SymbolicLink

I would go from the bottom up instead of top down.

Make a list of software and tools you use, and search for functional Linux native equivalents. Then find the distro that supports up to date versions of that software (through flatpak or the package manager).

You can honestly do 100% of this without even touching the command line if you choose something user friendly like Mint, Pop OS, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Don’t fall into the rabbit hole of finding the perfect distro. Go from what you need to what supports it.

keep the windows partition around for a while until you are 100% confident you can fully make the switch.

From a user perspective, Distrobox is a tool that lets you "spin up any distro inside your terminal".

You can basically create a mini Linux environment of any distro that you can access through the terminal. You can set it to share your home folder, our create a new home folder just for that mini environment.

Behind the scenes Distrobox is creating and managing containers through Podman or Docker. You could technically achieve the same thing by manually setting up Podman containers, Distrobox just makes it very easy to create and maintain those containers with the correct permissions. It also has useful tools where you could install an app in a Distrobox container, but then add that app to your host OS app list.

This makes it especially useful for immutable OSs. Instead of adding packages to your base OS, which should be kept as minimal as possible, you can just install them in a Distrobox, so your host's root filesystem is unaffected.

Yeah and I have thousands of hours in League of Legends, but have probably enjoyed only about 10 minutes

I run everything in rootless containers using systemd service files generated with podman generate systemd.

Podman Compose is a "community effort", and Red Hat seems to be less focused on its development (here is their post about it).

There are ways to get it working but I find it easier to go with podman containers and pods through systemd because the majority of documentation (both official and unofficial) leans in that direction.

I don't know how much you already know, so here is just a summary of things that worked for me for anyone reading.

Podman uses the concept of "Pods" to link together associated containers and manage name spaces, networking, etc. The high level summary for running podman pods through systemd:

• Create an empty pod podman pod create --name=<mypod>.
• Start containers using podman run --pod=<mypod> ... and reconfigure until containers are working within the same pod as desired.
• Use podman generate systemd to create a set of systemd unit files. Be sure to read through the options in that man page. -- this is more reliable than creating systemd unit files by hand because it creates unit files optimized for the podman workflow.
• place the generated systemd unit files in the right place (user vs. system) and then it can be started, enabled, and disabled as with other systemd unit files.

Note: for standalone containers that are not linked or reliant on other containers, you can should skip creating the empty pod and can skip the --pod=<mypod> when starting containers. This should result in a single service file generated and that container will operate independently.

This post goes over pods as systemd services.

This doc goes over containers as systemd services.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux docs have a good amount of info, as well as their "sysadmin" series of posts.

Here are some harder to find things I've had to hunt down that might help with troubleshooting:

• Important: be sure to enable loginctl enable-linger <username> or else rootless pods/containers will stop when you log out of that session.
• If you want it to run a container or pod at system startup you will need to specify the right parameters in the [Install] section of the systemd file, see this doc page. Podman generate systemd should take care of this.
• If you are using SELinux there is a package called container-selinux that has some useful booleans that can help with specific policies (container-use-devices is a good one if your container needs access to a GPU or similar). Link to repo

Yeah I am a bit salty about all of the whole "Opt-out" telemetry thing. I know its just a proposal but just feels a bit slimy.

Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is supposed to result in a mutually beneficial arrangement where Fedora users are essentially testers / bug reporters of code that will eventually make its way into RHEL. Its just part of the collaborative, fast, and "open" nature of FOSS. Adding sneaky/opt-out telemetry just feels like a slap in the face.

super small ex. I am a big Podman user these days, and have submitted a few bug reports so the Podman github repos which has been fixed by RedHat staff. This makes it faster for them to test and release stable code to their paying customers. Just a small example but it adds up across all users to make RHEL a better product for them to sell. Just look into the Fedora discussion forum, there is so much bug reporting and fixing going on that will make its way to RHEL eventually.

Making and arguing for "Opt-out only" telemetry is just so tone deaf to the Linux community as a whole, but I think they got the memo after the shit storm that ensued over the past few days.

