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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Now that you can get latest software from Flathub, there’s really nothing wrong with Debian “stable” except for more recent hardware support that requires newer kernel at the very least (recent userspace drivers will also come from Flatpak if the software like Steam is also a Flatpak). That is, if the stable repo has all you need and there’s no reason to supplement it with external packages.

    There are however perfectly valid reasons for going with rolling to get recent improvements, which I for one care about. For example, now that PipeWire is pretty mature, Debian 13 will ship good version and it will serve well for the next 2-3 years, but some 2 years ago it was really important to get the latest and greatest to have good experience - and even early it was better than PulseAudio would ever be, just still improving rapidly, not ready for full freeze. Other example - KDE Plasma improved significantly from version 6.0 onwards introducing long awaited functionality like fractional scaling, HDR, but also improved stability and general polish. It will only be introduced in Debian 13, one full year after it was introduced.

    Lastly, there’s nothing wrong with rolling and it isn’t really “unstable”. Using Arch full time for the last 12 years, I only had like 2-3 situations when update actually broke something and it wasn’t my misconfiguration or a skill issue. Even then it could easily be avoided by using linux-lts kernel. In fact my Debian/Ubuntu installs were much less stable as there was always something missing that I needed (in era before Flatpaks or AppImages especially) relying on 3rd party apt repos, causing breakages and conflicts. I would usually upgrade Debian to testing or unstable anyway, so rolling, but one that’s actually open for breakage.



  • The more I read all this, the more I understand that I should diagnose for ADHD as those descriptions are just too damn fitting.

    I was always sort of smart and stupid at the same time, unable to focus on specific things while being hyper-focused on something not always relevant. Procrastinating like crazy, but when it’s really bad, able to do a lot last minute.

    Reading one sentence over and over again and still not knowing what it says is definitely something that did happen to me many times, I’m just focused on something else and cannot help it.



  • Well, if you actually want to invest some time in learning, Arch is great for that, while also being awesome distro. Some say that you should NEVER use it for your first time with Linux, but I disagree. You should never use it if you have short attention span and unable to read, but if that’s not the case, you’re good to go.

    My recommendation is to not try to learn everything at once. Burn archiso on USB stick, boot into it, use archinstall to get in set up easily, and then search ArchWiki for topics of your interest, for instance the installer won’t install printing support, but if you google “archwiki printing” the very first result you get is CUPS page with basically all that you need to get printing up and running.

    During the installation there might be some choices that aren’t entirely clear. For example which graphics drivers to use - it depends on your hardware, if you’re on Intel or AMD graphics, simply select “all open-source” and for nvidia there different choices. If you get to choose option for audio, Pipewire is the best choice. For profile choose desktop and select the one you want. If you don’t know, I highly recommend KDE Plasma, but you might also like GNOME if MacOS is your thing. For networking use NetworkManager for easy integration with your desktop.

    I also recommend installing Flatpak and use it as primary source for installing apps, rather than defaulting to system packages.

    It might take more effort with Arch to get something functional, but it is more rewarding as you can get exactly the setup you want and can learn a lot.







  • Generally the industry shifted in a direction where it heavily relies on containers for running cloud applications. This solves many problems with traditional server systems where you’d be sticking to certain distro, so certain dependencies are in fixed versions, which brings some limitations. Container is an environment to run process in an isolated way so that it had its own root filesystem, its own view on what resources are available, sort of like it was separate machine, but it’s still running on the same machine natively using the same kernel as the host. You can then have multiple of such containers, all serving its narrow purpose and they all come with the complete fs and whatever distro release they are tested with. Nowadays cloud computing is all about containers and they come from images that are built in OCI format using Dockerfile syntax. After building an image, it is typically pushed into registry where it can be pulled from over network to be utilized across different nodes, which makes it pretty easy to scale and propagate changes in cloud environments.

    Now what that means to Bazzite/Universal Blue is that it uses similar tech to deploy the system, though the target here is your local machine. Of course some of the characteristics aren’t relevant in this scenario, but it solves some of the same problem - build predictable and reproducible environment that can be thoroughly tested before publishing. The general idea is similar to how devops build cloud apps: there is CI pipeline that runs the build using giant Dockerfile (or Containerfile, same thing) inside of which they include everything that the system needs (running traditional package manager and act as it was normal Linux distro during the build), which then results as image that’s being pushed to registry. Bazzite users then install updates by pulling new version of the image and ‘rebasing’ to it. It is called rebasing here, because rpm-ostree lets users add additional layers with more packages on top of that.

    EDIT: here’s the Containerfile I’ve been talking about: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile Might give you some idea on how this works.