It’s still in active development, but you might want to keep an eye on Plasma Bigscreen. I’ve been looking for a similar setup to you, and it seems to tick all of the boxes, at least for me.
I only learned about it recently, and I’ve been too busy to try it in that time, but I’ll edit this post with my impressions once I get the time to have a play with it.
Imagine downvoting “Be careful what you expose to the internet”. I thought I’d got away from Reddit.
Well this thread is an absolute shitshow.
Jellyfin is great, but if you refuse to let yourself understand that Plex’s ease of setup for remote access is a point in its favour - especially when sharing with non-tech savvy people - then you’re just as bad as the supposed “Plex shills”.
Plex is well on the enshittification train, and I’ve always been a bit concerned about how private it may or may not be, but there’s absolutely no way I’d have been able to share a Jellyfin instance with my grandfather, especially as his dementia got worse.
I don’t know whether it’s me or my hardware, but display managers seem to absolutely hate me. I’ve tried quite a few, and I’ve always encountered some sort of issue within a few days. Even on distros that install and set them up automatically for me.
Since I’m the only user of my computers, I’ve set mine up to log me in and startx (well, now the Wayland equivalent) automatically, bypassing DMs altogether. If I decide to experiment with other window managers/desktop environments, I just change the line in my bashrc.
If you have a 3D printer that can’t connect to the internet, you could try Octoprint.
or going to a protest
I’d suggest you may be better off not bringing your phone at all, in this case.
I’ve tried some weird and wonderful partition schemes in the past, but I think I’ve settled down and just go for simplicity. Half a gig for /boot, and the rest for / (in ext4). I’ve tried btrfs, but I’ve never been in the position where I needed snapshots, and ext4 is a lot more simple.
I also like having the flexibility of not having a separate home partition. I back up my super important files, so it doesn’t matter if I lose home (not that I distrohop much anymore, anyway). And I don’t have to stress about whether I’ve made my root partition big enough. For the same reason I use a swapfile rather than a swap partition (though I do need to look in to zram and zswap) - I like knowing that I can resize it easily, even if I don’t really plan on doing so.
Any reasonably modern, well maintained desktop distro should be fine; whether they’re “for gaming” or not shouldn’t matter. I’ve successfully run WoW on both Debian Stable and Arch.
I really need to stop being lazy and swap to Jellyfin…
Fedora’s always run really sluggishly for me on whatever hardware I’ve tried it on, so I don’t recommend it in general because my personal experience with it hasn’t been great.
Even ignoring this, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for beginners due to how it tends to jump on the latest hip new software. For some users this is a massive point in Fedora’s favour, but I’m not sure how much I’d trust a beginner to, say, maintain a BTRFS filesystem properly. Not to mention the unlikely, but still present, possibility of issues caused by such new software.
…this looks like it was written by a supervisor who has no idea what AI actually is, but desperately wants it shoehorned into the next project because it’s the latest buzzword.
I think they’re cool as a technical feat, but I’d be far too worried about breaking it to ever buy one. The fact that the crease is visible even on brand new devices looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
Fedora was never that great to begin with
I always just found it to be really, really, ridiculously slow. I swear DNF might rival Windows in terms of update slowness and it seems to permeate the whole system.
I built my first PC in a Bitfenix Prodigy. The blue LEDs they used for the power and HDD activity lights were brighter than a thousand suns. I ended up disconnecting them.
While I admit that the timing with Red Hat’s closed-sourcing is really bad, and I’m also going to start avoiding Fedora for the same reason, saying that opt-in telemetry (that one can literally read the source code of) is “putting dollars first” is really dumb. Do you think the same about Debian’s popularity-contest, which has existed since 2004?
This really depends on your definition of “stability”.
The technical definition is “software packages don’t change very often”. This is what makes Debian a “stable” distro, and Arch an “unstable” one.
The more colloquial definition of “stability” is “doesn’t break very often”, which is what people usually mean when they ask for “stable” distributions. The main problem with recommending a distro like this, is that it’s going to depend on you as a user, and also on your hardware.
I, personally, have used Arch for about 5 years now, and it’s only ever broken because I’ve done something stupid. I stopped doing stupid things, and Arch hasn’t broken since. However, I’ve also spoken to a few people who have had Arch break on them, but 9 times out of 10, they point to the Nvidia driver as the culprit, so it seems you’ll have a better time if you have an AMD GPU, for example.
such as the GUI installer pamac allowing unsuspecting users to trivially install unvetted packages from the AUR without even a clear indication they may be dangerous
Unless something has changed since the last time I used Manjaro, this isn’t actually true. You have to go relatively deep into Pamac’s settings menu to enable AUR packages, and when you do, a popup comes up telling you what the AUR is and why it might be dangerous (although iirc, it neglects to tell you that an extra reason is Manjaro packages being out of date).
Not that I’m pro-Manjaro, for all the other reasons you’ve given.
Manjaro was my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can’t recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.
Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don’t get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it’s possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.
I think that if one wants “Arch with an installer” they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the archinstall script.
Arch.
I’ve done a reasonable amount of distrohopping, but I always come crawling back because I’ve never found anything that can compete with the AUR.
Custom ROMs were always a pretty niche thing, and they’ve become much less worth it since:
So unless there’s an old feature you want to keep (LG Quad DAC diehards represent), or you’re super privacy-conscious, most people aren’t going to bother.