There are many Distros out there, but what they all do is make useful and modern systems.
What are your not well known hacks/tricks to make the Linux Desktop experience WAY better and modern?
Here are mine
Install a bigger Distro
I dont recommend Ubuntu anymore, as they are simply doing things that are not traditional anymore. Unless they open source their snap store, and allow third party repos, its simply not a free Linux Distro.
But its true that sticking to something “Upstream” helps a lot with stable Experience and Support.
I recommend Fedora, and they put a lot of focus on the new, modern Atomic Variants.
You may also stick to Opensuse, Arch or even Debian. Debian will get boring and stay partly broken. Opensuse struggles with adaption sometimes. Arch is Arch…
Get Flatpak & Flathub
Having an “out of the box” system helps extremely with updates, package conflicts and all. With Flatpak, you have access to nearly all Graphical Linux Applications (that are widely used and maintained).
Its not sufficient for everything, but 70% or so of the users could totally have a 90% Flatpak/10% native packages system.
This reduces the amount of entropy drastically. Entropy means chaos, the randomness that your package manager needs to fight. Every install and removal of a package makes your system diverge from the tested version upstream, and developers will often say “We cant reproduce this issue”.
Also at the same time, Flatpaks remove the need of seperate packaging, they have official binaries (--subsection=verified
). Thus the versions are often newer.
Also, Flatpaks are open, and have easy containerization and permission management.
Containerize workloads
Example: I have a Laptop that does Private, Secure and Work things.
Best would be to have isolated containers or even Virtual Machines, if you really dont want other apps spying on something you dont like. This is luckily nearly nonexistent, even though X11 and the lack of SELinux make common Distros not actually secure.
So if you can use VMs with graphical acceleration and have enough RAM, install a very light Desktop on there or even a Window Manager (Fedora Sway spin?).
One step below: you can use isolated containers. Toolbox and Distrobox are not suited for that out of the box, but there are ways to isolate its directories and also remove filesystem permissions completely.
The last but still useful step is to have Toolbox/Distrobox Containers. It doesnt isolate your filesystem at all, as its primary use case is to have app support from every Linux Distro. So you can use Ubuntu PPA, Arch AUR, Fedora COPR, Opensuse and many more Distro-specific repos.
While thats mostly not needed, you can group your projects here, most common use case is a dev environment with loads of other dependencies, that you dont want to put on your main system.
Stick to secure defaults
Example: Fedora and others are nearly unique at using SELinux, which is naturally on Android.
Also, Distros being very stable with Wayland, Pipewire and other modern standards, are a good indication. Switching from Kubuntu to Fedora-KDE for example was a great step.
Its not best to self hack all your security features. Even though MAC address randomization or secure DNS settings are not default poorly.
Things like hardened kernel, hardened malloc, measured boot, hash authentification (Heads BIOS for example) are not common, which is pretty bad.
Try OSTree Distros
There are now great talks about different versions of Immutability.
- Linux User Space: Happy Rebasing to everyone!
- Fedora Project Podcast: Silverblue and immutable Desktops
To keep it short: Do you know how your system will look like after using it regularily, updating, installing, uninstalling, for many upgrades?
You can be more sure by following the containerization standards, but still the system can not be resetted, and you cant simply display the changes you did to your system.
With OSTree Distros you can reset, rebase to another system (completely different or simply with some other packages), display every change you did to it, revert the changes to your last boot, keep any image as a backup before experimenting… And all updates and installs are atomic! If something fails, you will have no update, no chance to break at all, even when using rolling git releases or something.
Automate
Automate updates, this is so important and poorly not standard. This doesnt mean having to click a button on a store always. I am working on some better system, detecting networks and battery state.
Automate backups of important directories to an external Drive.
For example using Syncthing. Why need a server when you have all your data on two devices that you own. The chance of both breaking is not very high.
Or use Nextcloud, maybe combine it with Cryptomator if you dont trust your Server.
Automate command line tasks in your shell config.
Automate app startups if they take long.
Automate your passwords by using a password manager.
Automate annoying cookie banner removal using UBlock Origin.
Automate entering “sort by price” or “only in 100km range” etc in ebay, or anything else, using “Add Custom Search Engine” and a custom search string.
What are your tips for Linux Desktops?
Only in Linux Land would “daily desktop tips” include “REINSTALL YOUR ENTIRE SYSTEM FOR SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT FEATURES.”
Ok its not very practical but its also something like “tips I would like to have known before having a complex setup”.
That’s something that beginners do to entertain themselves. My desktop image has been rolling forward since 2013 (when I switched to 64 bit userspace) and it has survived through several generations of hardware.
What distro, out of curiosity?
My previous record was on the server — Debian from Sarge to Wheezy (2006 to 2017). In retrospect I should have stuck to it, but wanted to try Ubuntu Server… I’ve only returned to Debian this year.
But on desktop I’ve never made it longer than 5 years on the same distro. I guess things change much more on the desktop and maybe it’s not a reasonable goal to stick with the same distro for too long? I’ve been on Manjaro now for 3 years, we’ll see how that goes.
Haha if you mean by entertain having Black screens and stuff? Idk, I broke every KDE System before that wasnt Debian based. And I like new features. So Fedora. The Kinoite is probably not that important, if you dont install random packages. But just because it works for many people, it may not be the easiest way, with least troubles to save when it breaks.
