Why are these mainstream media journalists going out of their way to make Linux work and look harder than it is?

You don’t need to open the terminal to install software or configure anything, that’s literally the whole point of every big DE that ships well made GUI apps.

He solved his problem by switching off of Ubuntu to Fedora, I think I almost shed a tear lmao

Their dumb counter argument was AVIF, for the same reason as webp which is reduced total size since they’re a massive cloud provider and want to penny pinch costs wherever possible.

JPEG-XL also has a progressive loading algorithm that increases the quality as you download instead of classic vertical scan loading, which is sick but I don’t think any browser actually bothered to implement it yet after the Google hit job.

Hopefully will see it in action soon.

I really don’t want Apple to enter this market because then all the current OEMs will just be even more incentivized not to make generational advancements, and to just copy Apple’s Chinese grade quality to sell more slop because idiots will buy.

Google already threw a grenade with their subpar pixel fold and then Samsung magically swapped off snapdragon for their zflip. If Apple joins, next they’ll start using plastic for the shell and still charge $999.

People who think this won’t be a competitive product can just look to the past 20 years of Apple successfully selling stupid shit for exorbitant prices. I would even bet money it comes with an even deeper crease than current gen foldables against the “new hinge tech” hype this guy is claiming.

Okay so step one is to take GNOME and throw it into the trash where it belongs, and replace it with KDE which is a complete DE and not a bunch of plugins disguised in a trench coat of bash scripts.

Step two is to recommend a distro that targets both user quality and latest stable kernel releases for the most updated modules (Like Fedora or OpenSUSE)

Linux needs to adopt executable installers for software packages that can be downloaded on the web

Is the wrong problem because that’s what Flatpak accomplishes without creating distro dependency hell. Regressing to .run and .appimage files for everything is why windows updates suck total ass, and it would nuke one of Linux’s most killer features.

Users are already used to an appstore on mobile, I can personally guarantee you that they have no trouble getting accustomed to a desktop app installer, especially since they find it so much easier to search and click install without opening a bunch of websites. Since it shows both package manager and flatpak apps, they don’t even have to be aware of the backend system.

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The only thing holding back linux at this current point in time is honestly just vendors using it standard in consumer hardware. The dependency hell issue was resolved years ago by both huge improvements in package repos and the widespread support of Flatpak. The leftover baggage from X11 has been replaced by Wayland, which finally became viable around end of 2023. Even stuff like pulseaudio has been replaced by pipewire to handle every edge cases scenario.

I would not have said the same thing 2 years ago. The evidence is that the linux desktop user base is growing at an increasing rate. All they need is to hit a critical share (6-7%) for bigger vendors and OEMs to follow.

The good news is, as mentioned, there are a lot of vendors that are starting to do this. Valve’s steam machine by itself could be enough to add another 10 million users if they play their cards right.

My other anecdotal evidence is that I successfully changed several of my friends and family members over to Fedora just last year because I finally found it viable to throw at any former Windows user.

The only dissatisfaction I caused was one “dependent” person who couldn’t play Fortnite (the only game in their library that didn’t work), which I audaciously told it would be possible in 2026 via waydroid/lepton (valve plz dont fail me lol).

zswap and zram becoming highly critical software again trying to shove your fat 16Gb allocated application into 8Gb of RAM with room to spare:

iirc they weren’t even the first ones to discover this because there was already someone on the blackmarket selling data collected from exposed cameras and endpoints which included PII of entire police departments.

AFAIK this has already been a problem, you can find Samsung M.2 SSDs for cheaper than Samsung SATA SSDs at the same capacity, because their cloud customers have all flown past classic SATA/SAS for NVME U.2 and U.3, which is much more similar to M.2 due to NVME.

I was planning on adding a big SSD array to my server which has a bunch of external 2.5 SAS slots, but it ended up being cheaper and faster to buy a 4 slot M.2 PCIe card and buy 4 M.2 drives instead.

Putting it on a x16 PCIe slot gives me 4 lanes per drive with bifurication, which gets me the advertised maximum possible speed on PCIe 4.

Whether or not the RAM surge will affect chip production capacity is the real issue. It seems all 3 OEMs could effectively reduce capacity for all other components after slugging billions of dollars into HBM RAM. It wouldn’t just be SSDs, anything that relies on the same supply chain could be heavily affected.

How I sleep knowing Fedora + podman actually uses safe firewalld zones out of box instead of expecting the user to hack around with the clown show that is ufw.

I could be wrong here but I feel like the answer is in the docs itself:

If you are running Docker with the iptables or ip6tables options set to true, and firewalld is enabled on your system, in addition to its usual iptables or nftables rules, Docker creates a firewalld zone called docker, with target ACCEPT.

All bridge network interfaces created by Docker (for example, docker0) are inserted into the docker zone.

Docker also creates a forwarding policy called docker-forwarding that allows forwarding from ANY zone to the docker zone.

