Neat. I've been thinking of doing something similar. My parents currently use a Mac, but they mainly just use the web browser. I was thinking of switching them to VanillaOS at some point.
mother is using Opensuse Aeon and my father in law is using Fedora Silverblue
How long have they been using those distros? Do you or they have any preferences for Aeon or Silverblue?
what’s keeping YOU from switching to an atomic distro?
I tried switching to VanillaOS a month ago. I had a hell of a time getting my niche use-case to work, consisting of using Syncthing to sync my Obsidian notes to a server via Tailscale. Apparently, I had to create a custom VanillaOS image just to install Tailscale? Also, I couldn't get wl-copy to work. Also, docs were out of date and missing.
I like Arch because I have control over the system. At least with VanillaOS (not sure about other immutable distros), it seems like I'm supposed to give up control or fight with the system to let me do what I want.
I actually have accidentally bricked my Linux system in the past, but that was a long time ago and I learned from the experience. So it's not a problem I currently have.
I still haven't gotten to doing this, but actually, I was thinking the locked down nature of VanillaOS might be fine for my parents. They currently only use their Mac for browsing the web and not much else. Seems like VanillaOS might be a good fit for users that don't have very demanding computing needs.
I'm typing this message on my Dell XPS 13 9310. I'm really happy with it, specifically the 9310 model, not other models.
The volume, screen brightness, and keyboard brightness buttons all work great.
Bluetooth and wifi work great.
Touchpad and touchpad gestures work great. It's also a decent size.
The FHD display has no scaling issues with any apps or any distros.
The keyboard and overall build quality feel nice.
The one thing that doesn't work great is the webcam. It turns on and captures video... except it's really dark. Although, I haven't tried running Wangblows on this, so maybe it's Dell's fault for picking bad hardware. Anyway, I just use an Opal Tadpole webcam and that works great. Happy to answer any questions about this laptop! I use Arch, btw, with GNOME. Zoom, Google Meet, Discord video calls and screen sharing all work as well.
If you're serious about this requirement:
DPI/screen resolution doesn’t cause scaling issues
then I would avoid Framework. I recently sold mine after daily driving it for about 1 year. My biggest complaint was the high DPI display. It will 100% cause scaling issues. You will have blurry apps and/or tiny text, 100%. People will suggest that you add a ton of config or switch distros—neither of which will actually 100% solve the issue—or use different apps—which you can't always because alternatives may not exist. If you want to use arbitrary software like hexchat which is GTK2, DO NOT buy a Framework laptop. 🙅
I love the little cultural differences here. In the US, our old traditional saying of "grab 'em by the pussy" means you're fit to be president. But I guess other countries interpret this as sexual harassment. 🤷 😭
Everyone says they’d love having a small phone, then buy something else when it’s time to spend money.
I own a Palm Phone, a Unihertz Jelly, an iPhone 13 Mini, a Light Phone 2. Although, from that line up only the iPhone 13 Mini is viable. The rest of the phones come with other issues...
I also don't have heavy phone usage, so battery life isn't really a problem for me.
I don't know about foods, but do you know how to play a wind instrument? Playing trumpet for 30 seconds has been a 100% cure for me. Then you can get on with the eating.
In the digital age, you still have to talk with humans. What did my coworker tell me again? The wheels need to be torqued to 150 Nm or ftlb or lbft? Shoot. He's busy helping other customers now... uhh... I'll just wing it.
Really my main point of doing this was to try something different. I've been neutral on flatpak this whole time. I've never had problems with native installs, but I'm also a little judicious on what I try to install on my systems. The point of this exercise was to flip those habits.
About flatpaks, I've learned:
a ton of stuff I installed via AUR is available as a flatpak
some flatpak apps seem to be a little less buggy than the native installs for some reason... (Thunderbird specifically)
flatpaks use more disk space
Distrobox has also been cool because I usually don't like to install random crap on my machine, but with Distrobox I've been doing just that. I can install random C++ libraries, Node, Haskell, Postgres, etc and not worry about polluting my main system I actually care about. In the past, I would take some time to consider if I should really install this random thing. And yes, I'd pacman -Rs pkg if it didn't pan out.
I'm not sure if I'll keep running the system like this, but so far it's been interesting to run things a little differently.
Things I've liked:
Thunderbird flatpak is less buggy than Thunderbird native
Managing flatpak apps via Software Center or flatpak is easy/nice
Distrobox seems useful for working on different types of software projects
Things I don't personally care about (but other people might and that's fine):
using more disk space
the fact that my main system is still mutable
Things I didn't like:
nothing so far
I actually went in thinking I was gonna have to fight
with the flatpak permissions, but everything has worked
fine so far, so... not sure what I don't like.
maybe I'll hit a snag soon and then I'll change my mind
Honestly, just because I'm the most comfortable in Arch. I tried VanillaOS briefly, but it was way too annoying to install tailscale, so I went back to what I know.
I recently brought over some ideas from VanillaOS over to my Arch install.
Install as much as possible via flatpak
Install a bunch of other stuff in distrobox (with podman backend)
That gives me like 50% (idk fake number) of the features from VanillaOS, but I get to keep control over my system.
Not that I ever had any problems with native pacman installs though... so... not sure how much benefit I'm really getting from doing this. I guess my pacman -Syu command runs faster now. That's something...
Convenience beats owning things. 99.999% of non-techies I've talked to do not want to manage their computer or media. They don't want to learn how things work or how to fix them. The video says it, "... it took away the burden of ownership."
I can't even convince them to use my seedbox to torrent media—heck I've even offered that I'll do all the work, they just have to access Jellyfin! But, no. They prefer to pay to get access to the media now instead of messaging me, waiting for me to get the media, and then watching it.
At the same time, they'll complain that "everything is a subscription now!" I'm like bro...
paequ2 @ paequ2 @lemmy.today Posts 20Comments 321Joined 6 mo. ago
Even a better summation than this? 😸