Drito @ Drito @sh.itjust.works

Posts

1

Comments

136

Joined

2 yr. ago

In all distro I tried, I always found Vi.

The PS3 is not crazy, but has an exotic hardware that optionnally runs Linux.

Nyxt includes a blocker, and has an appealing minimalistic interface, but I never tested.

Xfce is the Linux I appreciate. Its not made heavy for some opinionated features addition and setups are exposed to users.

There is also a place for DEs that are more opinionated and polished out of the box, its fine. But I'm glad composable things such as Xfce still exists.

I'm not recommending non-systemd inits, but in a desktop usage, I never wrote a single script with MX Linux and Alpine. Their init system just works.

For a desktop user I don't see any significant benefits to replace systemd. But also no-systemd distros works fine. I was impressed during my try on Alpine Linux, that uses openrc instead. The text printing during OS startup is so short that the terminal didn't scroll. The bluetooth worked flawlessly. But it is a small community distro, and Alpine is limited by other things than the init system. The init system is a problem for people that have to deal with services.

On political aspects, IMO FOSS works easier with small and focused components that can survive with spare time developers. I can't make critisicms on technical aspect, I'm not a good programmer, I just notice systemd seems to works fine. Red hat has man-power and capable of large contributions to Linux distros so they leads the innovations. All big distros switched to systemd, now its hard to avoid.

I would like to support smaller FOSS-friendly systems but I use Arch because I need recent versions and the anti-systemd arch-forks are harder to use. I'm a weak guy.

In short, as an user you should be fine by keeping normal Debian. If for political reasons you want a no systemd distro, the easiest is to use MX Linux with the default init.

Mint works and you can recommend it, but it is a mess with its two versions. The "normal" version is based on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is already an user friendly distro. Mint also has LMDE version, it makes more sense because directly based on a "rough" Debian, but it seems less popular.

I was an MX user. It looks nice out of the box (better than Mint at the time) and the "flagship" version runs smooth on old laptops, probably thanks to Xfce. Side note, MX has a rare feature, it provides a choice between two init systems.

Its not default behaviour, some people may not want images to be displayed like that. You can apply rules on any application.

If I understand what you mean this is a solved problem.

As instance in bspwm I just wrote this line in the config then all images opens as a floating window.

bspc rule -a Sxiv state=floating

I guess many other tiling WM are able to do that.

15 years ago I would have been surprised to hear that Thinkpads are cheap laptops !

About the status bar I want to suggest Tint2 because it is relatively easy to setup. You can create new widgets by writing an "executor" in bash. This is how I display the window name in my Tint2 panel.

execp_command = xdotool getwindowfocus getwindowname

There are more advanced executor examples here. https://github.com/IanLeCorbeau/tint2-executors/tree/master

The other suggestions are also nice, maybe more featured, but Tint2 was just less intimidating for me.

Everything audio needs Alsa including Pipewire.

Clear Linux looks very performant which is interesting for gaming. And it provides choice between DEs !

Gnome is the default on many important distro, but it is not flexible. A default DE has to fit to most people.

Xfce reminds me how bad are modern softwares.

Xfce keeps an old design and the result is more flexible and fast than modern DEs. Whats wrong with nowadays developers ?

"Linux" is owned by Linus Torvalds. Can he ask this foundation to change its name ?

I'm annoyed when there are many differents isos.

If the replacement is Coreboot thats OK, but if this is UEFI no thank you !

I'm not Adobe user, I know only pdf format. Do you mean the file formats exported by Adobe tools are not reproducible by open-source tools ?