We Should Act Before The Irreversible Loss of Computing Ownership
I see a very strong trend in the industry: General-purpose computing is being locked down, and the trend is accelerating. It's not one particular manufacturer or architecture; it's systemic.
# The mobile ecosystem is getting worse.
Phones have always been bad, but it's getting worse. Most bootloaders are locked. OEMs make unlocking really painful or extremely punitive: voiding warranties or breaking features. Alternative OSes like postmarketOS have to struggle with proprietary driver blobs and zero hardware documentation. Android is also clamping down with integrity checks and API gating, even when independent software is technically side loadable.
# And it's now also spreading to laptops and desktops.
The same lock-down is following as ARM becomes mainstream in PCs. Apple migrated from UEFI, relatively open Intel Macs to iBoot, much more restrictive Apple Silicon. Linux runs via Asahi only because they reverse-engineered Apple's boot process; it's not a standard UEFI experience.
But this is not because ARM has to be closed. UEFI and Secure Boot work just fine on ARM. The ARM PCs running Windows use them today. Arm's SystemReady program makes ARM devices boot exactly like the x86 PCs. Lock-down is a deliberate product choice, not a technical requirement for the presence of this technology.
# 'Security' is a misleading term and a false justification
Manufacturers say they lock bootloaders for security, but x86 Windows PCs prove you can have secure defaults while letting owners disable Secure Boot or enroll their own keys. Security and openness are not in mutual exclusion; manufacturers simply choose restriction because it maintains control.
# OS lock-down is not justified by regulatory requirements.
Radios and DRM firmware can remain vendor-signed and isolated, but without locking the OS boot process. The baseband/radio actually runs on its own secure processor with signed, secure firmware satisfying FCC/RED requirements. It doesn't need to control what OS the user boots. Same thing for DRM: Measured boot with owner keys can provide attestation for banking/enterprise without requiring OEM-exclusive control.
In other words: lock what regulators actually require (the radio subsystem), not the owner's whole computer.
# What we really should demand?
Owner control of Secure Boot on all general-purpose computers (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops or any architecture):
Allow disabling Secure Boot, OR
Provide documented owner key enrollment (manage your own PK/KEK/db)
# Separation of concerns:
Radio/baseband firmware remains vendor-signed and isolated to meet FCC/RED
But this MUST NOT require OEM control of OS boot
Publish open interfaces, so third-party OSes can use radios, GPUs, cameras without proprietary, NDA-only drivers
# Standards-based attestation with owner keys:
Support measured boot (TPM/DICE) such that banking/enterprise/DRM can get integrity signals even on those third parties operating systems
Works with owner keys, not just OEM keys
# Right-to-repair / EOL:
When OEM updates end, devices MUST allow owner unlock or key enrollment
It enables secure third-party OSes to extend device life, reducing e-waste.
# Transparency:
We should have documented boot architectures and unlock procedures in accessible manuals, so open source implementation can develop properly.
# Why now?
If closed boot with OEM-only attestation becomes the default across phones and ARM PCs, it will be virtually impossible to reverse. We have a small window of opportunity to act now while ARM is still growing, before lock-down is irreversible.
Anchoring in the right place: EU's right-to-repair agenda, and associated cybersecurity frameworks CRA, RED. An argument for mandated secure defaults plus documented owner-control paths to achieve radio compliance via isolation of signed firmware - without justification of OS locking due to radio requirements.
# What you can actually do?
Contact your MEP: frame this in the context of
I see a very strong trend in the industry: General-purpose computing is being locked down, and the trend is accelerating. It's not one particular manufacturer or architecture; it's systemic.
# The mobile ecosystem is getting worse.
Phones have always been bad, but it's getting worse. Most bootloaders are locked. OEMs make unlocking really painful or extremely punitive: voiding warranties or breaking features. Alternative OSes like postmarketOS have to struggle with proprietary driver blobs and zero hardware documentation. Android is also clamping down with integrity checks and API gating, even when independent software is technically side loadable.
# And it's now also spreading to laptops and desktops.
The same lock-down is following as ARM becomes mainstream in PCs. Apple migrated from UEFI, relatively open Intel Macs to iBoot, much more restrictive Apple Silicon. Linux runs via Asahi only because they reverse-engineered Apple's boot process; it's not a standard UEFI experience.
But this is not because ARM has to be closed. UEFI and Secure Boot work just fine on ARM. The ARM PCs running Windows use them today. Arm's SystemReady program makes ARM devices boot exactly like the x86 PCs. Lock-down is a deliberate product choice, not a technical requirement for the presence of this technology.
# 'Security' is a misleading term and a false justification
Manufacturers say they lock bootloaders for security, but x86 Windows PCs prove you can have secure defaults while letting owners disable Secure Boot or enroll their own keys. Security and openness are not in mutual exclusion; manufacturers simply choose restriction because it maintains control.
# OS lock-down is not justified by regulatory requirements.
Radios and DRM firmware can remain vendor-signed and isolated, but without locking the OS boot process. The baseband/radio actually runs on its own secure processor with signed, secure firmware satisfying FCC/RED requirements. It doesn't need to control what OS the user boots. Same thing for DRM: Measured boot with owner keys can provide attestation for banking/enterprise without requiring OEM-exclusive control.
In other words: lock what regulators actually require (the radio subsystem), not the owner's whole computer.
# What we really should demand?
Owner control of Secure Boot on all general-purpose computers (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops or any architecture):
Allow disabling Secure Boot, OR
Provide documented owner key enrollment (manage your own PK/KEK/db)
# Separation of concerns:
Radio/baseband firmware remains vendor-signed and isolated to meet FCC/RED
But this MUST NOT require OEM control of OS boot
Publish open interfaces, so third-party OSes can use radios, GPUs, cameras without proprietary, NDA-only drivers
# Standards-based attestation with owner keys:
Support measured boot (TPM/DICE) such that banking/enterprise/DRM can get integrity signals even on those third parties operating systems
Works with owner keys, not just OEM keys
# Right-to-repair / EOL:
When OEM updates end, devices MUST allow owner unlock or key enrollment
It enables secure third-party OSes to extend device life, reducing e-waste.
# Transparency:
We should have documented boot architectures and unlock procedures in accessible manuals, so open source implementation can develop properly.
# Why now?
If closed boot with OEM-only attestation becomes the default across phones and ARM PCs, it will be virtually impossible to reverse. We have a small window of opportunity to act now while ARM is still growing, before lock-down is irreversible.
Anchoring in the right place: EU's right-to-repair agenda, and associated cybersecurity frameworks CRA, RED. An argument for mandated secure defaults plus documented owner-control paths to achieve radio compliance via isolation of signed firmware - without justification of OS locking due to radio requirements.
# What you can actually do?
Contact your MEP: frame this in the context of
We Should Act Before The Irreversible Loss of Computing Ownership
I see a very strong trend in the industry: General-purpose computing is being locked down, and the trend is accelerating. It's not one particular manufacturer or architecture; it's systemic.
# The mobile ecosystem is getting worse.
Phones have always been bad, but it's getting worse. Most bootloaders are locked. OEMs make unlocking really painful or extremely punitive: voiding warranties or breaking features. Alternative OSes like postmarketOS have to struggle with proprietary driver blobs and zero hardware documentation. Android is also clamping down with integrity checks and API gating, even when independent software is technically side loadable.
# And it's now also spreading to laptops and desktops.
The same lock-down is following as ARM becomes mainstream in PCs. Apple migrated from UEFI, relatively open Intel Macs to iBoot, much more restrictive Apple Silicon. Linux runs via Asahi only because they reverse-engineered Apple's boot process; it's not a standard UEFI experience.
