While I agree that user-generated reddit topics are best left to a dedicated community, I also think that published articles discussing the platform are appropriate for any Technology community; no different than Twitter, Threads, or other social media platform news coverage.

I've never had a use for Linux Mint myself, but I'm still happy to see them cut out the middle man and base it directly off of Debian. Hopefully being closer to the source will result in even more upstream contributions.

Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE all offer excellent alternatives depending on your reasons for staying.

Nice! A big thanks to the dev team that keeps this project going. Can't wait to see what finds its way into K9 (and the rebrand!).

So many to choose from...Linux, Syncthing, Vim, Firefox and Thunderbird/K-9 Mail, Keepass and derivatives, GrapheneOS, Inkscape, VLC/mpv, yt-dlp...there are just too many daily drivers to name them all.

Finally! This is the first instance I've seen of any government participation. I hope Canada jumps on board soon, even if in a limited capacity. It makes so much more sense for a public agency to use a public platform, particularly when it can have domain over its own instance.

Yep, it seems Boost died today. I don't frequent reddit these days, but my wife is still a mod there and she was using Boost for moderation right up until last night.

On the odd occasion that I do go to my old subs, they're filled with repost bots and low value comments.

I don't think you'll be able to build anything with €100, but you might be able to buy an old PC or laptop locally and use it as is. I've never run nextcloud myself, but from I've read it'll be the most taxing service on your list. Everything seems pretty minimal, though I don't know anything about Photoprism.

You haven't really identified any of your reasons for leaving the previous distros behind. Did they fall short somewhere? If it was simply to try them all out, then by all means, add a notch on your belt for Arch too. You can always install yet another distro down the road if it doesn't pan out.

I'm a former Arch dev, and once upon a time I created its logo. I love the project, and it will always be dear to me. That said, I use Fedora Silverblue for most of my host systems now, and Arch containers for my everyday tasks.

As you likely already know, Fedora provides one of the best GNOME experiences available. I like the additional stability, flexibility, background updates, and easy rollbacks that Silverblue provides, but I can also appreciate that the flatpak and containerized workflow isn't for everyone.

I can't deny that the name's connotation in internet culture is what turned me away from Fedora for many, many years. It is an unfortunate coincidence.

Ubuntu is (mostly) based on Debian. This is simply a move by Ubuntu to further push their own packaging platform which is effectively proprietary at this time. Debian's own packaging will remain unchanged.

I'm happy to see it's finally happening, and I hope they left its implementation flexible.

What I'd really love to see (aside from triple buffer) is a real solution to the system tray situation. AppIndicator is problematic for some apps and under certain X11/Wayland desktops, and even when it works well it is cumbersome to use compared to traditional tray implementations. Hoping we see a new approach soon.

In the meantime, I've been enjoying a revisit to KDE Plasma under Kinoite and I have to say I'm really impressed with both DEs!

Nope, we love our local library for nearly all of our media needs!

As I understand it, the community would simply carry on without a mod, until such a time that the site admin appointed a new mod. The content would remain, and other users would still be able to post to it etc.

The best and most official explanation I've read is the 2017 GNOME blog post, Status Icons and GNOME.

Essentially, tray icons are a throwback to the days before designated notification and media playback APIs, and they now create some ambiguity for app developers, in addition to being ripe for abuse.

It's a worthwhile read and the writer makes several valid points, but doesn't address as much as I'd like in terms of actual solutions for things like instant messengers.

Personally, I would be happy if most traditional tray apps could be displayed in the dash, with status indicators, and started in a minimized state, but I still see the benefit of having some always-visible panel icons, such as instant messengers and VPN indicators.

I appreciate the writeup and that you've taken the time to post about it here, however I am 100% leery of managing remote access or credentials using closed source software. I'll definitely keep an eye on the project, but it's a hard pass for me until the app is fully open source.

Looking so forward to seeing K-9 Mail incorporate even more modern features (snooze!) and take on the new branding. It has already come a long way these past couple of years, and made my degoogling journey much easier. Would love to see an Android-based calendaring equivalent too. Shout out to cketti for all his hard work!

Still waiting for my refund for what I suspect was a switcharoo return of a PC. Ordered a renewed Optiplex 7040 with an i7-6700 for a family member, but received someone's old and dusty 3020 with an i3-4150 instead, and the refurb sticker for the right product had been slapped on it.

Figured it was a one-off scam, reordered another one right away, and thankfully the second was legit...but they've had the returned PC for 2 weeks now and still no refund. And course no way to follow up about it within the return status itself, so I'll be wasting even more time trying to chase it down. Something has to change.

As a fellow Atomic user, my completely biased opinion is that you've made a good choice of distro for switching from Windows.

