Unfortunately it seems to be a completely proprietary kernel. I did find a paper on it (presented by Huawei in a conference): https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-haibo

The first line of the abstract reads

This paper presents the design and implementation of HongMeng kernel (HM), a commercialized general-purpose microkernel that preserves most of the virtues of microkernels while addressing the above challenges.

Another interesting tidbit from the paper:

We started the HongMeng kernel (HM) project over 7 years ago to re-examine and retrofit the microkernel into a general OS kernel for emerging scenarios. To be practical for production deployment, HM achieves full Linux API/ABI compatibility and is capable of reusing the Linux applications and driver ecosystems such that it can run complex frameworks like AOSP [42] and OpenHarmony [35] with rich peripherals.

It was a skin, now its a completely different OS. The initial version, HarmonyOS, was based on Android/Linux, the new HarmonyOS Next, is a proprietary version (or successor) of HarmonyOS based on an open source project/OS, OpenHarmony. It uses a new microkernel instead of the linux kernel.

OpenHarmony is essentially an open source base for making an operating system on top. Its not like the Linux kernel, in the sense that its not just a kernel (in fact you can use the linux kernel with it), but rather a bunch of components people can build upon. And since it uses a permissive license, you can build a proprietary OS on top of it (like the HarmonyOS Next).

Huawei actually launched OpenHarmony many years back but it was not ready for phone usage yet. It was only with the launch of the 5th version that Huawei was confident enough in it to start using it on their own phones.

rpm-ostree is intended to be the last resort because layering causes issues with updates and other things

thanks for the comprehensive answer!

But what about the other features?

(tbf looking at the github I don’t see anything special but I have been seeing people using it swear by it so Im wondering what Im missing)

yep 😄 just edited it

AMD and Intel both have very good linux support. On that note there shouldn’t be much of a difference.

In fact, AMD GPU drivers are quite a bit ahead of Intel on Linux. And the AMD laptop has a significantly more powerful iGPU plus it has DDR5 ram. So it should give you noticeably better performance.

More problematic could be the wifi chip, fingerprint reader and maybe the camera.

Wifi nowadays works well on Linux so I don’t think that should be much of a problem. Intel Wifi usually has better support though.

Cameras also mostly work though the IR sensor might not work.

Fingerprint support on linux is 50/50 (from linux-hardware, it seems fingerprint on similar models is not working unfortunately). If you know the exact fingerprint reader model on the laptop you can check if it has linux support.

Thinkpads usually have good support on Linux overall so I won’t be too worried with either option. I couldn’t find the exact models on linux-hardware.org, however I did find similar models:

All AMD models by this name (E14 Gen 6)

All Intel models by this name (E14 Gen 5)

21M3002TGE

21JK0009SP

Intel pretty mutch only thinks about Winows

Where did you get that from? Intel officially supports their drivers on linux and has many engineers working on support for their products in the kernel and mesa.

Let Linus see through the Rust inclusion in Linux. I dont think it will go well without him. He is well respected in the Linux community so people are more willing to compromise with him.

You can disable apps using adb.

I personally use AppManager (FOSS). In the settings, change the working mode to Wireless ADB. The app should give you the instructions but you can also ask here. Then from the app list you should be able to disable any app you want. The app even tells you which apps are bloatware.

But if you want, you can use adb on Linux too. Download adb and then from terminal run the commands as explained here: https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/

Yes, but maybe debian enables it by default? You can check by running cat /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled

If the result is 0x0007, it means MGLRU is fully enabled.

Its about Malibal, an infamous linux/windows hardware company. The person in the video is a KDE dev (Niccolo).

If you prefer peertube: https://tube.kockatoo.org/videos/watch/fcd71cf8-37be-41ad-ab66-bb7efaf44350

Distros ship with icons and themes system wide because apps running as root only load icons/themes that are installed system wide (you can check this by running an app as sudo).

Yeah the docs are a bit misleading but they are mostly for complete linux newbies. Its basically saying that to scare away any newbies from relying on ntfs because ntfs on linux has quite a few issues (in general, not exclusive to Bazzite) and might break unexpectedly since it is reverse-engineered so it is not perfect.

Bazzite does support NTFS. I use Bazzite on one of my devices with ntfs partitions and I haven’t had any problems so far. Unless you mean installing Bazzite on the ntfs partition which yeah I guess it doesn’t but Im not sure if any other disro has support for it.

But fair enough, immutable distros have a read-only system so making certain changes might be difficult and the usual commands might not apply. They are not impossible though, just require different commands since you have to layer those changes on top of the system. I have been able to make pretty much any changes to my Bazzite system that I would do on an ordinary distro.

Bazzite also has a really nice community that will help you with any issues and you can also ask for help in Fedora Silverblue/Kionite communities since Bazzite is just an image of Fedora (Kionite).

Bazzite does support ntfs. I have ntfs partitions on my system and they work perfectly fine in Bazzite.

Woah that MR actually got merged damn. Couldn’t believe it when I saw this, I thought the title was a clickbait or something until I checked and it was for real.

Yeah the whole situation really sucks. Im a big fan of both marcan and linux so its just sad how it all ended. But Im hopeful the R4L project will be successful despite these setbacks. Some of the first rust drivers are really close to landing and I think once that happens, the dust will mostly settle as hopefully most of the things around rust would have been figured out by then. Even this situation led to some improvements like the R4L policy (and also brought the issue to greater public scrutiny). Though the drama probably won’t end there, especially if rust starts making in to the core kernel (thus start being required for building the kernel). That is probably going to be the final obstacle; if rust makes it to the core kernel code, I think the R4L project will have succeeded.

tl;dr Run sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-24.04 in the terminal to get the latest kernel version available (v6.11.x)

Linux Mint uses whatever kernel the latest Ubuntu LTS (24.04) is using which happens to be v6.8.x. Ubuntu LTS and thus Linux Mint will by default remain on this kernel version for two years after its release i.e. until the release of the next major version of Ubuntu LTS. This is for stability (hence the LTS moniker - Long Term Stable). You do get security updates and fixes in point releases of the kernel.

So yes kernel versions are tied to your Linux Mint version. But Ubuntu also offers newer kernel versions, however those will be less stable so are not recommended unless you have some hardware that doesn’t work with your current kernel version. Just run sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-24.04 in the terminal which will install v6.11.x. This will also install newer versions of drivers (mesa) and other related stuff. Note that this kernel version is not fixed, you will get updated to a newer major kernel version every 6 months.

*And if you have an Nvidia GPU, you would also want to install the Nvidia driver for the newer kernel. I think Mint provides an app for that (drivers or something).

really nice video, covers the whole spectrum of things