But this is not because ARM has to be closed. UEFI and Secure Boot work just fine on ARM. The ARM PCs running Windows use them today. Arm's SystemReady program makes ARM devices boot exactly like the x86 PCs. Lock-down is a deliberate product choice, not a technical requirement for the presence of this technology.
# 'Security' is a misleading term and a false justification
Manufacturers say they lock bootloaders for security, but x86 Windows PCs prove you can have secure defaults while letting owners disable Secure Boot or enroll their own keys. Security and openness are not in mutual exclusion; manufacturers simply choose restriction because it maintains control.
# OS lock-down is not justified by regulatory requirements.
Radios and DRM firmware can remain vendor-signed and isolated, but without locking the OS boot process. The baseband/radio actually runs on its own secure processor with signed, secure firmware satisfying FCC/RED requirements. It doesn't need to control what OS the user boots. Same thing for DRM: Measured boot with owner keys can provide attestation for banking/enterprise without requiring OEM-exclusive control.
In other words: lock what regulators actually require (the radio subsystem), not the owner's whole computer.
# What we really should demand?
* Owner control of Secure Boot on all general-purpose computers (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops or any architecture):
* Allow disabling Secure Boot, OR
* Provide documented owner key enrollment (manage your own PK/KEK/db)
# Separation of concerns:
* Radio/baseband firmware remains vendor-signed and isolated to meet FCC/RED
* But this MUST NOT require OEM control of OS boot
* Publish open interfaces, so third-party OSes can use radios, GPUs, cameras without proprietary, NDA-only drivers
# Standards-based attestation with owner keys:
* Support measured boot (TPM/DICE) such that banking/enterprise/DRM can get integrity signals even on those third parties operating systems
* Works with owner keys, not just OEM keys
# Right-to-repair / EOL:
* When OEM updates end, devices MUST allow owner unlock or key enrollment
* It enables secure third-party OSes to extend device life, reducing e-waste.
# Transparency:
* We should have documented boot architectures and unlock procedures in accessible manuals, so open source implementation can develop properly.
# Why now?
If closed boot with OEM-only attestation becomes the default across phones and ARM PCs, it will be virtually impossible to reverse. We have a small window of opportunity to act now while ARM is still growing, before lock-down is irreversible.
Anchoring in the right place: EU's right-to-repair agenda, and associated cybersecurity frameworks CRA, RED. An argument for mandated secure defaults plus documented owner-control paths to achieve radio compliance via isolation of signed firmware - without justification of OS locking due to radio requirements.
# What you can actually do?
* Contact your MEP: frame this in the context of
I see a very strong trend in the industry: General-purpose computing is being locked down, and the trend is accelerating. It's not one particular manufacturer or architecture; it's systemic.
# The mobile ecosystem is getting worse.
Phones have always been bad, but it's getting worse. Most bootloaders are locked. OEMs make unlocking really painful or extremely punitive: voiding warranties or breaking features. Alternative OSes like postmarketOS have to struggle with proprietary driver blobs and zero hardware documentation. Android is also clamping down with integrity checks and API gating, even when independent software is technically side loadable.
# And it's now also spreading to laptops and desktops.
The same lock-down is following as ARM becomes mainstream in PCs. Apple migrated from UEFI, relatively open Intel Macs to iBoot, much more restrictive Apple Silicon. Linux runs via Asahi only because they reverse-engineered Apple's boot process; it's not a standard UEFI experience.
But this is not because ARM has to be closed. UEFI and Secure Boot work just fine on ARM. The ARM PCs running Windows use them today. Arm's SystemReady program makes ARM devices boot exactly like the x86 PCs. Lock-down is a deliberate product choice, not a technical requirement for the presence of this technology.
# 'Security' is a misleading term and a false justification
Manufacturers say they lock bootloaders for security, but x86 Windows PCs prove you can have secure defaults while letting owners disable Secure Boot or enroll their own keys. Security and openness are not in mutual exclusion; manufacturers simply choose restriction because it maintains control.
# OS lock-down is not justified by regulatory requirements.
Radios and DRM firmware can remain vendor-signed and isolated, but without locking the OS boot process. The baseband/radio actually runs on its own secure processor with signed, secure firmware satisfying FCC/RED requirements. It doesn't need to control what OS the user boots. Same thing for DRM: Measured boot with owner keys can provide attestation for banking/enterprise without requiring OEM-exclusive control.
In other words: lock what regulators actually require (the radio subsystem), not the owner's whole computer.
# What we really should demand?
* Owner control of Secure Boot on all general-purpose computers (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops or any architecture):
* Allow disabling Secure Boot, OR
* Provide documented owner key enrollment (manage your own PK/KEK/db)
# Separation of concerns:
* Radio/baseband firmware remains vendor-signed and isolated to meet FCC/RED
* But this MUST NOT require OEM control of OS boot
* Publish open interfaces, so third-party OSes can use radios, GPUs, cameras without proprietary, NDA-only drivers
# Standards-based attestation with owner keys:
* Support measured boot (TPM/DICE) such that banking/enterprise/DRM can get integrity signals even on those third parties operating systems
* Works with owner keys, not just OEM keys
# Right-to-repair / EOL:
* When OEM updates end, devices MUST allow owner unlock or key enrollment
* It enables secure third-party OSes to extend device life, reducing e-waste.
# Transparency:
* We should have documented boot architectures and unlock procedures in accessible manuals, so open source implementation can develop properly.
# Why now?
If closed boot with OEM-only attestation becomes the default across phones and ARM PCs, it will be virtually impossible to reverse. We have a small window of opportunity to act now while ARM is still growing, before lock-down is irreversible.
Anchoring in the right place: EU's right-to-repair agenda, and associated cybersecurity frameworks CRA, RED. An argument for mandated secure defaults plus documented owner-control paths to achieve radio compliance via isolation of signed firmware - without justification of OS locking due to radio requirements.
# What you can actually do?
* Contact your MEP: frame this in the context of
right-to-repair, sustainability, and fair competition
* Reference existing proof: Windows ARM PCs already use UEFI, x86 PCs allow management of Secure Boot. This is owner rights, not weakening of security. Secure boot can stay enabled with your own keys.
Agree? Shall we organize around this and actually act and push MEPs on it?
Btw, sorry if I made mistake, English isn’t my native language.
And I'm not a professional on those things too, I just gathered as much info as I could to understand the situation. So please correct me if I'm wrong.
https://redd.it/1opdl8f
@r_linux
* Reference existing proof: Windows ARM PCs already use UEFI, x86 PCs allow management of Secure Boot. This is owner rights, not weakening of security. Secure boot can stay enabled with your own keys.
Agree? Shall we organize around this and actually act and push MEPs on it?
Btw, sorry if I made mistake, English isn’t my native language.
And I'm not a professional on those things too, I just gathered as much info as I could to understand the situation. So please correct me if I'm wrong.
https://redd.it/1opdl8f
@r_linux
Reddit
From the linux community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the linux community
sharing luks-tray -- a system tray app to manage LUKS containers
I'm sharing LUKS Tray—a Qt-based utility designed to bring easy, ready access to your encrypted LUKS containers. When I converted to LUKS, I missed VeraCrypt's handy tray utility; so I made a trimmed-down, but high-feature comparable tool to fill that gap.
