I do the this and it’s great. An entire distro takes up only a few GB. Many graphical installers don’t support installing on an existing btrfs partition (or subvolume) and want to create a new one. This can often be solved by manual intervention.

If your anything like me you’ll forget what PPAs you’ve added in a few months. Or rather, forget that you’ve even added things like PPAs. That’s why I stick to flatpak if its not in my distro’s repos.

These tools are also useful for finding large files in your home directory. E.g. I’ve found a large amount of Linux ISOs I didn’t need anymore.

Do you delete all your files on a reinstall? Documents, photos, videos, games?

Fclones is a great tool, but it’s for finding duplicate files and replacing them with sym-/hard-/reflinks.

I recommend using the --cache option to make subsequent runs extremely quick.

If you need a more interactive method, gdu is awesome. And if you’re using btrfs, btdu gives preliminary results instantly (which get more precise over time).

Good point. I’ll have to stop using immutable and stay with atomic (and declarative).

Interestingly /bin and /usr/bin are not in PATH by default, so /bin/chewy can only be executed by its path directly and won’t affect the systems reliability.

Fully agreed. On almost any atomic distro, /home/user is writeable like usual, so any attacker is able to persist itself by editing ~/.bashrc and putting a binary somewhere.

NixOS is immutable and atomic, but it isn’t image-based.

Immutable simply refers to how the running system configuration can’t be changed by simply putting a file somewhere (e.g. copy a binary to /bin, which is a bad idea).

For example, Fedora Atomic and derivatives are image based, although they are more flexible than the A/B types like SteamOS.

OpenSUSE MicroOS uses btrfs snapshots to apply updates atomically, and is more flexible than most image based immutable distros.

Edit: But I don’t think those terms have a single definition, so how would you differentiate these terms?

MPV also supports pipewire.

Yes, ~/.local/share/flatpak includes all user installed flatpaks, while /var/lib/flatpak includes all system wide installed flatpaks. Both include repository information and required runtimes (i.e. dependencies).

This does not include user data, which is stored in ~/.var/app.

Make sure to test your backup just in case on another system/VM.

Thanks to image-based distros like Fedora Atomic, I skipped the asking to update step. They download and apply updates in the background, and then the new image gets selected on next boot.

Given Fedora doesn’t do major changes in point releases, nothing breaks (until I do a manual upgrade to a new (half-)yearly major release).

Not having a terminal does not make sense (unless in a business context). For some people (my mum) it’s as if it doesn’t exist anyway, so why remove it.

Yes. 1TB SSDs can be bought new for 50€, 500GB for even less. For some people this is expensive depending in the region (e.g. I also know someone who uses an HDD). But given the price of other pc parts it isn’t something to cheap out on (a 1TB/2TB HDD is also 50€).

Global hotkeys have been addressed on KDE, but no applications actually support it — one of the reasons being that no other desktops support it. Typical chicken-egg problem.

If VPN’s actually won’t be able to protect its users from copyright claims anymore, there’ll still be anonymisation networks like I2P (at least so long as encryption isn’t banned).

Yes, it’s slow atm, but if it was included in more torrent clients and enabled by default, speeds would likely get better.

This does not apply to difficult projects like emulators.

E.g. suyu, a yuzu fork, does not seem to get much development. Most of the changes are build or documentation related. [1]

Those emulators will work fine for the currently supported games, but without new competent people (trying to stay anonymous), I don’t see how these emulators will improve.

[1] https://git.suyu.dev/suyu/suyu/commits/branch/dev

Blocking incoming traffic and accepting outgoing traffic is usually the default for distributions anyway.

There’s an issue with posts about which games work and which don’t.

https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/issues/311

Blender and DaVinci Resolve work better on Nvidia. AMD might work, but it will be a hassle and you’ll likely need the proprietary AMD drivers anyway.

With Nvidia supporting Wayland and the open-source NVK continuing to get better, you could even switch to open source drivers for gaming at some point, if you prefer.

Edit: I’ve had enough issues with AMD GPU’s clocking down while gaming, leading to micro stuttering. So don’t buy AMD just because everyone tells you they work flawlessly.

For CPU and mainboard, everything works well — just don’t buy a random unknown SSD from Amazon, then you’re asking for data loss and random issues.

He said somewhere that he did ask a top contributor if they care, and they didn’t. He also said that he rewrote a bunch of code to be able to change the license.

I can’t verify this, but it doesn’t seem like he infringend on someones copyright. Small changes (e.g. a few lines) don’t even (necessarily) qualify for copyright (just like the few sentences I wrote here likely don’t).