Posted by kingcrimson1000 5 hours ago
Mine keeps shoving full screen backup reminders in my face.
Skip for now. Maybe later. Not right now.
It’s a work machine, but not on a domain, and I don’t use an MS account.
Ubuntu is outdated linux, it part of Debian-family, which goes by the misleading name 'stable'. Its not stable like a table. Its stable like software versions are frozen, despite bugs being fixed.
Fedora isnt Arch, I think most Debian-family users don't realize they are unrelated. Fedora is just well maintained and generally up to date.
I switched to Fedora this year, and I've been super pleasantly surprised. There are some sharp edges (Mostly due to Wayland and Flatpaks), but I don't think I'll be going back to Debian any time soon. Things seem way more stable than on Ubuntu.
In your experience, does Fedora handle these better than Ubuntu?
edit: I use it on a thinkpad, ymmv
Bluetooth sucks on Debian-family because the kernel is from 2024... Fedora's kernel is from 3 months ago.
Anyway, enjoy Fedora. Fedora is so good, I won't call it Linux.
Tried again a few months ago and it's a breeze with an llm creating all the commands and code and troubleshooting.
eg vibe coded a text transcriber similar to windows Voice Typing.
I recommend for people that want things to not change and not get new bugs every update to use an LTS distro like Kubuntu and only get latest kernels or drivers from a PPA or upstream if you really have to. I am not running the latest KDE stuff and I feel fine, I am not suffering in pain for some cool new feature in Plasma and some new bug, I am comfortable with the existing features and existing bugs.
Ironically, my best experience so far in that regard is an arch variant (CachyOS).
That said, people shouldn't be afraid of experimenting to find the best software for their purposes, and something like Linux Mint is still a great option to recommend to people who are new to Linux.
There are some valid usecases to use rolling or some bleeding edge distro, like if you want to contribute to KDE or similar project you would want to track latests library versions, but for doing say a web dev job and soem enterteminent an LTS distro works better, you do not upgrade and you have the surprise that GNOME removed yet some new feature you were using, or soem stuff in Plasma broke and now you get a ton of notifications about something not working, or maybe you did not read the Arch forums before upgrading and you had cool package Y that conflicts with cool package Z and now your system is unbootable and you need to fix it instead of doing your actual work. (Arch fans should first Google Arch upgrade briked my system before commenting that this never happened to them).
Btw I used Arch in the past too when I had more free time and loved thinkering with my system.
Tumbleweed is good for a mostly stable, clean KDE distro, but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming or codec integration. The first-class btrfs snapshots are probably my favorite feature.
I want to have VMs that are kind of like Arch but a little bit more stable, yet have very latest versions of everything I need with minimal risk (no need for the bleeding edge at all times; Manjaro does this semi-okay with its two weeks grace period).
But "stay on an older version to be safe" is not the panacea many try to pretend that it is. Way too many bugs and security vulnerabilities on old versions as well.
I recommend docker-compose based tools, especially dockge [1]. It drastically cuts down on the surface of weird things you have to deal with. Just put up a reasonable distro (I recommend Debian here, since Fedora tends to get some SELinux issues which would confuse beginners), install docker, and run it. You don't have to touch anything else system-wise (maybe except setting up encryption when installing)
Most self-hostable services provide docke-compose files, which you can just paste in with some customizations, and run it from there.
Tailscale for external access is probably the easiest solution.
I got my brother, who's not a techie and who lives at the other end of the world, to install Proxmox and get GPU passthrough working.
> Just put up a reasonable distro (I recommend Debian here
Proxmox is basically Debian.
Proxmox allows to do things that are totally overkill for beginners indeed but it's still simple to use for simple stuff.
I think we should encourage beginners, like my brother, to use solutions like Proxmox, not discourage them.
Most games using anticheat won't run on VMs without a fight too. Your Proxmox supports taking a memory snapshot and restore, which would allow most cheats to work if they are convenient enough.
For every person like your brother we have many more half-serious people who need some type of reward before committing more mental effort. Wtf is a storage pool? What do I do with all these clusters, high availability thing it keeps asking about? Flattening out the learning curve is a nice benefit on its own.
The virt-manager is easy for most Desktop folks looking to drop Win11 in a frozen backing-image sandbox with a local samba folder loop-back mount (allows fake network share in Win11 or MacOS guest OS.) =3
For anything more complex (e.g. GPU passthrough) you will need to drop into manually modifying XML files.
(user group setting issue is a common hiccup)
It pretty much just automates the standard Qemu/kvm setup workflows. =3
Also, nobody should be buying an (overpriced) Raspberry Pi for self-hosting, when used mini-PCs are faster, more reliable (no SD card, better cooling), and often cheaper.
Finally, I don't think you should use Proxmox in a home setting: too much abstraction, too much overhead (mainly memory). Use Docker where it makes sense, and deploy the rest bare metal.
I'll take my turn on the soapbox to say I hope people keep posting about their adventures and misadventures in trying something new. I'd much rather be reading that than seeing yet another post on LLM-based agentic startups or pelicans riding bicycles.
Root cause: Ubuntu and some other distros recently switched to a GUI backend called Wayland. I don't remember upgrading, but maybe it happened during a system update? It has disabled low-level device inputs except for mouse movement. You can use window-based events instead, but IMO this is a mistake. An OS-level function shouldn't block hardware access. I want the OS to facilitate software and hardware; not create friction.
Desktops like gnome have dropped support for x11 so you can expect that wayland will be the only way to do things from here on out.