Running
https://preview.redd.it/ramkvkqdphzf1.png?width=505&format=png&auto=webp&s=745173849f5c4782f3662af4c8d145287a860cf0
One click starts the mount or unmount process for both devices and file containers. LUKS Tray handles the messy
Check out the docs and grab the package on PyPI: luks-tray · PyPI
https://redd.it/1opcqos
@r_linux
I'm sharing LUKS Tray—a Qt-based utility designed to bring easy, ready access to your encrypted LUKS containers. When I converted to LUKS, I missed VeraCrypt's handy tray utility; so I made a trimmed-down, but high-feature comparable tool to fill that gap.
Running
luks-tray places a shield icon in your system tray, where its color indicates the overall state of your containers (Locked, Active, or Alert).Right-clicking its tray icon brings up a menu like this:https://preview.redd.it/ramkvkqdphzf1.png?width=505&format=png&auto=webp&s=745173849f5c4782f3662af4c8d145287a860cf0
One click starts the mount or unmount process for both devices and file containers. LUKS Tray handles the messy
cryptsetup/mount logic behind the scenes, remembers your preferred mount points (a huge time saver!), and offers optional master password encryption for saved credentials. It runs on many DEs/WMs, but how well depends on its system tray support.Check out the docs and grab the package on PyPI: luks-tray · PyPI
https://redd.it/1opcqos
@r_linux
We are getting many new users. But are we losing any?
Like has anyone uninstalled Linux?
I think we should be discussing about cases and experiences like this. For one it may help the new user come back. Or it might raise awareness for an issue that needs to be solved.
https://redd.it/1opuwkb
@r_linux
Like has anyone uninstalled Linux?
I think we should be discussing about cases and experiences like this. For one it may help the new user come back. Or it might raise awareness for an issue that needs to be solved.
https://redd.it/1opuwkb
@r_linux
Reddit
From the linux community on Reddit
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KDE connect is the GOAT
After years of muscle memory on my phone lockscreen pattern, for whatever reason, today my brain decided to have permanent amnesia. Im now 8 hours away from next attempt and it looked like im gonna have to reset my phone along with all the data on it.
I tried normally connecting usb, adb, nothing worked.
That is when i realised i could try to access my phone's storage right through dolphin because i have kde connect installed. it worked. i would have like kde connect to unlock my phone as well but, worst case scenario avoided atleast. i can back up all the important stuff. its a bit slow over wifi, but atleast it works.
https://redd.it/1opvpws
@r_linux
After years of muscle memory on my phone lockscreen pattern, for whatever reason, today my brain decided to have permanent amnesia. Im now 8 hours away from next attempt and it looked like im gonna have to reset my phone along with all the data on it.
I tried normally connecting usb, adb, nothing worked.
That is when i realised i could try to access my phone's storage right through dolphin because i have kde connect installed. it worked. i would have like kde connect to unlock my phone as well but, worst case scenario avoided atleast. i can back up all the important stuff. its a bit slow over wifi, but atleast it works.
https://redd.it/1opvpws
@r_linux
Reddit
From the linux community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the linux community
LONG My First Year on Linux – A Retrospective
Today my daily driver turned 1 year old! I thought I'll take this opportunity to celebrate, reflect on how it's been going and share my experiences so far.
https://imgur.com/hqDOOW4
The why
I knew the end of win10 support was looming, and I was less than excited about the prospect of moving to win11. The removal of features previous versions of Windows had, and the addition features I did not want, the lower performance in games compared to win10, the horror stories of breaking updates, had me holding off the move for as long as I could. The gradual but consistent removal of user agency already had me frustrated on win10, and it only seemed to get worse with 11.
"Do you want to update and restart? Your options are Yes, and Yes, but later. Do you want me to ask again? Just kidding, I will anyways. Unless of course I notice your PC idling for an extended period of time, in which case I'll just do it without asking." Great.
"Oh you want to install the OS without logging into our servers? Nooo, no, I can't let you do that. Oh you're doing the little rain dance ritual in the terminal? Allright. Just this once. Oh now you want to have a vertical task bar? Lol. Lmao even. Not on my watch. Now get back to work on those documents I helpfully uploaded to my cloud servers for you." Ugh.
Then MS Recall hit the news. That one was a bit too much even for me, but at least I didn't need to care until I upgraded, right? Well, one article mentioned a command to check the service state. I punched it into the console for fun and.... "Feature Name: Recall. State: Enabled." Wait. What? On Windows 10? I didn't see anything? I went snooping around the system files, and there was only a skeleton folder with nothing functional in it, but in my mind that clearly meant they were preparing for something. Now a year later, it still hasn't manifested, so maybe it was just an accidental inclusion, who knows. Either way, that was the last straw for me.
The what
So. Now what. Apple was a contender, but the lack of user agency and vendor lock-in stays the same, barely any gaming is possible as far as I know, in addition to the rather high upfront cost for the hardware, and my desktop was barely a year old at that point, so that was out of the question. I don't hate on Apple, don't get me wrong, it's good hardware and their OS does many things right, it's just not ideal for the cheapskate tinkerer and gamer in me.
I was aware Linux existed though, from having rescued my win98 data from a broken drive using KNOPPIX over a decade ago. I also played around with Ubuntu on my Raspberry PI and ran a webserver for a while, so I knew how to "apt update && apt upgrade" and even "reboot", but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.
So I figured, If I'm going to do this, I'll have to start from the ground up with something easy, and I'll do it in a virtual machine, just to make sure I can handle it and see how I like it. Not knowing much about distros at that point, I just made sure to choose one from the debian family to keep the familiar package manager, and went with the one I saw recommended a lot- Linux Mint. So I spun up a VMWare VM, and for about two months, I booted into Windows, then immediately opened the VM and fullscreened it, and then just went about my daily business from there.
And that phase was surprisingly frictionless. The updates went through the familiar apt without a hitch. Installing Discord and Cinny went fine. Thunderbird synced mails from all my providers with ease. Brainrotting on Youtube worked just fine too. I did install Steam and tried gaming, but lacking proper GPU passthrough, that wasn't exactly a smooth experience. The games I tested did start though, so that was a good sign for the bare metal install.
So instead I spent some time just getting comfortable with the system, installing software, replacing parts of the system, breaking things and trying to fix them. I got rid of Cinnamon and installed Plasma for its customizability and just binged on all the
Today my daily driver turned 1 year old! I thought I'll take this opportunity to celebrate, reflect on how it's been going and share my experiences so far.
https://imgur.com/hqDOOW4
The why
I knew the end of win10 support was looming, and I was less than excited about the prospect of moving to win11. The removal of features previous versions of Windows had, and the addition features I did not want, the lower performance in games compared to win10, the horror stories of breaking updates, had me holding off the move for as long as I could. The gradual but consistent removal of user agency already had me frustrated on win10, and it only seemed to get worse with 11.
"Do you want to update and restart? Your options are Yes, and Yes, but later. Do you want me to ask again? Just kidding, I will anyways. Unless of course I notice your PC idling for an extended period of time, in which case I'll just do it without asking." Great.
"Oh you want to install the OS without logging into our servers? Nooo, no, I can't let you do that. Oh you're doing the little rain dance ritual in the terminal? Allright. Just this once. Oh now you want to have a vertical task bar? Lol. Lmao even. Not on my watch. Now get back to work on those documents I helpfully uploaded to my cloud servers for you." Ugh.
Then MS Recall hit the news. That one was a bit too much even for me, but at least I didn't need to care until I upgraded, right? Well, one article mentioned a command to check the service state. I punched it into the console for fun and.... "Feature Name: Recall. State: Enabled." Wait. What? On Windows 10? I didn't see anything? I went snooping around the system files, and there was only a skeleton folder with nothing functional in it, but in my mind that clearly meant they were preparing for something. Now a year later, it still hasn't manifested, so maybe it was just an accidental inclusion, who knows. Either way, that was the last straw for me.
