Ah yeah that looks perfect, just get WayBlue Hyprland then! That sounds like exactly what you need.

No need to mess about with user services in systemd and display manager config.

NixOS

Alternatively (speculating here), you might be able to use Nix to install Hyprland onto an existing immutable distro like Silverblue.

Nix people please chime in!

My condolences!

I have never heard of WattOS but that sounds terrible.

It seems like antiX is a systemd-free Debian flavor.

If you want systemd, why not just use Debian? Or, if you are looking for a nice preconfigured DE/WM, any of a number of Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.

Mint for best out of the box setup, Pop!_OS for tiling, Zorin OS if you’re looking for a funky styling, any of the Ubuntu derivatives for the major DEs: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.

Obviously, I can’t tell you about the privacy implications of every internet routing device on the planet.

I was just trying to provide a more complete and longer TL;DR than the one I was responding to.

Sounds like you know what you are doing as well as anyone could, you don’t need my TLDR

TL;DR: Don’t buy Mesh WiFi, especially if offered at a low price/subscription by your ISP. Use old-fashioned routers and access points.

If you already have or really need Mesh WiFi, consider installing a VPN client on every single device that supports it. A VPN config on your router will not protect your data from the spying WiFi Mesh Pods.

Great post! Completely agree! I will add that for filling out PDF Forms, Okular is amazing!

chezmoi does basically that, without actually making your home dir a git repo, it just syncs it. It also supports templating and per-machine differences. Pretty cool really.

SMB is originally Windows tech. So it might not play nicely with file modes?

Distro version of Firefox worked wonderfully for me on EndeavourOS (Arch repo / Wayland / Sway) and Pop!_OS 22.04 (Ubuntu base / X11 / GNOME)

Completely off topic, but: I’ve been trying Fedora (KDE spin) for a few months now, and I’m flabbergasted at how unusable the distro version (not the Flatpak) of Firefox is. I think it’s a codec issue as I’ve checked Firefox is running in wayland mode, but:

• video calls (Zoom, Slack) don’t work.
• despite installing every codec I could find through Fedy, a package manager for non-free Fedora repos.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Edge flatpak works flawlessly.

Are you using a flatpak browser too? If not, how did you get your browser to work?

I really like Fedora otherwise: up-to-date kernel and modern (very efficiently stored) packages, but properly tested with major releases, btrfs and systemd by default and commonality with RHEL is useful at work.

But these codec issues are pushing me back to Arch…

Exactly! If you only have to edit small text files on a server once in a blue moon, nano is much less biomemory-heavy. But if you regularly write docs and code in l vim or neovim, it starts to pay off after a week or two.

I really enjoyed learning to quickly select and change entire words or lines, doing things like: :%s/replace_this_text/with_that/g Etc. If you enjoy that, you will soon get to a point where you miss the motions in your regular editor and install a vim extension in VS Code and stuff, just before fully switching to neovim

Try running this: vimtutor

If you are already aware of hjkl, skip to the part where you learn motions:

/motion

Then look up surround (ysw is usually the command to surround a word, ys3w the next 3 words, etc)

It’s pretty neat.

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That’s amazing!

I get it, I actually use the exact same distros you mention: Pop!_OS, Endeavour and Fedora.

Had the same experience with Pop!_OS: those few things that did not “just work” but needed tinkering caused quite some issues. And yeah, somewhat more bleeding edge than Ubuntu LTS is nice: to use neovim on the 22.04 base, I’d need to use distrobox or build vim from source, but on Fedora and Arch, it “just works”.

I liked Endeavour, though I haven’t really used it with a DE, I went with Sway. So hard to compare, but the manual sysadmin intervention everyone keeps talking about has been minimal. AUR is amazing, pacman is fast and sane.

I went to Fedora because it is bleeding edge enough, but seems better tested and more stable than Arch. Also wanted to see how BTRFS is setup on there and test the rollbacks. The codec stuff has been terrible though. Even after enabling RPMFusion and installing a bunch of them, the Fedora source Firefox still refuses to do video calls in MS Teams. I’m using Flatpak browsers now but downloading flatpak updates is way slower than even the worst package manager for “native” binaries. Feels a bit odd to have to use a Flatpak for the browser.

If I had to install a new pc today, I’d go EndeavourOS with KDE (which I’m using on Fedora now), BTRFS and systemd-boot. I got to know systemd-boot in Pop!_OS and have tried a different boot manager (rEFInd), but systemd-boot is amazing.

Genuine question: what is it about Fedora that keeps you coming back? I have also used Debian based and Arch based distros, as well as Fedora.

Ubuntu does not require the model either. It’s an optional service that Canonical offers. They just market it in a weird way (inside the package manager)

I’ve been trying to explain that choosing to pay for this “extended security service” this is completely unnecessary if you just upgrade your OS every few years.

I think the average Mint user is not a wealthy enterprise with tons of systems they don’t want to upgrade so they don’t need to consider this, whether it’s available for their distro or not.

IIRC, Canonical is using Ubuntu to push an “extended security maintenance” program or something like that.

These kinds of services are all the same. RedHat does it, Microsoft does it, many others too probably.

The idea is: (stop reading if any of these don’t apply)

• You are a huge enterprise with lots of money
• You have a lot of computers with a lot of complex, (manually tested and badly designed) programs/systems that are strongly coupled to and dependent on the specific configuration of those computers.
• Thus, you HATE upgrading all these computers to new OS versions
• You would love to pay a company to give you a sense of security by providing monthly security patches so you can keep using your old OS
• You don’t really mind that this is fundamentally flawed and insecure because the cost of upgrading to a new OS version is too great for you to pay: you’d rather take a subscription for shitty bandaid.