I wonder why test this on an 11 year old phone?
I have it running on a Pixel 3a and it's definitely smooth, but it still stutters once in a while. It feels slower than Android to me, but not much.
Battery life is indeed excellent, though mine doesnt seem to fast charge.
The camera app was the standout feature to me. The pictures i take look every bit as good as those from Android. I expected the app to be clunky or to have bad colors, but that is not the case at all.
Edit: Pixel 3a not 3
My bad it's a 3a
Good counterpoint
make the most use of the hardware
All distros should do this equally well, and better than Windows
let me play the most games
All distros will be more or less the same. Games generally work or they dont. Check ProtonDB to see which games work and how well.
easiest to use
lowest maintenance possible
This is how distros actually differ.
Some common suggestions:
Ubuntu LTS:
Kubuntu LTS:
Ubuntu/Kubuntu current:
Linux Mint:
Fedora
Pop!_OS
I do not reccomend Bazzite, Kali, Arch, Manjaro, Garuda, Debian, or Slackware. They are all great distros for specific use-cases, but they are all significantly more work to configure and/or maintain than the suggestions i've outlined.
I haven't tried Nobara so i cant recommend it, but from the outside it looks fine for a gaming desktop.
Edit: I have mixed feelings on Bazzite, but it might also be a good option for someone feeling adventurous
I just don't see the draw of immutable distros for non power users.
With traditional ubuntu/mint/fedora you have 15+ years of forum posts, tutorials, and community wisdom to help you out if you get stuck. You probably wont need to, but it's nice to be able to just google something and get a dozen good answers. If you want to use containerized apps you also have that option.
Also depending on your taste in gaming, you might need access to stuff outside of steam/lutris/heroic/flathub. In those cases getting your game working could be a bit of a hassle compared to a traditional distro.
I totally see how immutability can be a draw for tinkerers and developers, but for regular users it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist, or is pretty rare if it does.
I also think there is something to say for picking a distro that's been around a long while. Hopefully Bazzite is still around in 10 years. I feel very confident Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora/Pop! still will be.
That said, I'm glad to hear you and your friend are happy with Bazzite. It seems like a really good option if you only play games from steam/heroic/lutris/flathub. A best of both worlds between a PC and a gaming console.
I've given up on GOG. No linux client means the whole process of installing/launching games is rather tedious. Also linux game dependencies can be annoying to resolve
Steam on the other hand just handles everything. If it doesn't work at first, it probably will with proton.
I'd love to support an anti-DRM store, but it's tough when there is so much friction when actually playing the games
LTS kernels aren't more or less stable. Rather, they have been selected by the kernel maintainers to get security fixes backported to them for a certain time.
Ubuntu does the same thing for the kernels on their LTS versions (technically they usually are not LTS kernels since canonical supports them instead of kernel team)
Overall I'd suggest going with what the distro provides unless you have very new hardware, in which case a newer kernel may be required
One of the best apps on any platform
Couldn't finish it: too much whining, not enough substance.
I haven't tried hyprland yet but if this is the guy developing it than maybe I'm good.
Cosmic seems promising. Best of luck to system76, happy to see an alternative opinionated desktop getting some momentum.
Nice job! If you can get the nvidia driver installed properly, any distro should work in theory.
On Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation
On Pop!_OS it should be already installed by default
I've been hearing good things about Nobara, Ill have to try it out!
Don't use an immutable distro like endless or silverblue. It's a whole new paradigm to learn (in addition to learning Linux basics). You should get your feet wet with something more user-friendly first.
My big recommendation is Ubuntu. Normal ubuntu. Not one of the flavors or derivatives. It's got everything you need, plus very easy to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. Try to avoid using the command line when following guides online, there is nothing on Ubuntu you actually need it for and the graphical tools are very good.
Don't listen to the complaining about snaps. You won't notice them, they won't affect you negatively, they are designed to just set and forget. The complaints come from a highly particular and technical subset of the Linux community.
If you really don't like the look of Ubuntu, then I'd second all the recommendations for Mint. Those two distros have the most number of non-technical users in their communities because they are both very user-friendly and well-tested. I'd recommend against trying anything else until you've gotten comfortable with Ubuntu or Mint.
What's the use case? What are you running into that you want to launch as sudo through the gui that isn't pulling up the dialogue automatically?