The what
So. Now what. Apple was a contender, but the lack of user agency and vendor lock-in stays the same, barely any gaming is possible as far as I know, in addition to the rather high upfront cost for the hardware, and my desktop was barely a year old at that point, so that was out of the question. I don't hate on Apple, don't get me wrong, it's good hardware and their OS does many things right, it's just not ideal for the cheapskate tinkerer and gamer in me.
I was aware Linux existed though, from having rescued my win98 data from a broken drive using KNOPPIX over a decade ago. I also played around with Ubuntu on my Raspberry PI and ran a webserver for a while, so I knew how to "apt update && apt upgrade" and even "reboot", but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.
So I figured, If I'm going to do this, I'll have to start from the ground up with something easy, and I'll do it in a virtual machine, just to make sure I can handle it and see how I like it. Not knowing much about distros at that point, I just made sure to choose one from the debian family to keep the familiar package manager, and went with the one I saw recommended a lot- Linux Mint. So I spun up a VMWare VM, and for about two months, I booted into Windows, then immediately opened the VM and fullscreened it, and then just went about my daily business from there.
And that phase was surprisingly frictionless. The updates went through the familiar apt without a hitch. Installing Discord and Cinny went fine. Thunderbird synced mails from all my providers with ease. Brainrotting on Youtube worked just fine too. I did install Steam and tried gaming, but lacking proper GPU passthrough, that wasn't exactly a smooth experience. The games I tested did start though, so that was a good sign for the bare metal install.
So instead I spent some time just getting comfortable with the system, installing software, replacing parts of the system, breaking things and trying to fix them. I got rid of Cinnamon and installed Plasma for its customizability and just binged on all the
themes and funny cursors I could find. And that was unfortunately the point where I learned the price you pay for stability. At that time, I was reading news about the release of Plasma 6, with all the fancy features I needed, but all I could get from the repos was 5.27. Welp.
I love Mint. It has a special place in my heart now. I cannot stress enough how much I love the devs. Their default answer to any question I looked up seemed to be "Our professional opinion is that you shouldn't, but if you still want to, here's how." The level of respect you feel as a user is just something you don't get on Windows, or even many other distros. I still maintain one doesn't choose Mint over Ubuntu for any technical differences, but because of the amazing developers.
Anyways, at that point I have lurked enough on the subreddits and watched enough Linux Youtube to know about rolling release distros, and to have seen the Arch memes. I guess it wouldn't hurt to check it out. "Rolling releases..." Yep. "...targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation..." Okay, that's fine. "...a pragmatic distribution rather than an ideological one ... Evidence-based technical analysis and debate are what matter, not politics or popular opinion. " You know what, I love that. Add new VM.
It took hours of reading the installation guide, but actually, the installation difficulty was not as high as expected. Download the iso, format the drive, set locale, create a user, install the packages. Same steps as Mint, just without a GUI. Add Plasma on top, and it largely feels the same as my beloved Mint. But now everything is more up to date. Yeah I can do this. Time for the bare metal install.
The move
Exactly one year ago, I unplugged my Windows drive just to be sure. Picked an older SSD out of storage and plugged that in instead. Still wanted to keep my Windows drive, just in case. I copy pasted all commands I used in the VM into a text file and sent that to my phone, so the second time around very little reading was needed. The installation time dropped from hours to minutes. Pretty sure that was less work than clicking through a GUI installer. Kinda starting to enjoy this terminal thing.
With the install finished, I plug my Windows drive back in, set up my boot order to prefer Linux, and boot into my fresh system. Everything seems fine except... My mainboard and RAM are lit up like a christmas tree. The RGB versions were on sale and cheaper than the blacked out components, but the software I used on Windows to disable them doesn't exist on Linux. Ah. Didn't consider that.
Quick search later I learn about OpenRGB. Long search later and some help from the OpenRGB Discord, I learn that my RAM brand needs a specific kernel module blacklisted to work with OpenRGB, whatever that means. It does work though, and using the HardwareSync plugin, I can even mirror my Windows setup and have my RAM light up when my CPU reaches critical temperatures. Brilliant!
Next on the order of business, the horizontal scroll wheel on my Logitech mouse doesn't control the volume anymore. I tested this in the VM, I guess it was just properly passed through. On Linux, Logitech software doesn't exist, but Solaar does. Highjack the wheel, bind "XF86AudioRaiseVolume" and "XF86AudioLowerVolume" to "up" and "down" respectively et voila! Neat.
Next. My external drives aren't recognized. Quick rummage through the Arch wiki, and an install of ntfs-3g later, that issue is gone too. Everything else? Just... Works? Wifi works, GPU works, gamepad works, Euro Truck Sim Works, Flight Sim works, Stardew Valley and OpenTTD too. Don't really need much more. I could get used to this.
The Bash excursion
I used the terminal quite a bit to solve the arising issues by now, so at this point I wasn't afraid of it anymore and excited to explore it. Reading guides, looking at cheat sheets, watching "Top 100 console commands on Linux you NEED to know! You won't believe #69!" is great fun and I start to pick up
I love Mint. It has a special place in my heart now. I cannot stress enough how much I love the devs. Their default answer to any question I looked up seemed to be "Our professional opinion is that you shouldn't, but if you still want to, here's how." The level of respect you feel as a user is just something you don't get on Windows, or even many other distros. I still maintain one doesn't choose Mint over Ubuntu for any technical differences, but because of the amazing developers.
Anyways, at that point I have lurked enough on the subreddits and watched enough Linux Youtube to know about rolling release distros, and to have seen the Arch memes. I guess it wouldn't hurt to check it out. "Rolling releases..." Yep. "...targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation..." Okay, that's fine. "...a pragmatic distribution rather than an ideological one ... Evidence-based technical analysis and debate are what matter, not politics or popular opinion. " You know what, I love that. Add new VM.
It took hours of reading the installation guide, but actually, the installation difficulty was not as high as expected. Download the iso, format the drive, set locale, create a user, install the packages. Same steps as Mint, just without a GUI. Add Plasma on top, and it largely feels the same as my beloved Mint. But now everything is more up to date. Yeah I can do this. Time for the bare metal install.
The move
Exactly one year ago, I unplugged my Windows drive just to be sure. Picked an older SSD out of storage and plugged that in instead. Still wanted to keep my Windows drive, just in case. I copy pasted all commands I used in the VM into a text file and sent that to my phone, so the second time around very little reading was needed. The installation time dropped from hours to minutes. Pretty sure that was less work than clicking through a GUI installer. Kinda starting to enjoy this terminal thing.
With the install finished, I plug my Windows drive back in, set up my boot order to prefer Linux, and boot into my fresh system. Everything seems fine except... My mainboard and RAM are lit up like a christmas tree. The RGB versions were on sale and cheaper than the blacked out components, but the software I used on Windows to disable them doesn't exist on Linux. Ah. Didn't consider that.
Quick search later I learn about OpenRGB. Long search later and some help from the OpenRGB Discord, I learn that my RAM brand needs a specific kernel module blacklisted to work with OpenRGB, whatever that means. It does work though, and using the HardwareSync plugin, I can even mirror my Windows setup and have my RAM light up when my CPU reaches critical temperatures. Brilliant!
Next on the order of business, the horizontal scroll wheel on my Logitech mouse doesn't control the volume anymore. I tested this in the VM, I guess it was just properly passed through. On Linux, Logitech software doesn't exist, but Solaar does. Highjack the wheel, bind "XF86AudioRaiseVolume" and "XF86AudioLowerVolume" to "up" and "down" respectively et voila! Neat.