Modify the zone to your security needs? Or does Docker reset the zone rules ever startup? If this is the same as podman, the docker zone should actually accept traffic from your public zone which has your physical NIC, which would mean you don’t have to do anything since public default is to DROP.

relaxes in XFCE

Do these updates not go through any rigorous testing at all

Lol no, MSFT infamously dropped their entire Hardware QA team after WIndows 7 and instead relied on the also infamous insider hub to get QA “feedback” from home users instead, leading to the also infamous Windows 8 disaster and slightly less infamous critical CVEs that went unaddressed because MSFT ddidn’t even bother to read the insider hub posts.

Oh and they didn’t learn anything and kept running with the insider hub well into Windows 10 & 11.

They sort if did this with Windoes Vista, but instead of fixing issues, they just removed a ton of vulnerable code, which resulted in a bunch of dropped features lol.

Seriously for all the protests and walkouts over Gaza last year, my main thought was “didn’t you know MSFT/Google/Meta is literally evil?”

I can’t blame anyone for wanting a stable income, but you might as well be working for Lockheed Martin. There’s a reason why these megacorps stay in an oligopoly at the top, and it has nothing to do with talent or quality solutions.

Yeah except I have never seen anyone actually suggest Zorin OS for this purpose due to its controversial pro edition.

There are other distros that achieve the same thing. My point is that Zorin is making money off of something I could do with zero effort, which implies its not even worth making a pay to use distro when one of the inherent benefits of linux is that its free.

I could understand if Zorin provided some groundbreaking software like Crossover, which for a long time had some serious advantages over wine and proton (yes I know irony that all are based on wine). But as other people have pointed out, most of this OS is just a reskin + preinstalled app combo. Might as well just use Nobara, which GE made in his spare time with some lazy scripts for Fedora.

Bruh ain’t no way people are choosing Zorin OS over all the available options.

If this is a result of people searching “best windows like distro”, they’re profiting off of a windows theme for GNOME, not even a full DE.

You can achieve the same thing with zero effort on any distro because DEs and themes aren’t tied to a distro.

Its still lagging is its MRs, like HDR coming in just less than a year ago.

Valve’s complaint was that even after getting approval from at least 3 DE projects, protocols were not getting merged due to hypothetical discussions and implementation baggage.

I imagine it all started with them making their gamescope compositor a few years ago and realizing a bunch of stuff was still missing.

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

Check if you have ffmpeg-free or ffmpeg (from RPMFusion)

Honestly forgot which codecs+encode/decode aren’t included in Fedora’s free build, but I think they don’t include some parts of H264, H265, and other proprietary codecs.

Yes Yes I have been continously using it and it wasn’t viable until around late 2023 and early 2024.

My complaint isn’t that it sucks now, its that it sucked for a solid decade doing nothing.

proper HDR

Is completly up to each compositor to implement properly. Its still experimental in KDE because afaik theres no proper SDR + HDR tone mapping for mixed apps on the display, like a desktop.

Valve made their own compositor and cheats the problem by ensuring their client and overlay supports HDR colors + only having to handle the HDR from game output.

full VRR support

Not if you have an Nvidia GPU before 2017, and again already a thing in X11.

no screen tearing and reduced latency

Again, VRR and wayland’s ingenious solution to this was triple buffering, which is a pure software solution that adds latency making it unsuitable in several cases like this: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3373

The clipboard also works fine

Welcome to Xwayland clipboard hell: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/6132

Its not that Wayland can’t easily fix any of these issues or that the other major improvements you mentioned are not worth it, its that it took Wayland like 13 years to do so.

Most of this should have been sorted out in the first couple years of development. People were already making fun of Wayland back in the day for pretending to be “decoupled from the graphics hardware” and then deciding on the aforementioned triple buffer.

Wayland didn’t even merge in HDR support until 9 months ago: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14#note_2777587

Fedora (with KDE Plasma) or OpenSUSE tumbleweed (with KDE Plasma)

Mint is good but its kernel is usually slightly out of date and it still has upstream Ubuntu issues.

Other Ubuntu downstreams are subpar imo.

Plus Fedora & OpenSUSE ships with SELinux if you want MAC security support.

The only downside for Fedora is you have to enable 3rd party software after install and run a couple of commands to swap to full ffmpeg and Nvidia drivers if you have Nvidia hardware. I think OpenSUSE might ship with these enabled but I forgot.

Wayland is responsible for kneecapping linux desktop in so many ways its infuriating, especially since linux basically figured out the golden standard of UX design back in the 2000s with stuff like GNOME 2 and Compiz.

It’s such an unnecessary burden with progress as slow as ripoff projects like star citizen.

I hope valve picks up the slack with frog protocols or at least gets PRs merged, because it would be stupid to ship steam machine and then explain to the user that the clipboard doesn’t work yet, even though it used to work perfectly fine in X11.