The old one was too confusing for new users. It wasn’t clearly step by step like all the other installers on linux.

Currently most cooperate linux companies are not in the business of selling linux desktop itself. Rather its linux for servers, administration, embedded things (like cars), and other enterprisey stuff. So at least at the moment they are not looking to profit of linux desktop users directly which has saved us from enshittiffication attempts.

But even if they in the future attempt to do something fishy, that most users dont agree with, I think by the virtue of how stuff works on linux it will be very easy for people to move to something else or a fork, and still get 95-99% of the same experience. This in turn will force companies to think twice before doing something like this.

A good example here is canonical/Ubuntu who has made questionable decisions in the past and each time they had to take it back. Even now, Snap due to its use of a centralized store is almost universally shunned by the linux community and is only supported maintained by canonical. While Flatpak is supported by the wider linux community with people from different projects contributing to it (though I sometimes worry about everyone centralizing on Flathub to the point where they are actively discourage other projects from launching/maintaining their own stores/repos).

This is why we need to build and champion tech that is resistant to control and enshittiffication. Then we dont have to worry too much about who is developing it.

Impressive work, thanks!

KWin has gained support for the initial version of the Wayland session restore protocol

I found it interesting that they were merging support for a not-yet-merged protocol so I looked it up.

It seems the plan is to use the new experimental protocol thing that was introduced a while back:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/392

check out this app, its still under dev tho: https://codeberg.org/lucaweiss/lpa-gtk

Also, related note, how easy is it to migrate from one distro to another? I am thinking about trying something else - maybe base Fedora or Arch - to hopefully have better performance.

You can backup your data and restore but will have to reinstall all your apps.

Also have you tried asking in the nobara discord? GE and other devs are in there so you likely to get help there.

They should at least make a docs tag or similar and tag all these documentation like posts with it.

Another thing is that my laptop might be using Legacy BIOS, so systemd isn’t compatible with it.

Oh sorry, then Fedora isnt a good idea. They have deprecated support for Legacy BIOS.

Anything with LXQT 2.1 available should give the same experience however right now it seems only rolling distros ship with 2.1. Lubuntu 25.04 will ship (in ~April) with LXQT 2.1 but it wont default to wayland so you might have to do some manual config. Its also not an lts release.

storage requirements

shouldn’t be a big problem. lxqt is super lightweight. If you go with lubuntu, I recommend turning off snap to save some space.

Linux Mint MATE or XFCE are really good if you dont necessarily want wayland support.

Another option is the Raspberry Pi OS. Debian based, should be very lightweight and runs wayland. I haven’t personally tried it though.

try Fedora LXQT too, it ll default to wayland in the next fedora release (~4th april i think), and its very lightweight

I mean Fedora is open source but if they really wanted a european base, they could have gone with opensuse. AFAIK opensuse is the only fully european linux distro plus they use many of the same tech that redhat/fedora does.

Ultimately I think it doesn’t matter too much since even the linux foundation is based in the US and large parts of what makes the linux desktop are maintained by non-EU companies (on top of all the major projects hosted by Github, Gitlab including most of Flathub). If its all open source, I think the risks are pretty low e.g. huawei was able to use Android despite all the restrictions.

You can also get the appimage on https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

After downloading, set the execute bit: chmod +x ./GIMP-3.0.0-x86_64.AppImage and then open the file to open gimp.

yep very underrated piece of software, its so fast and reliable compared to like packagekit

If you dont mind using the terminal, there is topgrade which can update many different kinds of packages with a single command (topgrade).

You can also build mintinstall (linux mints updater/store) on ubuntu.

One thing I’m doing differently in Arch this time is I’m trying out installing as many things as possible as flatpaks. I’ve successfully ignored them until now. Surprisingly, a lot of my apps are already packaged as flatpaks.

Yeah I have grown a liking to flatpaks too but I dont think I can live with only flatpaks yet.

The other thing I’m borrowing is distrobox+podman. I didn’t know about that before. This seems useful for dev environments.

Distrobox is really nice, I even run some gui applications in containers.

That being said, I’ve never had a problem with pacman breaking my system, so I don’t see major value in doing this… other than… it’s helping me procrastinate! I should be doing real work right now. 😄

This is the only thing keeping from arch tbh. I shudder to think of all the ways I can procrastinate on arch!

Thanks, didn’t knew it was based on Debian Sid though that makes a lot of sense for an immutable distro since I assume you can easily rollback in case of issues.

I had the same suspicion that it probably doesn’t work well for seasoned linux users but its nice to see its otherwise fine. I have used ublue in the past and my experience was similar.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer.

Did you use the linux-surface kernel? It has additional community maintained patches for surface devices and detailed installation instructions for the best linux experience. From their feature matrix they seem to have full support for sgo2.

Not sure if its available on pmOS though.

sorry its OT but what has been your experience so far with VanillaOS? I remember there was a lot of discussion about it a while back but haven’t heard much since then.

There is also Merkuro Mail which has a more modern design that some might prefer (to Kmail).

I wonder if immutable systems could negate the need for kernel anti cheat. If the game can ensure the current kernel and image is one from a list of acceptable ones, it doesn’t need to kernel anti cheat. They could do this by comparing the checksum or something.