Next. My external drives aren't recognized. Quick rummage through the Arch wiki, and an install of ntfs-3g later, that issue is gone too. Everything else? Just... Works? Wifi works, GPU works, gamepad works, Euro Truck Sim Works, Flight Sim works, Stardew Valley and OpenTTD too. Don't really need much more. I could get used to this.
The Bash excursion
I used the terminal quite a bit to solve the arising issues by now, so at this point I wasn't afraid of it anymore and excited to explore it. Reading guides, looking at cheat sheets, watching "Top 100 console commands on Linux you NEED to know! You won't believe #69!" is great fun and I start to pick up
[LONG] My First Year on Linux – A Retrospective
Today my daily driver turned 1 year old! I thought I'll take this opportunity to celebrate, reflect on how it's been going and share my experiences so far.
https://imgur.com/hqDOOW4
**The why**
I knew the end of win10 support was looming, and I was less than excited about the prospect of moving to win11. The removal of features previous versions of Windows had, and the addition features I did not want, the lower performance in games compared to win10, the horror stories of breaking updates, had me holding off the move for as long as I could. The gradual but consistent removal of user agency already had me frustrated on win10, and it only seemed to get worse with 11.
"Do you want to update and restart? Your options are Yes, and Yes, but later. Do you want me to ask again? Just kidding, I will anyways. Unless of course I notice your PC idling for an extended period of time, in which case I'll just do it without asking." Great.
"Oh you want to install the OS without logging into our servers? Nooo, no, I can't let you do that. Oh you're doing the little rain dance ritual in the terminal? Allright. Just this once. Oh now you want to have a vertical task bar? Lol. Lmao even. Not on my watch. Now get back to work on those documents I helpfully uploaded to my cloud servers for you." Ugh.
Then MS Recall hit the news. That one was a bit too much even for me, but at least I didn't need to care until I upgraded, right? Well, one article mentioned a command to check the service state. I punched it into the console for fun and.... "Feature Name: Recall. State: Enabled." Wait. What? On Windows 10? I didn't see anything? I went snooping around the system files, and there was only a skeleton folder with nothing functional in it, but in my mind that clearly meant they were preparing for something. Now a year later, it still hasn't manifested, so maybe it was just an accidental inclusion, who knows. Either way, that was the last straw for me.
**The what**
So. Now what. Apple was a contender, but the lack of user agency and vendor lock-in stays the same, barely any gaming is possible as far as I know, in addition to the rather high upfront cost for the hardware, and my desktop was barely a year old at that point, so that was out of the question. I don't hate on Apple, don't get me wrong, it's good hardware and their OS does many things right, it's just not ideal for the cheapskate tinkerer and gamer in me.
I was aware Linux existed though, from having rescued my win98 data from a broken drive using KNOPPIX over a decade ago. I also played around with Ubuntu on my Raspberry PI and ran a webserver for a while, so I knew how to "apt update && apt upgrade" and even "reboot", but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.
So I figured, If I'm going to do this, I'll have to start from the ground up with something easy, and I'll do it in a virtual machine, just to make sure I can handle it and see how I like it. Not knowing much about distros at that point, I just made sure to choose one from the debian family to keep the familiar package manager, and went with the one I saw recommended a lot- Linux Mint. So I spun up a VMWare VM, and for about two months, I booted into Windows, then immediately opened the VM and fullscreened it, and then just went about my daily business from there.
And that phase was surprisingly frictionless. The updates went through the familiar apt without a hitch. Installing Discord and Cinny went fine. Thunderbird synced mails from all my providers with ease. Brainrotting on Youtube worked just fine too. I did install Steam and tried gaming, but lacking proper GPU passthrough, that wasn't exactly a smooth experience. The games I tested did start though, so that was a good sign for the bare metal install.
So instead I spent some time just getting comfortable with the system, installing software, replacing parts of the system, breaking things and trying to fix them. I got rid of Cinnamon and installed Plasma for its customizability and just binged on all the
Today my daily driver turned 1 year old! I thought I'll take this opportunity to celebrate, reflect on how it's been going and share my experiences so far.
https://imgur.com/hqDOOW4
**The why**
I knew the end of win10 support was looming, and I was less than excited about the prospect of moving to win11. The removal of features previous versions of Windows had, and the addition features I did not want, the lower performance in games compared to win10, the horror stories of breaking updates, had me holding off the move for as long as I could. The gradual but consistent removal of user agency already had me frustrated on win10, and it only seemed to get worse with 11.
"Do you want to update and restart? Your options are Yes, and Yes, but later. Do you want me to ask again? Just kidding, I will anyways. Unless of course I notice your PC idling for an extended period of time, in which case I'll just do it without asking." Great.
"Oh you want to install the OS without logging into our servers? Nooo, no, I can't let you do that. Oh you're doing the little rain dance ritual in the terminal? Allright. Just this once. Oh now you want to have a vertical task bar? Lol. Lmao even. Not on my watch. Now get back to work on those documents I helpfully uploaded to my cloud servers for you." Ugh.
Then MS Recall hit the news. That one was a bit too much even for me, but at least I didn't need to care until I upgraded, right? Well, one article mentioned a command to check the service state. I punched it into the console for fun and.... "Feature Name: Recall. State: Enabled." Wait. What? On Windows 10? I didn't see anything? I went snooping around the system files, and there was only a skeleton folder with nothing functional in it, but in my mind that clearly meant they were preparing for something. Now a year later, it still hasn't manifested, so maybe it was just an accidental inclusion, who knows. Either way, that was the last straw for me.
**The what**
So. Now what. Apple was a contender, but the lack of user agency and vendor lock-in stays the same, barely any gaming is possible as far as I know, in addition to the rather high upfront cost for the hardware, and my desktop was barely a year old at that point, so that was out of the question. I don't hate on Apple, don't get me wrong, it's good hardware and their OS does many things right, it's just not ideal for the cheapskate tinkerer and gamer in me.
I was aware Linux existed though, from having rescued my win98 data from a broken drive using KNOPPIX over a decade ago. I also played around with Ubuntu on my Raspberry PI and ran a webserver for a while, so I knew how to "apt update && apt upgrade" and even "reboot", but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.
So I figured, If I'm going to do this, I'll have to start from the ground up with something easy, and I'll do it in a virtual machine, just to make sure I can handle it and see how I like it. Not knowing much about distros at that point, I just made sure to choose one from the debian family to keep the familiar package manager, and went with the one I saw recommended a lot- Linux Mint. So I spun up a VMWare VM, and for about two months, I booted into Windows, then immediately opened the VM and fullscreened it, and then just went about my daily business from there.
And that phase was surprisingly frictionless. The updates went through the familiar apt without a hitch. Installing Discord and Cinny went fine. Thunderbird synced mails from all my providers with ease. Brainrotting on Youtube worked just fine too. I did install Steam and tried gaming, but lacking proper GPU passthrough, that wasn't exactly a smooth experience. The games I tested did start though, so that was a good sign for the bare metal install.
So instead I spent some time just getting comfortable with the system, installing software, replacing parts of the system, breaking things and trying to fix them. I got rid of Cinnamon and installed Plasma for its customizability and just binged on all the
themes and funny cursors I could find. And that was unfortunately the point where I learned the price you pay for stability. At that time, I was reading news about the release of Plasma 6, with all the fancy features I *needed*, but all I could get from the repos was 5.27. Welp.
I love Mint. It has a special place in my heart now. I cannot stress enough how much I love the devs. Their default answer to any question I looked up seemed to be "Our professional opinion is that you shouldn't, but if you still want to, here's how." The level of respect you feel as a user is just something you don't get on Windows, or even many other distros. I still maintain one doesn't choose Mint over Ubuntu for any technical differences, but because of the amazing developers.
