Sounds like you want EndeavourOS.
Installs in a few minutes to a fully configured and usable desktop environment of your choice. It is Arch ( uses the same packages, uses the same kernel, has access to the AUR ). A huge benefit of the Arch repos is the up-to-date package universe as well everything you are likely to want being in the repo or AUR.
Don’t underestimate the maintenance and reliability benefits of not having to cobble stuff together from multiple sources.
While I agree with you, what is attractive about Manjaro that you want that EOS does not offer?
I also tend to see EndoeavourOS as a great Manjaro replacement because what I want is a high-quality, opinionated, and easy to install no-nonsense distro that offers a massive repository of very up-to-date software in its repos.
I used to think Manjaro looked better but I installed it recently and I did not like it as much as the default EOS look. Perhaps I am just conditioned.
The only thing that stands out for me that people might prefer about Manjaro is the graphical package management. Of course, it is a one-time, one line command to install the very same package manager in EOS that Manjaro uses. Does that disqualify EOS as a Manjaro replacement?
You may already know this but you can run OPNsense on top of Proxmox. That may mitigate the driver issues you are having.
BSD is well designed and cohesive but has many more missing bits and contraints than Linux. So, if you are in its sweet spot, it is awesome and maybe better than Linux. However, outside that it can be totally unusable.
For me, the biggest issue is the lack of software. There is both a mountain of it as it is of course an POSIX compatible OS and at the same time it is trivial to need important software that is missing.
As a desktop, it therefore feels very nice and also very limiting.
I love that it is actually real UNIX with an unbroken history back to the beginning. I find that really compelling. At the same time, I always get “bored” using it because it inevitably does not support what I want to do.
I am still hoping Chimera Linux finds a sweet spot that melds the two worlds in a nice way.
First line of the the description of Zorin on zorin.com/os
“Zorin OS is the alternative to Windows”
Totally agree.
I think they had or have commercial aspirations. That along with the strong desire to curate the experience are likely what lead to the walled garden effect.
The problem with walled gardens ( well, I hate them always ) is that they only work if you have the resources to pull off the full experience by yourself. Elementary really never had that and, before they could get there, they stumbled internally and killed their execution. It is going to be really hard to get it back.
Whatever their original aspirations, salvaging what they have into a distro agnostic DE is probably their best hope for relevance and survival. With a curated Flatpak store, they may even be able to someday pull off their walled garden in a cross-distro way. If it ever became big enough, they could take another run at being a full distro.
As it is, Elementary is on borrowed time. That would be the case even if the Wayland clock was not ticking but ticking it is.
If it runs under WINE, it will probably be higher performance and of course integrates better into the rest of your system ( eg. files ).
If it does not work under WINE, it will probably work in a VM. So, depending on the app, this may be the only choice.
Apps that depend on talking to specific hardware ( including the GPU ) do not always work in a VM.
So, it depends…
ARM is a recent development and frankly not that big a problem at the API level.
Absolutely.
A lot of it is just the organization and leadership within the projects themselves. The GNUstep guys struggled for a long time. Just agreeing to implement the Mac APIs instead of just the NeXTstep ones is a thing.
Regardless of how attractive projects are, they can be run well or badly. Without trying to disparage anybody, look at the progress of WINE vs ReactOS for example. And if you think it is just because kernels are hard, look at Linux or Haiku or SerenityOS vs ReactOS instead.
But the popularity of Windows made the Win32 APIs more commercially viable as well and so you get companies like CodeWeavers and Valve that really accelerate the WINE effort. That wind at your back really helps.
In what way?
The binary formats are not compatible, not even the format of the files themselves. Linux uses ELF. MacOS uses MachO.
True, macOS is more or less POSIX at the base but the API Mac applications are written to is not that at all ( Cocoa ). GNUstep exists for a reason. Sadly, it is not very mature. It is certainly not a trivial undertaking though as there have been a number of attempts over decades and nobody has really pulled it off.
The Win32 API on the other hand has largely been implanted on Linux. A few Win32 APIs are even being added to the kernel.
Going the other way is easier. You can port POSIX stuff to macOS fairly easily.
Ubuntu was the “original” easy-to-use Linux desktop. It expanded into that demand and still enjoys the market share it got when nobody else was really filling that niche.
Mint exists explicitly as a fork of Ubuntu and enjoys less success as a result. Many, including me, think Mint does a better job at being a solid desktop option than Ubuntu and is kind of the goto distro for that now ( not still not as popular as Ubuntu still is ).
Elementary is a curated desktop for people that really like coherence and design. That is, first of all, a more demanding target. It is perhaps too ambitious for their scale. And they have stumbled in execution. The task might be easier if they focussed on just being a DE ( desktop environment ) that other distros could use.
An “official” Ubuntu or Mint spin would have a real shot.
I use the version of VirtualBox that has been modified to use KVM as the back-end. Do you know if it has the same problems?