A few folks have argued this is unnecessary, but I'm curious about your perspective on why and when you think it would be useful
Stardew Valley is a very relaxing and fun game where you start a farm in a small town. It has also has optional multiplayer. I found it very addictive.
Hardware support is also two-sided.
For example: game controllers.
On Linux, any first-party Switch, Playstation, or Xbox controller works out of the box. Most 3rd party controllers also work out of the box. Even Wii remotes work once paired over bluetooth (and the pointing works but takes some setup).
On windows, xbox controllers work out of the box, except for very old ones which require a driver. 3rd party pc controllers will tend to work out of the box (or sometimes with a driver), but wired Switch and Playstation controllers need hacky workarounds to work or to get full functionality. Wireless controllers can often be paired with bluetooth, but I've had hit and miss luck with windows and first party Sony/Nintendo controllers
Sure does, though I hope it keeps improving steadily. I've been donating to their patreon almost as long as it's existed.
For me, Lutris works about 50% of the time with no hassle. The other 50% of the time I get an error during installation that I can't figure out, and I end up using steam or giving up.
Recently it was Diablo 1 that I couldn't get working on Lutris, but got working pretty quickly with steam
Idk. I have a windows pc my work gave me, and the battery shits the bed constantly. I don't even know were to begin troubleshooting the issue. I put in an ubuntu partition as an experiment, and the battery suddenly had a decent lifespan. I have my own linux laptop, so the partition was redundant and I ended up wiping it.
My partner also has a windows laptop and it has it's own weird issues. The start menu search frequently can't find programs she has installed, or takes up to 10 seconds to even show a result. This isn't an old laptop, nor a particularly underpowered one. She also has issue with certain browsers on her work's vpn, and troubleshooting via remote desktop has caused her issues as well. In both those situations she borrowed a linux laptop from me and her work's IT department was able to figure it out pretty quickly. Some of it has since been solved but once in a while it still comes up. (they had no RDP solution for linux but the VPN info she was given worked, which got her up and running)
I'm sure someone more experienced with windows would just be able to fix these issues with a registry edit or something, but I have no idea where to begin. I have lots of respect for windows admins because it all feels like black magic to me. At least on linux you can google for solutions.
I also find the gui(s) on linux to be less buggy, more performant, more logical, and more consistent that the windows UI. I'm sure if I were more experience I could make some tweaks and get Linux-quality performance, but the bugs and inconsistency are still rough when you are used to Linux's simplicity.
That's my take anyway. I think the biggest thing is that knowledge and confidence smooths over a lot of issues, and that applies both ways. It seems like you have a lot of Windows experience that you can lean on and that's great.
Pretty sure it just had an emulation layer for Android. I had a Passport when it was new, and I remember the phone was emulating a version of Android a few years old, so a few apps didn't work properly
On KDE Plasma, my only outstanding bug is that the "window shade" button on my window controls is broken. Too bad since I use that feature a lot.
On GNOME everything seems to work as far as I can tell. It's pretty smooth!
There are quite a few niche window managers and desktop environments that it'd be a shame to loose. I'm quite fond of Windowmaker (and curious about Afterstep), Trinity DE, and NSCDE for example, and I'm not aware of Wayland plans for any of them.
That was also my take. If it's something you should be able to edit, your user should have permissions to do that. Jumping to running as root every time has lots of unintended consequences.
I do think a functionally similar idea would be a button to "take ownership" (grant "/r/w/x") of a file that would prompt for root password. That way things don't run as root that shouldn't. Would that be a good compromise between Linux permissions and Windows workflow?
Regarding formatting a drive, whatever program you are doing that in should ask for root p/w when performing that operation. If it just refuses because of permissions that seems like a bug.
Just saw your edit. One thing you should be doing is taking ownership of directories you plan to be working in. So for an external drive for example, you'd want to make sure your user(s) have r/w/x permission recursively (granting permission for all files and folders underneath using the same command) on the root folder of the drive then you can move stuff on and off freely.
I agree it could be more straightforward, but ideally you'd only have to do it one time when you first use the drive with that machine
RAID 5/6 aren't yet recommended for general use on BTRFS by the developers.
Other than that I agree it should be suitable for anything, and an improvement over ext4 in some situations.
If you don't know what RAID 5/6 is you are good.
Yes, it's fantastic if you need that kind of thing. I used Bedrock for years to have OpenSUSE's patched kde-firefox running on Kubuntu. I never had any issues whatsoever. Very cool project.
