Not really:

• RHEL is paid if you need more devices than the free license provides

• SEL and Ubuntu Pro don’t have any free licenses as far as I remember

• you can mostly use windows without paying anything

Ubuntu, RHEL and Fedora use it as the default and they are very big distros. Idk if it’s enough but that’s what I know.

I mean, that’s pretty irrelevant. If you were for example at least comparing the downloads of fedora Vs spins, that would be a beginning of something.

Idk. KDE was unstable for me and it always has bugs after major releases. They should test things better.

1. In case it wasn’t obvious: stability is not reliability

2. So does GNOME, especially when you have a lot of extensions

3. KDE is pretty crap in both regards

Personal opinion.

Is that why every distro comes with vanilla GNOME? Oh wait…

But hey at least it’s getting better over time.

Meanwhile over the years KDE got lighter than GNOME while constantly piling on features.

the most popular

Citation very much needed

one of the most stable DEs on Linux

Hardly, but I’m guessing you’re thinking of reliability instead. Not really surprising when it’s so stripped down that vanilla GNOME is pretty much unusable. When you extend it, in order to get a proper DE, that goes right out the window.

That fact makes it especially funny that vanilla GNOME is by far the fattest DE around. How it manages to use up more resources than KDE is beyond me.

Pre-blowback: fucking children is fine if they consent to it

Post-blowback: friends explained to me that it hurts the children and that they can’t consent

The more snaps you have, the slower your machine will boot. It’s uniquely shit technology that should die already.

Also, different solutions have different benefits and downsides, and are better in different scenarios.

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That’s because of users, not OS… right?

It’s a factor, but constantly upgrading to the newest version of software does come with risks. I’ve had Arch and derivatives fail to boot on multiple devices plenty of times after an update.

Some people say that they run arch for years without having any issues, but that’s either extreme luck or bs.

I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time.

You can usually just use a btrfs snapshot to rollback, boot, and try to update later. But there were situations when I had to use arch-chroot, and it can be problematic to install new packages in that situation.

All setups have tradeoffs, but I’d wholeheartedly suggest a stable distro like MX and nix + home-manager. It avoids all of the previously mentioned issues, and comes with other benefits. Do note that you might need to make or copy a hyprland.desktop file because home-manager can only alter files in your ~.

It’s probably a configuration error.

As far as I remember it was working fine like a year ago when I was trying to make my own config (just vterm and evil packages were required). At the time the Doom people were saying it was impossible due to how terminal emulation works. Now it’s mostly working in Doom unless you go over 1 line. If you do, you’re not in a good place since you can’t use ESC to jump between words.

You’re not using KDE connect perhaps?

Aaah, so that’s why it takes them so long to update packages.

I’ll bet you anything they’re not reading the code for every random package and dependency. But yeah, with free distros it’s at least possible to read everything that’s on your machine.

https://programming.dev/post/14020506

It’s not, Xfce can only have one systray

I don’t think you can do it with kwin (KDE wm), but if you’re using xorg, you can replace it with something like i3wm. Do note you’ll lose the desktop, and will need to unbind most KDE shortcuts. It’s definitely worth it though.

That’s pretty interesting, I’ll need to give it a try.

maybe it wouldn’t be as wonky as the AUR since it’s Nix at least

That’s for sure, since nix handles dependencies a lot better than pacman. But I meant that due to the sheer size of nixpkgs, and the way you can add a repo to your flakes, there’s no real need for it. But that’s just pure speculation.

I think a sensible progression is: nix + home-manager -> flakes -> develop -> nixOS

You build on previous knowledge without getting overwhelmed. I tried using guixos without ever using guix or nix, and it’s really not nice when you have to spend a week trying to figure out how to do something that takes you 5 mins in a regular distro. It even took me a few attempts to get started with nix simply because the docs are abysmal, almost all info is on nixos, and home-manager is rarely mentioned.

I would rather Linux just be able to detect what’s missing and install it for me. In the case of a lot of missing components, what it says is missing will be named completely different from the package you need to install which makes it really hard.

That does happen, but Linux doesn’t have anything to do with installing packages, your package manager does. If this package was installed through apt for example, it would also download all of the dependencies. But this package is using a makefile to build and install, therefore it has nothing to do with your package manager.

Tldr: use the package manager, and don’t use DIY packages if you don’t want to DIY

Additional package managers like flatpak and nix solve different issues:

• dependency mismatch: let’s say libreoffice and this package require a different version of glibc -> flatpak downloads both versions and symlinks them in a different location in order for each package to have the correct version while not impacting your system and the glibc your DE is using

• newer packages: Debian freezes packages for 2+ years, flatpak gives you a fresh version

• easier packaging for developers: you can package for flatpak instead of having to maintain packages for every popular package manager and distro

Nix + home-manager are a much better starting point than NixOS

• your system still respects FHS and can still use like npm
• you can still leverage decades of Linux knowledge
• it’s much easier to slowly build up knowledge than to have to immediately learn everything

I’m running MX + nix unstable, and it’s pretty great. Although it’s got some annoying parts like nixGL, it’s nothing compared to simply updating your systyem and it failing to boot.

Tbh home-manager is going to be overkill in most scenarios. A dotfile directory + git is going to be more than enough, and you can use stow to symlink everything.