Anyways, at that point I have lurked enough on the subreddits and watched enough Linux Youtube to know about rolling release distros, and to have seen the Arch memes. I guess it wouldn't hurt to check it out. "Rolling releases..." Yep. "...targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation..." Okay, that's fine. "...a pragmatic distribution rather than an ideological one [...] Evidence-based technical analysis and debate are what matter, not politics or popular opinion. " You know what, I love that. Add new VM.
It took hours of reading the installation guide, but actually, the installation difficulty was not as high as expected. Download the iso, format the drive, set locale, create a user, install the packages. Same steps as Mint, just without a GUI. Add Plasma on top, and it largely feels the same as my beloved Mint. But now everything is more up to date. Yeah I can do this. Time for the bare metal install.
**The move**
Exactly one year ago, I unplugged my Windows drive just to be sure. Picked an older SSD out of storage and plugged that in instead. Still wanted to keep my Windows drive, just in case. I copy pasted all commands I used in the VM into a text file and sent that to my phone, so the second time around very little reading was needed. The installation time dropped from hours to minutes. Pretty sure that was less work than clicking through a GUI installer. Kinda starting to enjoy this terminal thing.
With the install finished, I plug my Windows drive back in, set up my boot order to prefer Linux, and boot into my fresh system. Everything seems fine except... My mainboard and RAM are lit up like a christmas tree. The RGB versions were on sale and cheaper than the blacked out components, but the software I used on Windows to disable them doesn't exist on Linux. Ah. Didn't consider that.
Quick search later I learn about OpenRGB. Long search later and some help from the OpenRGB Discord, I learn that my RAM brand needs a specific kernel module blacklisted to work with OpenRGB, whatever that means. It does work though, and using the HardwareSync plugin, I can even mirror my Windows setup and have my RAM light up when my CPU reaches critical temperatures. Brilliant!
Next on the order of business, the horizontal scroll wheel on my Logitech mouse doesn't control the volume anymore. I tested this in the VM, I guess it was just properly passed through. On Linux, Logitech software doesn't exist, but Solaar does. Highjack the wheel, bind "XF86_AudioRaiseVolume" and "XF86_AudioLowerVolume" to "up" and "down" respectively et voila! Neat.
Next. My external drives aren't recognized. Quick rummage through the Arch wiki, and an install of ntfs-3g later, that issue is gone too. Everything else? Just... Works? Wifi works, GPU works, gamepad works, Euro Truck Sim Works, Flight Sim works, Stardew Valley and OpenTTD too. Don't really need much more. I could get used to this.
**The Bash excursion**
I used the terminal quite a bit to solve the arising issues by now, so at this point I wasn't afraid of it anymore and excited to explore it. Reading guides, looking at cheat sheets, watching "Top 100 console commands on Linux you NEED to know! You won't believe #69!" is great fun and I start to pick up
I love Mint. It has a special place in my heart now. I cannot stress enough how much I love the devs. Their default answer to any question I looked up seemed to be "Our professional opinion is that you shouldn't, but if you still want to, here's how." The level of respect you feel as a user is just something you don't get on Windows, or even many other distros. I still maintain one doesn't choose Mint over Ubuntu for any technical differences, but because of the amazing developers.
Anyways, at that point I have lurked enough on the subreddits and watched enough Linux Youtube to know about rolling release distros, and to have seen the Arch memes. I guess it wouldn't hurt to check it out. "Rolling releases..." Yep. "...targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation..." Okay, that's fine. "...a pragmatic distribution rather than an ideological one [...] Evidence-based technical analysis and debate are what matter, not politics or popular opinion. " You know what, I love that. Add new VM.
It took hours of reading the installation guide, but actually, the installation difficulty was not as high as expected. Download the iso, format the drive, set locale, create a user, install the packages. Same steps as Mint, just without a GUI. Add Plasma on top, and it largely feels the same as my beloved Mint. But now everything is more up to date. Yeah I can do this. Time for the bare metal install.
**The move**
Exactly one year ago, I unplugged my Windows drive just to be sure. Picked an older SSD out of storage and plugged that in instead. Still wanted to keep my Windows drive, just in case. I copy pasted all commands I used in the VM into a text file and sent that to my phone, so the second time around very little reading was needed. The installation time dropped from hours to minutes. Pretty sure that was less work than clicking through a GUI installer. Kinda starting to enjoy this terminal thing.
With the install finished, I plug my Windows drive back in, set up my boot order to prefer Linux, and boot into my fresh system. Everything seems fine except... My mainboard and RAM are lit up like a christmas tree. The RGB versions were on sale and cheaper than the blacked out components, but the software I used on Windows to disable them doesn't exist on Linux. Ah. Didn't consider that.
Quick search later I learn about OpenRGB. Long search later and some help from the OpenRGB Discord, I learn that my RAM brand needs a specific kernel module blacklisted to work with OpenRGB, whatever that means. It does work though, and using the HardwareSync plugin, I can even mirror my Windows setup and have my RAM light up when my CPU reaches critical temperatures. Brilliant!
Next on the order of business, the horizontal scroll wheel on my Logitech mouse doesn't control the volume anymore. I tested this in the VM, I guess it was just properly passed through. On Linux, Logitech software doesn't exist, but Solaar does. Highjack the wheel, bind "XF86_AudioRaiseVolume" and "XF86_AudioLowerVolume" to "up" and "down" respectively et voila! Neat.
Next. My external drives aren't recognized. Quick rummage through the Arch wiki, and an install of ntfs-3g later, that issue is gone too. Everything else? Just... Works? Wifi works, GPU works, gamepad works, Euro Truck Sim Works, Flight Sim works, Stardew Valley and OpenTTD too. Don't really need much more. I could get used to this.
**The Bash excursion**
I used the terminal quite a bit to solve the arising issues by now, so at this point I wasn't afraid of it anymore and excited to explore it. Reading guides, looking at cheat sheets, watching "Top 100 console commands on Linux you NEED to know! You won't believe #69!" is great fun and I start to pick up
nice qol tips here and there. "sudo !!" reruns the previous command with elevated privileges without the need to retype the whole thing. "!<number from history>" reruns the given command. "\^old\^new" reruns the previous command with the given part replaced. The time savings!
Learning about .bashrc was great fun too. I spend hours googling other people's files and set up one letter aliases for my most used commands. I can even have if statements, so I can do things like this, and not even have to think about which of my systems I'm on currently:
if [ -f /etc/arch-release ]; then
# Arch
alias u='sudo pacman -Syu'
alias i='sudo pacman -S '
alias f='pacman -Ss '
alias r='sudo pacman -R '
alias rr='sudo pacman -Rs '
alias rrr='sudo pacman -Rns '
alias c='sudo pacman -Sc'
elif [ -f /etc/lsb-release ]; then
# Debian
alias u='sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade'
alias i='sudo apt install '
alias f='apt search '
alias r='sudo apt remove '
alias rr='sudo apt purge '
alias c='sudo apt autoremove && sudo apt clean'
else
echo "Unsupported distribution or cannot detect distribution."
fi
Functions work too. A quick one-liner to cd into a directory and list the contents immediately makes the whole thing feel more modern. Why isn't this a default? Whatever, the ability to just add that myself gives me a small taste of the potential power.