But HEY one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that I can pretty painlessly distro hop. I've done it before and can do it again. All my actual data is on my home server so no sweat off my back. openSUSE is looking pretty good, maybe I will give it a try.

Having the default box being "on" is only for the purpose of hoping people click through without realizing.

There is literally no other argument here. "Consent" is: "Hey do you want this, yes or no?". Not "We are assuming yes unless you explicitly tell us otherwise".

Yeah, management positions are often filled by people who:

A) Want to get a higher paying job and don't care about the product or the industry necessarily (MBA-circlejerk types).

B) Are Devs/Artists/Creatives that wanted increased compensation, and the only way up was as a manager where they have less aptitude.

Executive staff needs to better integrate management as "servant leaders" within teams, and compensate EVERYONE better

Reading through the post it looks like the project leads (Fedora council members) are arguing in favour of "opt-out" and the larger community is arguing in favour or either opt-in or a middle ground where the user has to select an option with no default.

Honestly it seems like the Fedora team is arguing that there are only two options: opt-out, or nothing at all. This isn't true and people are commenting with more reasonable alternatives.

I know its not in development yet, but if the Fedora council members are saying "opt-out or nothing", not a good look TBH given this initial community response.

Plex, PiHole, Photoprism, Home Assistant, Syncthing in a hub and spoke config, Caddy for reverse proxy, custom containers for: yt-dlp, restic, and rsync.

Disagree, no matter the level of detail, having "yes" automatically selected is an assumption. What purpose would it have other than hoping people will just select the defaults and ignore it?

Having it as a default guarantees it doesn’t scare non-power users away from it. It’s not about just having people clicking next and accepting it without consent.

Scare away from what? Data collection? I mean even in that wording you are saying there is something to be scared of. It should be up the user. If you are saying "non-power users won't fully understand what is being collected and might get scared away if it isn't the default option" then that is even worse TBH. Preying on people not fully understanding what's going on.

Restic and borg are the best I’ve tried for remote, encrypted backups.

I personally use Restic for my remote backups and rsync for my local.

Restic beats out borg for me because there are a lot more compatible storage options.

Nah @exu is right: non-IT focused companies do not have the skills or desire to reliably set up and maintain these systems. There is no benefit to them creating their own server stack based on a community distro to save a few bucks.

Smaller companies will hire MSPs to get them setup and maintain what they need. And medium to large size companies would want an enterprise solution (IE: RHEL) they can reliably integrate into their operations.

This is for a few high value reasons. Taking Red Hat as an example:

1. Standardization (IE: they can hire people with RedHat certificates and they will be a few steps ahead in ramping up to internal systems)
2. Vendor support (IE: if something critical isn't working they can get quick support from a Red Hat technician and get it resolved quickly)
3. Reliability (IE: all software is backed and tested by Red Hat and if anything breaks from a package update its on Red Hat to fix)

When lots of money is on the line companies want as many safety/contingency plans as they can get which is why RedHat makes sense.

The only companies that will roll their own solution are either very small with knowledgeable IT people (smaller startups), or MASSIVE companies that will create very custom solutions and then train their own IT operations divisions (talking like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon levels).

Not to say what Red Hat did is justified or good, because hampering the FOSS ecosystem is destructive overall, but just putting this into context.

I daily drive Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and distrobox has been great.

I have layered only two packages: USB Guard and Distrobox. I run syncthing in a rootless podman container, and the rest goes through Distrobox.

I was even able to setup ProtonVPN in distrobox and it functions as if it was directly installed on the host (just need to map your home folder and some permissions).

I hope that immutable becomes either the standard or at least all major distros start offering it as an alternative. Makes everything foolproof and makes me much more willing to try new packages and tools because I can always just roll back.

The only thing that would really make it perfect is if files in /etc/ where also handled in a similar manner. IE: Can make changes to configuration files, and easily roll back to defaults at any time.

