They could call it Eunux!

Oh…

You should get the Pantheon desktop environment for a more Mac like experience.

It’s got a touch interface more than anything else. I think this change came around the same time as Windows 8 when they went for a more touch screen-y experience.

I gave an original Surface Pro tablet and I use Ubuntu’s Gnome on it. It’s perfect for tablets I find. Not so great for desktop PCs.

Budgie has great potential. I really love the look and feel. And I especially love the side bar. I feel that’s a feature that’s missing in KDE.

Budgie however isn’t “there” yet. I’ve experienced quite a few bugs using it and it’s still missing a few features. But it’s getting there. It might become my go to one day.

I have mine look and work almost as exactly as Windows 10, which I really love in terms of UI/UX. It’s the most easiest and fastest desktop interface I’ve ever used so far.

I have a tiled app menu and I even changed the window decorations to look like Windows 10. I hate rounded corners. It’s such a waste of screen space.

That’s what I’d be using too. But it felt too incomplete and buggy. It’s not there yet, but it’s very promising.

Linux is the kernel, the core of the system.

A distribution is a collection of software that is provided with the kernel, usually with it’s own software package management system. Distributions are also supported and maintained by organizations which create their own tools for that distribution and also make decisions on what to distribute it with.

For example, Fedora is maintained and supported by the company RedHat which implemented their own tools and packaging system to use Linux. Debian is the same but with a community.

Desktop environments are that it says. You have several available in Linux. The two major ones being KDE and GNOME. They provide a desktop experience with their own paradigms. Just like the MacOS and Windows have their own desktop environments. They’re basically graphical shells to allow users to use the system.

The sandboxing isn’t as much as, say, Docker containers. So I think access to memory and devices is still possible and can eventually get you access to the whole system. I would think.

And this isn’t limited to flatpaks but I would assume Snaps as well, which some software is now delivered in that format by Canonical, even for server software.

That’s interesting. I’ll have to look deeper into that

Yeah but OP has a point regarding the libraries with known vulnerabilities. What if one of them gets exploited that allows remote malicious code execution and gives root access? I dunno how far the sandboxing goes in that regard.

Right???

Internet access was more complicated back then. If you didn’t have a second computer or couldn’t dual boot into a working OS it was a big problem. And there wasn’t a lot of Linux users back then either.

Oh yeah. Ubuntu really simplified everything.

My first distro on my own PC was Mandrake. I don’t know how many times I had to reinstall it because of my fuckups.

Two years later I was compiling my own kernel with the source code of special modules that I had downloaded for my NVidia card that had composite video input.

I’ve never had to compile a kernel since Ubuntu. I completely forgot to be honest.

😂😂😂

Wow. I had this on my removable hard drive for our operating systems class in college back in 2000.

Public libraries often have CDs tout can borrow.

I felt the same way about the flatpaks and snap. But having used flatpaks a bit I realized how great it is for desktop apps.

What I like the most is that you don’t have to pull in a ton of dependencies for them to run. For example, when using a Gnome app in KDE.

I also appreciate the sandboxing. Especially for web clients like Firefox and Discord for example. I’m using Flatseal to configure the app permissions like you would Android apps. And the Flathub acts like an app store. The software there is often more recent than what’s in the repo.

I highly recommend it.

Hello there!

It’s funny, I just made the switch this Monday. I got fed up with Microsoft’s bullshit being shoved down my throat. I was going to keep Windows 10 for as long as possible, but a recent update that installed Copilot on my machine was the last straw. I have been a Linux user since 2000 and have been using Ubuntu (and switching flavours) since 2004.

I had a big conversation on the Linux Gaming community about choosing a new distribution as a daily driver. You can see it here.

I wanted to get people’s opinion and it started a big thread with lots of responses. It led me to try many distributions to see which ones would be the best fit and read a lot about people’s experiences with them as well. In the end, I decided to stick with Kubuntu which was already installed as a dual boot on my system even though I didn’t use it much except to tinker from time to time and it was doing a great job. Gaming on it was also working fantastically well. And I knew that every time I booted into it it would always work unless I really started messing with system files and didn’t know what I was doing.

So Monday I had a day off and did the jump. Backed up my system, downloaded Kubuntu 24.04.1, booted off the USB stick and wiped the whole system clean.

But I learned something about Kubuntu (and Ubuntu in general) during that experience that made me regret keeping that distro. I knew that Canonical had developed their own sandboxed package system like Flatpak: Snaps. They were already available in 22.04, which I was running, but I didn’t really pay attention. Upon installing Kubuntu 24.04, I realized just how much Canonical insisted that Snaps be used. Some software is now exclusively available as Snaps and nothing else. This unacceptable for me.

To be fair, Snaps aren’t THAT bad. It’s pretty comparable to Flatpak in general in terms of features except for the fact that they are stored locally in their compressed form while Flatpaks are uncompressed. So the startup time of Snaps is slower. But they both offer sandboxing and therefore an added layer of security. This is great for apps like internet clients (browsers, email, etc.) or even servers or any kind of software, especially in an immutable system meant for IoT. Baeldung’s website explains the differences pretty well.

I’d probably use snaps for certain scenarios, but I think Canonical is pushing the limit by forcing people to use them. And also they’ve said they wouldn’t support Flatpak in future releases, even though it has become very popular and is being adopted much more than Snaps by third party software providers. I’m fairly certain Snaps are going to go the same way as Bazaar and Unity over time. In any case, I’ve been able to get around Snaps enough that it’s tolerable for the moment.

So now I’ve been considering starting over with Debian stable instead. I’m already used to Apt and .deb packages and the Debian way of doing things. I’m looking for stability over having the latest and greatest software and honestly, a 2 year release cycle is not that bad. Plus there’s backports as well. Almost everyone is saying “Debian is too far behind! Packages are too old!” but what’s “old” anyway? 6 months??? Honestly that’s not a big deal for me. I just want my system to boot and be very confident that it’ll work and won’t break during my next apt-get upgrade. Debian offers this peace of mind. But, after using Ubuntu for so long with all its quality of life improvements, Debian looks pretty rough around the edges in comparison.

I think I’ll stick with my Kubuntu for a bit and see how it goes and if I really get frustrated at Snaps, I’ll switch to Debian. But, right now I’ve spent enough time setting up my system that I feel too lazy to switch.

You can relax. If you install an Ubuntu based OS (v24.04 LTS for long term support) like Lubuntu or even Linux Mint you’ll have a pretty stable system with great hardware support and lots of online help.

And as long as you don’t mess with any files outside of your home directory and keep a regular backup of your system you’ll be just fine.

Also, there’s a lesson to be learned in our mistakes. In the future, keep a copy of files you want to delete but are not sure what they are for, before you actually delete them.

When using KDE, press meta-T to activate the equivalent of Windows Power Toys’ Fancy Zones.

You can then set tiling zones and when you drag a window, hold shift at the same time to lock it in one of the zones.