Don't sweat the need or desire to layer a few packages. I see a lot of folks stress over this as if it's a hard rule they are breaking. It's a general recommendation and little more. I would be surprised if most users don't layer at least one package (or even a few).

On my main workstation, running Kinoite at the moment, some of the layered packages include:

• distrobox
• gdm (sddm refuses to respect autologin)
• kate
• ksystemlog
• syncthing
• vim-enhanced
• virt-manager
• virt-viewer

Ptyxis, formerly Prompt. I used urxvt for many years but eventually settled on GNOME Terminal after transitioning to the GNOME environment for most of my devices. Ptyxis is a slick and quick container-centric GTK 4 terminal that fits well with my Fedora Silverblue container-based workflow.

The beauty of Fedora Atomic is that anyone effected by the recent update (including me) could simply rollback to the previous image and boot as normal in order to troubleshoot. This is exactly why nearly all of my devices are running Silverblue or Kinoite now.

I think it's worth mentioning that significant bugs happen across all major OS platforms.

Recently, Microsoft pushed a patch requiring effected users to manually resize their EFI recovery partition. Shortly after that, it was announced that all Apple Silicon Macs suffered from an unpatchable vulnerability which can defeat encryption. These are just a couple of examples from recent memory...there are many others.

To truly avoid serious software vulnerabilities or bugs is to avoid software entirely. Operating systems are highly complex, multilayered software, and shit happens.

I treat all guests on the network as potentially hostile, so I enable firewalls on all of my hosts.

I believe that Fedora's firewall is enabled by default, but it leaves open ports 1025-65535/tcp and 1025-65535/udp.

To lock down some sane defaults:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --remove-port=1025-65535/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --remove-port=1025-65535/udp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Verify allowed ports with:

sudo firewall-cmd --list-ports

See also:

• https://firewalld.org/
• https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/firewalld/

PS: if you have a Steam Link, you'll want to open these ports for connectivity:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=27031/udp  # steam remote play
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=27036/udp  # steam remote play
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=27036/tcp  # steam remote play
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=27037/tcp  # steam remote play

If your hobby is technology and you enjoy spending time learning this stuff, then go for it. You'll probably have a good time, and you likely won't stop at Void.

If this is more of a grass is greener over there thing, then consider that constantly switching your software environment is just time taken from something else, and it's time you'll never get back. Ever. The pursuit of minimalism can often bring the opposite of its desire effect.

Right, here's an enlightening synopsis by Evan Boehs:

https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

I'm glad to see you've gotten a ton of feedback here, and I just wanted to add another comment in support of flatpaks and image-based computing. I've been using Linux extensively for about 15 years now, mostly Arch and Debian Sid. I've been a distro packager, and I've compiled plenty of my own apps over the years.

This past year I took Fedora Silverblue for a spin after following the project for quite some time, and I am convinced that the image-based system approach, coupled with containerized and sandboxed userspace applications, is the future of Linux for most users. It makes so much sense from nearly all perspectives; whether security, reliability, or flexibility.

Integral parts of the system are mounted read-only by default. Simple commands can rollback unwanted changes, upgrade to a new distro release, or even sideload an entirely different OS. System updates are automated, as are flatpak updates, and there is little-to-no risk to stability due to the very nature of the essentials-only system images. And if something catastrophic did happen, you're just a reboot away from rolling it back.

Consider for a moment the collective energy and time that distro package maintainers must undertake on a weekly basis. Much of it simply repeated by each distro, building the same applications over and over again. Flatpaks are built once and deployed everywhere. Think of the collective potential that could be directed elsewhere.

Couple this with containers and the choice of distro matters even less. Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are just a keystroke away. Yes, you can run containers on any distro of course, but you don't gain any of the other ostree benefits mentioned above.

I have since moved all of my workstations to Silverblue and I don't see myself ever going back to a traditional system again. If anything, I may start automating my own image deployments, similar to Universal Blue.

Yes, flatpak as a platform still needs some work, and so does ostree, but both are evolving quickly and will only get better with time.

To others who complain about needing Flatseal...in my opinion, this is a feature to be embraced, not loathed. Sane defaults are rarely sane for everyone, and Flatseal exists to give you complete control over what an app can or cannot see and do.

This is old news and long-since resolved by RPM Fusion and/or flatpaks.

It definitely sounds like a hardware issue since it has survived multiple disk wipes and distro changes.

1. Make and verify your backups now if you don't already have them
2. Are you using the command line package manager or GUI?
3. What is your current distro?
4. Are you near capacity on your storage?
5. Run a S.M.A.R.T. test and review the results

Assuming you meant ".docx files", those should open without issue in LibreOffice. As others have said, OnlyOffice is another popular option if format preservation is a goal.