Bad bot, that’s not a Lemmy link just happens to contain “/c/“

Used: yes

Contributed: no

I know I know, I am sorry. Just started using it a few months ago (through Organic Maps on iOS), and honestly have started using it more than Google/Apple Maps. This is a good reminder for me so get off my ass and start contributing.

I'm conflicted on this. I 100% think CLI applications should remain as packages but Flatpak IMO is superior for GUI. It just has a lot of "step in the right direction" sorts of things that address some of Linux's faults.

The big two positives for me are:

1. Makes it easier for developers to publish their own software and reach many distros at once. This has really helped with software availability and updates.
2. Sandboxing (although not perfect and Flatseal is kind of essential here, I hope this gets rolled into software centers or something).

I am on Fedora Silverblue and the concept of a base OS + Flatpaks just feels right for workstations. OCI containers (podman/docker/distrobox) as a bonus for development environments without borking your host.

But with this recent Fedora news (I know nothing has changed YET but I am just sussed out tbh), I am considering switching to OpenSUSE Aeon/Kalpa.

I wouldn’t install a program for this if your use case is simple. You will end up relying on it when there are already some built in tools that can get you 99% of the way there.

1. Bash scripts placed in ~/bin or ~/.local/bin

• Can have simple or complex scripts setup to do whatever you want
• Easily called from terminal or automated through cron or systemd

2. Environment variables set in -/.bashrc

• Great for storing common paths, strings, etc.
• Can be easily incorporated into bash scripts

3. Aliases set in ~/.bashrc

• Ideal (IMO) for common commands with preferred options
• for example you could setup your most used rsync command to an alias: alias rsync-cust=“rsync -avuP”

Edit: rephrased to not discount the tools shared. I am sure if you had a specific reason to use them they could be helpful. But I think for many users the above options are more than enough and are supported pretty universally.

Also it’s good to get into the habit of using man or - -help instead of or in combination with searching on the internet. Makes you less reliant on searches and also ensures that your are using commands that correspond to the version of the software you are using

IE: man rm | grep recursive

Yeah I saw a post about it a long time ago on Reddit for users with lots of devices

Basically it is just setting up one or two "central devices" that know all the client devices, but not linking the client devices individually.

IE: One server is connected to your phone, laptop, tablet, desktop, etc. But the phone is not directly connected to your laptop or desktop or tablet.

To be fair I don't actually know if this is the best approach anymore or if just connecting all of them in a mesh is better 🤷

Here is a forum post describing it.

As much as I like my Steam Deck, replacing the battery is not as easy or clean as it should be because of the glue.

Yes I know there's a reason they glued it, and yes its good that it is "user replaceable" to some extent, but I hope this pushes for easier replacement in the future.

I would imagine that the battery cell manufacturers also play a role here, although I have absolutely no way to back this up so take it with a grain of salt. Because 99% of consumer mobile devices have glued in batteries, it is likely that Li-ion manufacturers have adjusted their supply chain to accommodate and make it less expensive for device makers to buy batteries that need to be glued. So it would be reasonable to assume if more companies need to switch to easily replaceable (read: not glued), the suppliers would shift to accommodate and stay competitive.

I've been checking for the Flatpak daily 😭

This is where you can track the issue

Ahhh I see. Might be an issue with the Nvidia drivers and Wayland.

I would try the following in order and see if any of them fixes it:

1. Update your system "rpm-ostree update" and reboot

2. Make sure you are on a Wayland session. This also provides instructions to see what apps are in X11 mode (which I suspect Firefox and Software Center are in your case).

• 2.1 If you are already on Wayland (its the default in Fedora 37): Install Flatseal and force Wayland for Firefox (toggle off X11 and 'Fallback to X11')

• 2.2 If you are on X11, logout and switch to Wayland in the login screen and follow 2.1 to force Firefox to Wayland.

3. If that doesn't work I would follow these specific steps to install Nvidia on silverblue. RPM Fusion also has some specific guides for Silverblue that you should check to see if you missed a step.

