this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
314 points (98.8% liked)
Linux
48338 readers
385 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why are debian-based systems still so popular for desktop usage? The lack of package updates creates a lot of unnecessary issues which were already fixed by the devs.
Newer (not bleeding edge) packages have verifiably less issues, e.g. when comparing the packages of a Debian and Fedora distro.
That's why I don't recommend Mint
This is where I see atomic distros like Silverblue becoming the new way to get reliable systems, and up to date packages. Because the base system is standardised there can be a lot more QA as there is alot less entropy in the installed system. Plus free rollbacks if something goes wrong. You don't get that by default on Debian.
Distrobox can be used to install other programs (including GUI apps), I currently run Steam in a distrobox container on Silverblue and vscode with all of my development stuff in another one. And of course use flatpaks from FlatHub where I can, these are more stable than distro packages imo (when official) as the developers are developing for a single target with defined library versions. Not whatever ancient version Debian has or the latest which appeared on Arch very soon after release.
I've tried Debian a couple of times but it's just too out of date. I like new stuff and when developing stuff I need new stuff and it's not good enough to just install the development/unsupported versions of Debian. It's probably great for servers, but I think atomic distros will be taking over that space as well, eventually.
I need to play around with that sometime. Is it a chroot or a privileged container or is it a sandboxed container with limited access? How's hardware excelleration in those?
It's just a podman/docker container. I'm pretty sure it is unprivileged (you don't need root). I've tried it on both NVIDIA (RTX 3050 Mobile) and AMD (Radeon RX Vega 56) and setting up the distrobox through BoxBuddy (a nice GUI app that makes management easy) I didn't need to do anything to get the graphics drivers working. I only mentioned BoxBuddy because I haven't set one up from the command line so I don't know if it does any initial set up. I haven't noticed any performance issues (yet).