I think you should try VanillaOS 2.0 when it comes out
I recently switched to Silverblue, somewhat accidentally, as I did not thought immutable distros a mature enough, that was an expirement to dig it myself. Guess what? It is really awesome, I do not watch back to common distros now. I also believe Silverblue is way easier and better for Linux novices, than Mint, which is indeed also good and user-friendly, but future of linux seems to be immutability and flatpaks. There is a KDE variant as well. OpenSUSE has Micro OS with another approach to immutability and Vanilla OS is coming soon with yet one more different approach. I guess there are more allready and there will be more and more.
Opensuse microOS (now Kalpa or Aeon, doing the same stupid mistake as Fedora) and VanillaOS are pretty similar. They simply use backups and a standard package manager afaik. No OSTree no reason, for me.
Yes I agree, Fedora Mint with Flathub and everthing out of the box would be perfect. Or just KDE, I think Fedora KDE is best. Its awesome on Wayland and with Plasma 6 will get awesome too.
How are they similar? Aeon rely on btrfs to work, that is simple and good approach, but less user-friendly? I did not tried it, after comparing Aeon and Silverblue I was confident enough Aeon is not for me. And Vanilla has some complex A/B partitions swapping, like Android does, not sure how it will work, but documentation is really confusing.
I dont know if BTRFS is user unfriendly, but if they dont use OSTree afaik you cant reset, view diffs and all that.
VanillaOS is high in useful package management, but not very secure too, poorly.
With btrfs you can do way more, than ostree offer. Like install some package, do something, than just rollback system as nothing happened at all. You can rollback parts of system, like any folder. You may compare differences up to single files. Easy. You can rollback months back! That is what Micro OS about, rollback anything at any time with ease. Common user just do not need it.
You can do the exact same end result with rpm-ostree. Not single files or anything, but I guess thats not really the default configuration? With ostree you can pin deployments, otherways you only keep one backup system which saves resources
No. I see you are somewhat obsessed with ostree. Think about btrfs like fstree. It is way more powerful. The entire btrfs filesystem is kind an ostree. I used Workstation before Silverblue and I could rollback entire os back to days, without home folder, if I need too. But that does not make it immutable right? There is a btrfs-grub, which allows to rollback to any pinned snapshot. If something goes wrong in Workstation you just rollback.
Edit. As Fedora uses btrfs by default (but you can use ext4 too) I also thought about btrfs rollbacks. I actually forgot to examine it, as Fedora docs say something about it, like they should not be used together, I did not read why exactly.
Really interesting, havent heard of that. Yes I saw that Fedora Workstation does something similar with the btrfs snapshots and also they make updates more stable by using this little system that runs on reboot instead of doing it while running.
Btrfs and snapper work together for rollbacks or viewing diffs
There’s also BlendOs but it’s a buggy mess right now. Has promise though
How would one remove cookie banners with ublock origin?
Activate the EasyList - Annoyances in the Ublock settings
Or manually use the dropper and remove it
deleted by creator
Debian will get boring and stay broken.
Linux Mint Debian Edition is an option if you want something more out of box.
I mean that they will simply not ship nonstable updates anymore, which makes the system outdated after a year or so. It may work for some (LMDE with only X11 is not secure at all) but software is not ready yet, so the current version is okay now, but soon not anymore.
Maybe I’m old school, but I have 100% native and 0% flatpak
You’re not alone. I never use them. Too much storage. Too much fiddling to make them have the same theme as the system. AUR has everything I need.
There are some useful things in there, but it can get complicated. If i could get to Linux I wouldn’t need a lot of this stuff, or at least I wouldn’t need to think about it.
Tho I can’t get to it yet (and no I’m not willing to do a windows vm), because of 2 things :
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I’m playing warframe, and sometimes I open alecafrale in the background with the overlays to know what reward to pick. And it seems they overwolf and the app is not compatible with Linux, at least from what I could read.
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I am using gpu virtualisation to share my pc occasionally with my brother. And on Linux, there is an alternative with LIBVF.IO. but sadly, not compatible with newer amd gpus, or at least from the tutorial and arch wiki, pretty complicated to make it run, if even possible.
When these 2 things would be fixed, maybe I’ll consider it, if i don’t have to switch to windows every 2 days…
I am using gpu virtualisation to share my pc occasionally with my brother.
Care to elaborate on this? I’m curious how you’re doing it.
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I’ve just tested an immutable distro (OpenSuse Aeon) in a VM, it’s really confusing to me for now.
It is simply different. Flatpaks are not, system packages a bit, updates and installs very different.
I have problems with gaming on Nvidia unless I use Arch. Any benefit of switching to Fedora?
That’s great and all…but Alt-Drag is missing.
I’ve honestly been using Linux on and off for nearly 25 years, and daily the past 6 or so…and somehow just found out about this, and now my life is changed.
So what the hell is alt drag?
Many WMs allow for moving a window by holding alt, left-clicking anywhere in the window, and dragging it to move, by default.
Some use Super+Drag. They usually also have resizing the window by right-click-dragging.
The OSTree advantages are also NixOS advantages
I am curious about NixOS, how are they similar or different? Is NixOS harder to set up? Where do the packages come from?
The packages come from nixpkgs, which is a huge GitHub repo with instructions on how to build packages. Nix, the package manager, interprets the instructions and builds the packages reproducibly.
Because it’s a github repo, anyone can submit new packages, but the changes have to be approved by a trusted person
Since when does Ubuntu disallow 3rd party repos? What is with all the misinformation being spread in this community lately?