4. I would also consider upgrading to Fedora 38, and bump up your RPM fusion major version to track Fedora 38.

I think looking at the two major enterprise players (Red Hat and Canonical) can give hints.

Fedora: run by Red Hat, upstream of RHEL. No way they are going to allow an unreviewed repository to be shipped with fedora by default. But they do have guides to add RPM fusion, and copr repos (the closest equivalent)

Ubuntu: run by Canonical. No way they are going to allow an unreviewed repository to be shipped with Ubuntu by default. But they do host and have guides for PPAs (closest AUR equivalent)

Debian: kind of the base layer for a lot of other distros. Debian itself is kept very minimal, and has a whole philosophy on what packages are allowed

I also recommend Fedora if OP wants a similar “just works” experience as Ubuntu.

Been using it for a while now on my desktops/laptops with no issues.

Can you run an rpm-ostree status and paste the results here?

Might also be good to post in ask fedora if you haven’t already.

The people who maintain silverblue are often there to help out.

The only thing keeping me on Plex is iOS downloads supported natively.

The second Swiftfin gets that I will be switching fully to Jellyfin

Unless Plex adds something new and exciting that pushes them beyond FOSS offerings

YES this.

Back when I was on Windows 10, I meticulously deleted all pre-installed crap (candy crush, Netflix, etc.), and turned off all tracking, ads, etc.

About a month later they pushed a major update and all those pre-installed apps were back, with more. All the settings I turned off were reverted.

I won't ever go back. The only games I really can't play are all online (League, etc.), and TBH good riddance. Wasn't adding value to my life anyway.

In a way, but chroot only isolates file systems (process only has access to an isolated "root" which isn't the actual host's root). Rootless Podman/Docker goes a few steps beyond and utilizes cgroups, and user namespaces to isolate not only file systems, but also processes and networking.

Here is a high level overview.

And another one from Dan Walsh.

I bought a .com for like $10 CAD from Cloudflare that uses a URL not linked to me.

Maybe overly paranoid, but it also makes it easy to get SSL certificates for my lab.

Silverblue + ZFS would be a match made in heaven, unfortunately Fedora makes it really hard to do ZFS reliably, too many kernel updates that break ZFS. This would be an even bigger nightmare on Silverblue given the distribution model.

If only ZFS was part of the Linux kernel 😑. maybe one day

Another shitty thing about Plexamp is there is no easy way to download your entire library in a converted format and auto download any new additions.

The developer said that "this is not the intended use of Plexamp", but the reasoning is flawed IMO

Yeah, potentially overkill, but all the power to anyone who wants to try them out. Freedom of choice is one of the best parts of Linux.

And sorry for the long response. It’s hard to gauge the proficiency that someone might have with Linux, so I tend to lean towards detailed explanations just in case

Yeah my dock is a glorified charging station. Might just sell it to be honest. I thought of using it for the TV for some party games, but even still the experience is just a bit too buggy TBH.

I think docked mode is more useful if someone wants to use their deck for occasional productivity/browsing on a monitor.

I think that there are definitely valuable/valid use cases for the software in the OP, but I think that the built in bash tools can get most people most of the way there. And learning the common bash/shell conventions is way more valuable than learning a custom tool that some distros/environments won’t support.

If someone already uses aliases, creates some custom scripts, and sets some useful environment variables (along with effective use of piping and redirection) and still needs something more specialized, then getting a new tool could help.

The downsides are a reliance on another piece of software to use the terminal. So I would only use something like this if I had a really solid and specific use case I couldn’t accomplish with what I already use.

Check out LibreOffice instead, it’s more modern and actively maintained.

I was on Pop for a while, if I was still using an Nvidia card I would still be on Pop. Their built in support/installer is just so convenient and seamless for the most part.

Nvidia is just such a pain on Linux. Like if it works then great, but I have had just so many minor problems in the past.

My Nvidia card is essentially just a backup now in my server in case I need video output for a terminal.