cd() {
builtin cd "$@" && ls -AF
}
And while we're at it, why do I need to type out "cd ~/.config/fastfetch/" every time I want to go there? Zoxide exists, sure, but that requires precaching, and if I usually only visit a config directory once after installing the package, what even is the point? But Google tells me fzf and fd exist, and a bit of copy pasting snippets from stackoverflow later, I can just "fz config fastfetch" at a barely noticeable performance penalty. Now we're talking.
fz() {
local dir
dir=$(fd --type d --hidden \
--exclude '.git' \
--exclude 'node_modules' \
--exclude '.cache' \
--exclude '/mnt' \
--exclude '/run' \
--exclude '/proc' \
--exclude '/sys' \
--exclude '/dev' \
. / 2>/dev/null \
| awk '{ print length, $0 }' | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f2- \
| fzf --query="$*" --select-1 --exit-0 \
--extended-exact --no-sort --height 40% --reverse \
--preview 'tree -C {} | head -n 20') \
&& cd "$dir"
}
Being able to just change the behavior of the shell like that is amazing and makes it feel much more like "home". At this point I wanted to write a bit more than just snippets, and having dabbled in game development before, I decided to take what I know and apply it in bash, adding [a leveling system](https://github.com/Divinux/linux-terminal-gamifier) from RPGs to my terminal. It tracks used commands and gives out experience points for using the terminal, and displays fun little messages on level ups, to make using the computer just a little bit more fun. I'll have you know, I'm a lvl 50 currently.
https://imgur.com/AvD0bZU
**The unhealthy obsession**
Now, this is the part I'm not proud of. I've come to love Arch. It's philosophy speaks to me and I can't imagine there is a distro that is a better fit for me. But what if... What if there is one and I just don't know it? And anyways, what IS the difference between distros other than the release schedule? How much do the installations actually differ? I've seen the GUI install, I've seen the CLI equivalent, is there something else? And how do the footprints compare, is there anything more lightweight than Arch? Something more challenging? I don't really want to distrohop, but I *do* have VMs at my disposal. I've heard some big names, Fedora exists, openSUSE exists, and there's fancy gaming focused Bazzite and Garuda too! I'll just quickly install those and have a look around,
Learning about .bashrc was great fun too. I spend hours googling other people's files and set up one letter aliases for my most used commands. I can even have if statements, so I can do things like this, and not even have to think about which of my systems I'm on currently:
if [ -f /etc/arch-release ]; then
# Arch
alias u='sudo pacman -Syu'
alias i='sudo pacman -S '
alias f='pacman -Ss '
alias r='sudo pacman -R '
alias rr='sudo pacman -Rs '
alias rrr='sudo pacman -Rns '
alias c='sudo pacman -Sc'
elif [ -f /etc/lsb-release ]; then
# Debian
alias u='sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade'
alias i='sudo apt install '
alias f='apt search '
alias r='sudo apt remove '
alias rr='sudo apt purge '
alias c='sudo apt autoremove && sudo apt clean'
else
echo "Unsupported distribution or cannot detect distribution."
fi
Functions work too. A quick one-liner to cd into a directory and list the contents immediately makes the whole thing feel more modern. Why isn't this a default? Whatever, the ability to just add that myself gives me a small taste of the potential power.
cd() {
builtin cd "$@" && ls -AF
}
And while we're at it, why do I need to type out "cd ~/.config/fastfetch/" every time I want to go there? Zoxide exists, sure, but that requires precaching, and if I usually only visit a config directory once after installing the package, what even is the point? But Google tells me fzf and fd exist, and a bit of copy pasting snippets from stackoverflow later, I can just "fz config fastfetch" at a barely noticeable performance penalty. Now we're talking.
fz() {
local dir
dir=$(fd --type d --hidden \
--exclude '.git' \
--exclude 'node_modules' \
--exclude '.cache' \
--exclude '/mnt' \
--exclude '/run' \
--exclude '/proc' \
--exclude '/sys' \
--exclude '/dev' \
. / 2>/dev/null \
| awk '{ print length, $0 }' | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f2- \
| fzf --query="$*" --select-1 --exit-0 \
--extended-exact --no-sort --height 40% --reverse \
--preview 'tree -C {} | head -n 20') \
&& cd "$dir"
}
Being able to just change the behavior of the shell like that is amazing and makes it feel much more like "home". At this point I wanted to write a bit more than just snippets, and having dabbled in game development before, I decided to take what I know and apply it in bash, adding [a leveling system](https://github.com/Divinux/linux-terminal-gamifier) from RPGs to my terminal. It tracks used commands and gives out experience points for using the terminal, and displays fun little messages on level ups, to make using the computer just a little bit more fun. I'll have you know, I'm a lvl 50 currently.
https://imgur.com/AvD0bZU
**The unhealthy obsession**
Now, this is the part I'm not proud of. I've come to love Arch. It's philosophy speaks to me and I can't imagine there is a distro that is a better fit for me. But what if... What if there is one and I just don't know it? And anyways, what IS the difference between distros other than the release schedule? How much do the installations actually differ? I've seen the GUI install, I've seen the CLI equivalent, is there something else? And how do the footprints compare, is there anything more lightweight than Arch? Something more challenging? I don't really want to distrohop, but I *do* have VMs at my disposal. I've heard some big names, Fedora exists, openSUSE exists, and there's fancy gaming focused Bazzite and Garuda too! I'll just quickly install those and have a look around,
GitHub
GitHub - Divinux/linux-terminal-gamifier: Linux Terminal Gamifier
Linux Terminal Gamifier. Contribute to Divinux/linux-terminal-gamifier development by creating an account on GitHub.
that can't hurt, right?
I spin up a couple VMs and install the big ones, check out the preinstalled packages, the package managers, install fastfetch and take a screenshot of the package versions and footprints. A dozen VMs later, I have a neat looking little folder with fastfetch screenshots, I compare the ASCII art and plot the package amount and memory footprint in a spreadsheet. I look into increasingly more obscure distros to add to my little digital stamp collection. Instead of gaming after work, I spend my time installing new distros. At some point I start going down the list of ASCII logos in the fastfetch source code to see which ones I'm missing.
Most blur together, it's always the Calamares or Anaconda installer. The CLI based ones are largely the same as Arch. Notable differences are the minimalistic source based ones like KISS and CRUX. SourceMage is fun. RedStar is exciting just because of what it is. I didn't find many differences from the surface level looks I gave the distros, but I certainly gained more confidence in my installation and rescue abilities from the more manual ones. Anyways, my collection currently contains 141 OSes. Let this be a warning to you and don't do distrohoping, kids.
https://imgur.com/G4Z6mz2
**The conclusion**
So, a year after I switched my daily driver to Linux, how do I feel about it? I truly, genuinely, love it. I can do most anything I could with Windows, save for Photoshop and Office365, but whatever, there's alternatives for those. But I can also do *more*. Tinkering with Plasma and making it look and behave how I want is amazing. If you want to do something, theres a setting for it. My UI themes are perfectly synchronized between Qt and GTK, my icon theme is a custom monochrome version of candy icons, because if you want to write a noscript to run through all the noscript files and pull all the color out, you can. My mouse cursor seems pretty vanilla, but is also a custom converted version originally only available on Windows, because if you want to convert that, you can do that too.
My terminal is set it up with tmux first and later replaced that with WezTerm to give me persistent sessions as well as graphics support. It still greets me with the same weather report styled through figlet that I set up on my first day of playing with it, but now it also pulls the Arch rss feed to alert me of any potential update issues. All in a custom colorscheme of course.
Everything, from the messages shown during boot, to the installed packages, to the behavior of windows, down to the colors of every last pixel is - to quote Kanye from before he went mad - "the exact motherfucker I wanted". And more importantly, it doesn't stand in my way when I need to do some actual work.