I remember a showstopper a while back being that you can't resize the title bar while shaded. That's already the current behavior on x11, so I would be fine with that caveat continuing if it meant wayland support.
Looking Glass is apparently broken on GNOME + Wayland in this exact way.
Ideally there would be a bare minimum server side decoration for Wayland apps (like Looking Glass) that don't provide any CSD. Hopefully that's on the horizon if it's not what's being discussed here.
That first link doesn't have anything like what you describe
Edit: they changed the link, the new one is at least relevant. The old link was just some random comment.
When I commented it was a link to a random github comment that had nothing to do with the subject. I guess they fixed it and removed the second link between my comment and yours
I had no issues with compatibility, just made sure to save documents to older microsoft office formats in the hopes of avoiding issues.
I never had to use an exam browser or anything like that, I'd imagine you'd want to have a polite conversation with the instructor if that were to occur, perhaps they can make an exception or allow you to do it on a library computer
Collaboration was always over google docs, so there were never any problems working with others. My CS classes were all expected to be done in Linux VMs so that was sort of ideal. Other science/humanities classes were totally software-agnostic.
I don't know what those are, but I'll look them up.
The linux dependency thing was "Freedom Planet" , an indie retro sonic clone. Trying to use the linux version through GOG, it took me several minutes to figure out and manually install dependencies (which will remain if I remove the game) and even then I couldn't get sound working.
I shoved the windows binary into steam/proton and it worked like a charm
Thanks for the tip!
I was really impressed with the hub. Such a well-implemented feature. I also miss the led that would blink a different color for different types of notifications or conversations
Sorry to be off-topic but I'm curious:
How/why do people use proton-ge?
Are you using it standalone? Through Lutris or Steam? Something else?
What are the situations you'd need it over vanilla proton? Do you keep both vanilla and ge installed?
Also, do improvements generally get added to vanilla, or is ge an increasingly-divergent fork?
I've been gaming primarily on Linux for over a decade and since it's been an option I've used proton on steam extensively, but I've never tried ge
I think you have it right, I was being clumsy with my phrasing
The "phone-native" theoretical new user may become more of a real thing in the future too. When GNOME and Pantheon started developing in that direction I thought they were chasing ghosts, but now it turns out they may have just been a decade ahead of their time.
I don't think the snap argument is without merit, I just think it's an argument only had by a very technical subset of users. I think your comment illustrates that.
I don't agree that anybody would be left "orphaned" on Ubuntu. LXD vs Podman is again a very technical question for a specific subset of users.
I also don't agree that SteamOS is the goal for compatibility and support. Compatibility is best with Ubuntu, it's the most widely deployed and used desktop distribution by far. Most other desktop distros are a rounding error when compared to Ubuntu user-wise.
I've also personally had a buggy experience with SteamOS. I wouldn't use it as a desktop in its current state, but I'm aware some folks do just that.
For someone new to Linux who just needs to get on with their desktop work, Ubuntu is the best distro there is (flawed as it may be). Mint is also a good choice for the same reasons.
I built a backup server out of my old desktop, running Ubuntu and ZFS
I have a dataset for each of my computers and i back them up to the corresponding datasets in the zfs pool on the server semi-regularly. The zfs pool has enough disks for some redundancy, so i can handle occasional drive failures. My other computers run arbitrary filesystems (ext4, btrfs, rarely ntfs)
the only problem with my current setup is that if there is file degradation on my workstation that i dont notice, it might get backed up to the server by mistake. then a degraded file might overwrite a non-degraded backup. to avoid this, i generally dont overwrite files when i backup. since 90% of my data is pictures, it's not a big deal since they dont change
Someday i'd like to set up proxmox and virtualize everything, and i'd also like to set up something offsite i could zfs-send to as a second backup
Not recommended for single-disk root partitions. This is a mistake I've made myself. Recovery tools are non-existant on ZFS so non-parity setups are inherently risky. If you have root setup on at least raidz1 with at least 2 disks you are fine.
That sounds like another good solution!
That's what I'm thinking. A menu entry that just runs chown -R [username] on whatever you click is the idea
Lineage gives you a decent app ecosystem (F-droid) with the option to set up Play Store for full Android compatibility
Ubuntu Touch has a very limited ecosystem compared to F-droid, but might be enough for someone willing to do most tasks in a browser.
Stuff like phone calls, pictures, sms, podcasts, music, and other simple tasks will work equally well on either OS assuming your device is supported