There is a compatibility layer called "xwayland" that should work, but there's definitely some rough edges between x11 apps and wayland apps. x11 gave all apps a pretty large ability to intercept information from across the system. Wayland locks that down pretty significantly.
Feel free to get in touch if you want to talk to someone (for free advice) about this porting problem you're having.
Overall it seems much more performant if that makes it any better
No, since I'm on Mint, and thus still on X11.
I keep hearing about Wayland problems, and I pray they don't reach me when Mint switches; that the relevant problems will have been fixed by them time Mint does switch.
I updated Nvidia drivers from version 580 to 590 on Ubuntu 24, using the additional drivers window. Rebooted. Now instead of the OS, it's booting into something called "BusyBox (initramfs). with a shell. No error message. I don't feel like dedicating an indefinite time to fixing it. Maybe now LLMs will have replaced searching forums and Stack Overflow.
It is this class of problems that has kept me from switching. I'm not sure if it would be easier to track this down, or install the OS clean again. I lament having to make this decision.
ChatGPT: Ran me in circles as you describe; suggested a number of things I didn't understand, including commands that don't work in the BusyBox shell. (It's not a normal shell)
Gemini: Nailed it on selecting an older kernel in the Grub menu.
This is why everyone in the linux world has a very sour taste for nvidia. It's not their fault per-say, but they did opt to go this route versus contributing their drivers to the kernel like everyone else.
I wish I could fix the things, I'll fully cosign the beef the hacker community has for Apple on that front. That being said, I don't see myself buying a Windows laptop anytime soon.
The workstation which I use as a server is only powered up when I need it.
> I used Syncthing for file synchronization and PiHole as my local network DNS server to block unwanted incoming traffic.
Nitpicking but a local DNS resolver doesn't block unwanted incoming traffic: it prevents unwanted domain names from resolving. Arguably if it blocks traffic then it's ongoing traffic that it blocks.
Maybe he meant that the machine running PiHole also runs a firewall? I use unbound, not PiHole, so I'm not that familiar with PiHole (maybe PiHole also acts as a firewall?).
Just one suggestion, I would put the lab network on a separate vlan and access it through a VPN (or tailscale, netbird, etc.) that way you don’t bother with any security risk and only you can access it once you are authenticated to the network, and even if you want to expose a service to the public, you can do so by reverse proxy or service-specific features like funnel from tailscale, so you replace ddns and portforwarding and keeping things secure.
>There are still issues with driver and software compatibility but it is getting better in the recent years thanks to projects like Wine and Proton .
OP, stop using outdated linux. Debian is intentionally outdated. You will never have a good experience with drivers when you are always using 2 year old kernels and software. 99.9% of humans think the word 'Stable' means bug free, but that isnt what Debian means by it.
I recommend Fedora, which is not Arch, its just up-to-date linux.
So as of today the latest "stable" release of Debian is a month old.
By contrast the last stable release of Fedora is Fedora 43, released on October 28, 2025 which four months old at this point.
Really once you get software that works all of this is pointless anyway, you have working software and you update once every year or so, or when you find you need to.
When you "need" to update is so personal that it cannot be predicted, but your FUD about Debian being universally old and outdated is clearly misleading at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
Have you used Fedora? After using Fedora I was actually offended how bad Windows was and how bad Debian family was.
Its the best OS I've used in my lifetime by what feels like an order of magnitude.
My only terminal commands were to unblock some minecraft ports for my kid. You won't find a Ubuntu/Debian user with that experience.
Debian Trixie, to my knowledge, comes with Linux kernel 6.12 LTS. Many people with more modern hardware want the most modern Linux kernel -- currently 6.18 -- to support their devices. There are also countless stabilization patches (I heard some of my acquaintances praising their Linux kernel upgrades as finally giving them access to all features of various Bluetooth periphery but did not ask for details).
Having a modern kernel is important. With Debian though, it's a friction.
Can it still be done? Sure, or at least I hope so as I want to repurpose my gaming machine as a remote worker / station and the only viable choice inside WSL2 is Debian. I do hope I can somehow make Debian install a 6.18 kernel.
Furthermore, you putting the word "need" in quotes implies non-determinism or even capriciousness -- those two cannot be further from the truth.
Arch and Fedora can't come to WSL2 soon enough.
...and none of that is even touching on the issue of much older versions of all software in there. I want the latest Neovim, for example. For objective developer experience reasons.
Debian stable is for purists or server admins. Not for users.
There’s the backports repository.
Admitting that getting 6.18 on Debian is some sort of insurmountable mountain is not something I would do in public while trying to show off my expertise. I'm not running it, because I don't need a kernel that's been out for 5 minutes and offers me nothing that can't wait a month or two. I'm running what's current on testing, which is 6.17.13. It's about a minute of work to switch to testing. I run stable on all my servers, and testing on my laptops, it is a triviality. But to all you bleeding edge software people, it's somehow rocket surgery.
> Many people with more modern hardware want the most modern Linux kernel
To run the latest version of Progress Quest. Need biggest number available.
> Arch and Fedora can't come to WSL2 soon enough.
So, it's really still Windows, then. I assume you've moved from spending years ranting about how Linux people were purist server admins and Windows was for users and just worked, and now you've chosen the same posture after being pushed out of Windows.
> Debian stable is for purists or server admins. Not for users.
You're not a typical user. Most users want a functional computer, not the largest numbers they can find.
I genuinely don't care to show off expertise. I just want a distro that works.
All the best.
We're so fucked from a security perspective.