What do you mean when you say the files are "not supported" by the tools you've tried? What, exactly, is happening and what are you trying to accomplish? The end goal wasn't clear to me from your post.

Getting Word to run under wine will require much more effort than copying the Word binary.

They're probably talking about Fedora dropping the h.264, h.265 and VC1 VA-API support back in 2022 for legal reasons due to patents:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API

It's largely a non-issue as you can easily install the patched Mesa from RPM Fusion, and I believe all Flatpaks incorporate the codecs already.

Don't get me wrong, Arch is great and it will always have a place in my heart, but I also think Fedora is a top-tier project and I completely understand why they weren't comfortable risking patent law unnecessarily.

I agree with others that the source article is using a click-bait title convention unnecessarily, but I disagree that the tool is bloatware.

I use tmux and vim for the vast majority of my daily tasks, and I still recognize the benefit of having GUI options for others.

I'll never understand why some in our community show so much disdain for software contributions made by voluneers simply because it doesn't directly benefit them.

It's been a long time in the making, but I've finally degoogled and largely removed all proprietary software from my personal life. I know this topic is pretty well covered here and elsewhere so just to add to the list of others, here's where I'm at these days:

• OS: Fedora (Silverblue) Linux (w/ AMD Radeon GPU)
• Email: Thunderbird w/ hosted email over IMAP
• Calendar/Contacts: Radicale instance w/ DAVx⁵ on Android
• Storage: Syncthing
• Web: Firefox
• Search: Startpage and DuckDuckGo mostly, but still use Google and Bing on occasion
• IM: Signal
• Desktop productivity: LibreOffice when I need it (Collabora Office on Android)
• Notes: Vim, VS Code (Markor on Android); most of my "docs" are just plain text files written in markdown
• Passwords: KeepassXC/DX
• Code editor: Vim, VS Code
• GrapheneOS on mobile, with almost entirely FOSS apps
• Kindle e-book reader with management via Calibre
• Media managed by Kodi with a raspberry pi
• Proxmox hypervisor for Windows/Linux VMs and containers

Gaming under Linux has improved unbelievably these past few years, now that Steam is contributing with their Steam Deck platform. I used to have to dual-boot Windows to keep up with the latest titles, but I wiped it about a year ago and things have been great.

I still rely on Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop for some tasks, but less so now than ever before. Unfortunately, my work will always be a Windows-dominated environment.

Distrobox will resolve your issue with VSCode and then some. Run archlinux, debian or whatever you want as a container. Then, install VSCode/VSCodium (and any other apps that Chimera lacks) inside the container OS. This will keep your development environment containerized and safely away from your host OS.

And I don't even care if they keep it as a "tray". I'd be content with integration into the dash if they can make it work smoothly. For example, just having the app start minimized as a regular icon (or segregated icon) in the dash...just something at this point.

That makes sense and is probably the best no-nonsense rationale I've seen yet.

Longtime Debian and Arch veteran here. I moved most of my workstations to Silverblue earlier this year (maybe 8 months ago now), and I've been very happy overall.

There is a bit of a learning curve if you aren't familiar with Flatpak or container-based workflows, assuming you wish to embrace those elements, but the curve is nowhere near as steep or unconventional as NixOS.

I love the automated updates. The flexibility to rebase or rollback the core OS on the fly, without any extra work, is great too. For example, it's very easy to test out beta releases, remixes, and preconfigured software bundles like uBlue.

I still use Arch for 99% of my command line tasks, inside a container managed by distrobox.

I strongly believe that Flatpak is the future of Linux software deployment, and although the format still has its kinks, it is already quite mature and will only get better as more and more upstream developers adopts its use.

Good points all around, though I do use my alt-functions more than the function itself.

You've already received a ton of feedback, so I just to mention that if you ever find yourself without working WiFi, you can connect your cell phone to the computer and enable USB Tethering on the phone (Android and iOS). The computer will automatically detect this as a network connection, and use it, without the need for additional software. This works for Windows and Linux (and possibly macOS, I don't know).

Off the top of my head...

• Gecko or GeckOS
• LizOS
• ReptilOS
• ChamelOS
• KomodOS

I think you've already received plenty of feedback here, for better or worse, so I'll just add that you're going find quirks in any operating system if you use it long enough; Windows is no exception.

Windows and macOS also introduce privacy and security complexities due to their proprietary nature. If that doesn't bother you more than the annoyances you've encountered under Linux, do whatever works for you.

The follower-only limitation is likely by design. They don't want you to see only those you're interested in because it limits advertising power. This platform is almost entirely geared for selling things to its users.