Yes, perfect doesn't exist, and sometimes there is something to fix. But annoyances exist on Windows too that require investing time, using google, troubleshooting and typing commands into the scary console. The difference however is this- on Windows, I'm always undoing things the developers did, while on Linux, I'm fixing things the (volunteer) developers for whatever reason didn't have the capacity for. On Windows, I'm fighting *against* the developers, and on Linux, I'm fighting *alongside* them.
And that is why I feel it's important to get more newbies into the ecosystem, more eyes on bugs, more people to complain, and more potential developers who think "fuck it, I'll just do it myself". And I'll certainly be here to welcome them with open arms.
Thank you so much for reading!
https://redd.it/1opy2x3
@r_linux
I spin up a couple VMs and install the big ones, check out the preinstalled packages, the package managers, install fastfetch and take a screenshot of the package versions and footprints. A dozen VMs later, I have a neat looking little folder with fastfetch screenshots, I compare the ASCII art and plot the package amount and memory footprint in a spreadsheet. I look into increasingly more obscure distros to add to my little digital stamp collection. Instead of gaming after work, I spend my time installing new distros. At some point I start going down the list of ASCII logos in the fastfetch source code to see which ones I'm missing.
Most blur together, it's always the Calamares or Anaconda installer. The CLI based ones are largely the same as Arch. Notable differences are the minimalistic source based ones like KISS and CRUX. SourceMage is fun. RedStar is exciting just because of what it is. I didn't find many differences from the surface level looks I gave the distros, but I certainly gained more confidence in my installation and rescue abilities from the more manual ones. Anyways, my collection currently contains 141 OSes. Let this be a warning to you and don't do distrohoping, kids.
https://imgur.com/G4Z6mz2
**The conclusion**
So, a year after I switched my daily driver to Linux, how do I feel about it? I truly, genuinely, love it. I can do most anything I could with Windows, save for Photoshop and Office365, but whatever, there's alternatives for those. But I can also do *more*. Tinkering with Plasma and making it look and behave how I want is amazing. If you want to do something, theres a setting for it. My UI themes are perfectly synchronized between Qt and GTK, my icon theme is a custom monochrome version of candy icons, because if you want to write a noscript to run through all the noscript files and pull all the color out, you can. My mouse cursor seems pretty vanilla, but is also a custom converted version originally only available on Windows, because if you want to convert that, you can do that too.
My terminal is set it up with tmux first and later replaced that with WezTerm to give me persistent sessions as well as graphics support. It still greets me with the same weather report styled through figlet that I set up on my first day of playing with it, but now it also pulls the Arch rss feed to alert me of any potential update issues. All in a custom colorscheme of course.
Everything, from the messages shown during boot, to the installed packages, to the behavior of windows, down to the colors of every last pixel is - to quote Kanye from before he went mad - "the exact motherfucker I wanted". And more importantly, it doesn't stand in my way when I need to do some actual work.
Yes, perfect doesn't exist, and sometimes there is something to fix. But annoyances exist on Windows too that require investing time, using google, troubleshooting and typing commands into the scary console. The difference however is this- on Windows, I'm always undoing things the developers did, while on Linux, I'm fixing things the (volunteer) developers for whatever reason didn't have the capacity for. On Windows, I'm fighting *against* the developers, and on Linux, I'm fighting *alongside* them.
And that is why I feel it's important to get more newbies into the ecosystem, more eyes on bugs, more people to complain, and more potential developers who think "fuck it, I'll just do it myself". And I'll certainly be here to welcome them with open arms.
Thank you so much for reading!
https://redd.it/1opy2x3
@r_linux
Status of linux tablets in 2025
I did a lot of research into this and finally found that Surface Go 2/3/4 are pretty much the only devices that qualifies as true x86 linux "tablets" out there, which is a bit disappointing, since they are a bit underpowered and top out at 8 GB of RAM.
Other options are too heavy and are awkward to use as tablets. Examples are Surface Pro models, Minisforum v3, Starlite and Surface-like devices from Dell (latitude 7210 for example), HP and Lenovo.
IMO they better quality as compact laptops rather than tablets.
Surface Go devices are around 500+ grams (1.20 lbs) and are comfortable to hold and use as tablets.
They are 100% compatible with linux out of the box.
I've been using a used Surface Go 2 I picked up for $160 for a couple of days and it's a joy to use both as a tablet and with the detachable keyboard, albeit if you only use it for web browsing and typing.
I just wish there were more devices in that weight class with better specs, but unfortunately I couldn't find any.
Has anyone found other good linux-friendly tablets worth checking out?
https://redd.it/1opx1ie
@r_linux
I did a lot of research into this and finally found that Surface Go 2/3/4 are pretty much the only devices that qualifies as true x86 linux "tablets" out there, which is a bit disappointing, since they are a bit underpowered and top out at 8 GB of RAM.
Other options are too heavy and are awkward to use as tablets. Examples are Surface Pro models, Minisforum v3, Starlite and Surface-like devices from Dell (latitude 7210 for example), HP and Lenovo.
IMO they better quality as compact laptops rather than tablets.
Surface Go devices are around 500+ grams (1.20 lbs) and are comfortable to hold and use as tablets.
They are 100% compatible with linux out of the box.
I've been using a used Surface Go 2 I picked up for $160 for a couple of days and it's a joy to use both as a tablet and with the detachable keyboard, albeit if you only use it for web browsing and typing.
I just wish there were more devices in that weight class with better specs, but unfortunately I couldn't find any.
Has anyone found other good linux-friendly tablets worth checking out?
https://redd.it/1opx1ie
@r_linux
Reddit
From the linux community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the linux community
Say hi to Kit | Firefox (official Firefox swag)
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/kit/
https://redd.it/1oq0kim
@r_linux
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/kit/
https://redd.it/1oq0kim
@r_linux
Firefox
Say hi to Kit
The Firefox brand is getting a refresh and you get the first look
Does Windows do this for you?
Does your OS do this for you?
/etc/cron.daily/installation-birthday:
0 0
| |
____|___|____
0 |~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~| 0
| | | |
___|__|___________|___|__
|/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/|
0 | H a p p y | 0
| |/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/| |
_|___|_______________________|___|__
|/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/|
| |
| B i r t h d a y ! ! ! |
| ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ |
|___________________________________|
Congratulations, your Debian system "gato" was installed
4 year(s) ago today!
https://redd.it/1oq15ge
@r_linux
Does your OS do this for you?
/etc/cron.daily/installation-birthday:
0 0
| |
____|___|____
0 |~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~| 0
| | | |
___|__|___________|___|__
|/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/|
0 | H a p p y | 0
| |/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/| |
_|___|_______________________|___|__
|/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/|
| |
| B i r t h d a y ! ! ! |
| ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ |
|___________________________________|
Congratulations, your Debian system "gato" was installed
4 year(s) ago today!
https://redd.it/1oq15ge
@r_linux
Reddit
From the linux community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the linux community
Armbian 25.11 release is coming
https://blog.armbian.com/armbian-25-11-release-is-coming/
https://redd.it/1opyzxe
@r_linux
https://blog.armbian.com/armbian-25-11-release-is-coming/
https://redd.it/1opyzxe
@r_linux
Armbian blog
Armbian 25.11 release is coming
Armbian 25.11 code freeze begins November 20th. Maintainers should test boards, resolve critical issues, and join the coordination meeting on November 8th.
CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43
https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43
https://redd.it/1oq9o7q
@r_linux
https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43
https://redd.it/1oq9o7q
@r_linux
Phoronix
CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43
With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender.