If you want simple, GNOME Boxes is hard to beat.
LeFantome
joined 1 year ago
“I would use Debian but Debian doesn't have the greatest security defaults. (No selinux profiles out of the box)”
https://reintech.io/blog/securing-debian-12-with-selinux
Depending on where you fall in the release cycle, Debian Stable will give 2- 3 years of support.
There is also the Debian LTS effort:
Not “out-of-the-box” but adding selinux to Debian is pretty simple.
As suggested elsewhere, I think your requirements map quite well to Linux Mint. I prefer the Debian Edition but it has a shorter support window ( not LTS ).
If you want / need selinux then you may prefer the RHEL camp. Others have proposed Rocky. I would do Alma ( especially given your security focus ). Either way, the desktop software is going to be ancient and package selection limited. One solution is Flatpak. Another is distrobox.
An Alma desktop with applications coming from an Arch install via Distrobox would be the best of both worlds. The desktop and overall environment would be rock stable, secure, and boring. Yet the library of applications would be huge and, once installed, they would stay very up-to-date.”
SELinux is available on Debian though: https://reintech.io/blog/securing-debian-12-with-selinux
It is excellent to see explicit sync. It is now is GNOME, KDE, XWayland, and Mesa. We just need the NVIDIA driver that supports it and that is coming soon I believe.
Most users will not see this until the fall distribution releases unfortunately. Rolling releases will be proving it all out soon though so it should be in good shape for the masses by year end.
Having these basic Wayland issues addressed and equalizing the experience between NVIDIA and other GPU hardware is a big win for everybody.
For Wayland, I think you need the unreleased xfce-panel from GitHub ( 4.19+ ).
Not disagreeing
Noble was used already
Nervous Numnut?
For anybody else following along, XFCE is working on Wayland support. In fact, the only component not already supporting Wayland in Git is XFWM4 itself. Wayland will ship officially as part of the 4.20 release.
They are creating an abstraction library that will allow XFCE to support both X and Wayland. Other desktop environments are going to use it as well.
We should be clear on our terminology here. Debian Unstable is called that because the package “versions” are not stable ( change ). It is not really a comment on quality although more frequent change also implies more opportunities for issues to be introduced. In Unstable, Debian may introduce disruptive changes either to configuration or even to the package library itself.
Regardless, taking a snapshot of Debian unstable and then separately supporting those packages completely eliminates these issues. That is what Ubuntu does.
Ubuntu LTS now offers up to 10 years of support without having to upgrade a release. This is far more “stable” than anything in Debian, including of course “Debian Stsble”. In fact, it exceeds the stability of Red Hat Enterprise.
I have not used Ubuntu in many years but I have been considering using it again for some server use cases precisely because it is now so “stable”. I still do not like Ubuntu on the desktop and do not like snaps in particular. I do not think snaps impact any of the server packages I would use though and I do not expect Canonical to introduce them during the support lifetime of a particular release.
For personal use, the 10 years of support is entirely free. That is pretty compelling.
Both Pop and Mint offload much of the heavy lifting to Ubuntu. They are not rolling everything from scratch.