🦊 OneRedFox 🦊

Yep, though the dpkg ecosystem also had more inertia than the rpm ecosystem did. Before Flatpak existed, pretty much everything that was packaged for Linux had a .deb file for it, but the same wasn’t true for rpm. So people who didn’t want to package shit themselves flocked to the Debian-based ecosystem. But these days we have Flatpaks and everything moved to the browser, so it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

I put my tech illiterates on Fedora with GNOME without issue. If you’re the one doing the installation and can install the RPMFusion stuff like drivers and codecs then yeah it’s pretty smooth sailing.

LibreELEC with a FLIRC dongle and a cheapo infrared remote. If you have any bluetooth console controllers laying around, you can use those too so long as they have good Linux support. There’s Kodi addons for popular streaming services and LibreELEC also offers an SFTP addon in case you want a local media server setup instead.

It’ll probably be my favorite filesystem in 2030.

Now this looks like an interesting option. I’ll be checking it out over the next few days. Thanks!

I too have noticed a number of minor behavioral differences that I’ve found annoying, but it is what it is. This was the closest I could find to an active fork of Cantata, but nothing has been released at this time, though the dev has expressed interest in a Qt6 port.

If there’s any other Cantata enjoyers reading this thread while feeling sad that it’s not maintained anymore, Strawberry is the closest alternative.

SimpleX was nice when I used it for small chats, but how is it with large groups? Matrix really drags ass with large rooms, even on native clients.

I don’t use LXQt itself, but its software suite is nice if you want a Qt desktop with a tiling window manager. Looking forward to it landing in my distro. 👍

Is the bootup/shutdown speed, and faster package management really worth it? Is it really significant enough?

No. The primary reasons why you’d want to use Void Linux are the musl packages, the easy packaging experience with XBPS, and the simplicity of Runit. The distro felt like BSD on Linux when I last used it (it’s admittedly been a few years since then); I liked it. If the above things interest you, then go for it; otherwise, stick with Fedora.

Sway doesn’t support the proprietary Nvidia driver and Nouveau was hot garbage last time I tried it. IIRC, GNOME and KDE are the two projects that have invested the most resources into accommodating Nvidia’s bullshit and even then I’d still expect the experience to be lackluster.

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It’s the spec for how the file directories should be set up on UNIX-like systems, like how typically user binaries would go in /usr/bin and libraries for those binaries would go in /usr/lib.

Installing proprietary software. For certain courses I unfortunately have to use software like Unreal Engine, Maya, Houdini, Unity, P4V, and a few others. I read NixOS has difficulty with running random binaries. I also could not find an UE5 package in nixpkgs, which Arch does have.

So NixOS is different from other distros in that it throws out the FHS so that it can do things like install multiple versions of the same library without issues; this breaks binaries, however, and they have to be patched to work with NixOS. So you basically have to package things for Nix for them to work. Certain programs like Steam and VSCode even have a wrapper as part of their setup that recreates the FHS to make them work as expected, so doing this is possible, but as a beginner I doubt you want to fuck with that.

Building binaries. I know nixos does some weird stuff with libraries and binaries. I need to be able to do normal stuff with binaries, and perhaps package and distribute them. It’d be really nice to be able to try out different compilers for my CMake/C++ projects also. Can NixOS do that easily?

It’s actually nice as a dev environment. You do have to write flakes for your projects, but that’s not a big deal and the reproducibility is nice.

VMs. I will be doing dGPU passthrough for testing assignments before handin. I assume this is no problem but it requires some weird stuff so I want to be sure before diving in!

I’ve used VMs without issue, so should be fine.

Since Nix is a distro-agnostic package manager, in your case I would probably use a normal distro like Ubuntu/Arch/Fedora and just use Nix with that if you want to go that route. It’ll go smoother than diving into the deep end right away.

What’s the Kepler support like at this time?

Ah good, I was wondering when this was going to release (April).

Pipewire was honestly the most pain-free introduction of a new audio technology on Linux; it was a nice change of pace.

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber

IMO these were their best products. 🙁

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Ugh, god damn it.

NixOS.

I used to be constantly making tweaks to stuff and distrohopping like none other, but in 2018 I finally found THE setup and settled down. These days it’s all about having scripts that set things up exactly how I want them.

Waybar just looks like a Wayland port of Polybar.