing an experiment right now. I’m giving my previous laptop to my dad to replace his very old, very close to death MacBook Air. I’ve installed Bluefin, rebased to the Stable branch and keeping everything else stock.

We’ll see how it goes :D

You’re welcome!

Yeah I think the recent nonfree images should take care of the most pressing driver issues (last time I installed Debian, I had to separately download and put on a second USB stick the drivers for my WiFi card just to be able to proceed with the installer). I don’t know if you still need to manually install proprietary blobs for the CPU or the GPU post-install tho. If not, that would mean modern Debian is indeed very close to OOTB functionality.

Sorry, I’m not a native English speaker and I work in IT :D

I however believe that it’s more useful in the long run to use correct terminology (with a small explanation if necessary) rather than “dumbing it down”, as it makes finding pertinent information quicker/easier.

Good call about Atomic distros, I’m adding some precisions.

I pondered a lot including a bit about rpmfusion in Fedora’s paragraph, but I elected not to because there is already too much stuff here :D

As a 20-years Debian user who switched to Fedora a couple years ago on my main laptop, I would say confidently that Debian is the distro I’m the most comfortable with. I love Debian. But, there are a couple things that prevent me from recommending it as a very first distro:

• The base system is very barebones and you’re required to manually install vital things like proprietary drivers (I think it’s a bit more painless now with the nonfree installer but I haven’t installed a fresh Debian in a few years). For me, having a fully functional Debian laptop is not hard work but requires a bit of knowledge beforehand.
• A lot of people want the latest and shiniest, and with Debian might be tempted to switch to Testing or Sid which is a very bad idea for a daily driver.

Good call about Kalpa, I’m removing it