KDE, just because it's a good balance of usability and customisability.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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I don't think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It's an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.
OpenSuse has this by default, but I'm back to good ol' Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created pre and post snapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.
Nice use case for snapshots! :-) I'll put it in my backlog, perhaps it is a nice insurance for my crash prone machines.
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- NixOS
- disko + nixos-anywhere (automatic partitioning & remote installation of new systems)
- stylix (system-wide theming)
- agenix (secret management)
- impermanence (managing persistent data)
- nixos containers for sandboxing applications & services (using systemd-nspawn)
- TMPFS as /
- LUKS
- BTRFS as /nix (might try bcachefs)
- SWAP partition (= RAM size, to susbend to disk)
- Greetd with TUIgreet (DM)
- SwayFX (WM)
- Kitty & foot (term)
- Nushell (shell)
- Helix (editor)
- Firefox (browser)
- slackhq/nebula (c.f. self-hosted tailscale, connecting my systems beyond double NATs)
EDIT1: fix "DE" -> "DM"
Now that's quite an interesting NixOS setup, I'm especially intrigued by the tmpfs root portion. The link you provided was a great read, and I'll keep this and honestly most of what you've described in mind for when I mess with NixOS again.
There are also these two blog posts by elis on setting up tmpfs specifically. Though these posts rather are setup guides, than "talking about the philosophy" of systems design.
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- LUKS
- Btrfs
- sway
Nobara KDE user here. One of the reasons why I chose it is because it comes with many of the customisations that I'd normally do (such as using an optimized kernel). But in addition, I use:
- Opal instead of LUKS
- KDE configured with a more GNOME/macOS like layout (top panel+side dock)
- GDM instead of SDDM, for fingerprint login
- Fingerprint authentication for sudo
- TLP instead of power-profiles-daemon for better power saving (AMD P-State EPP control, charging thresholds etc)
- Yakuake terminal (and Kitty for ad-hoc stuff)
- fish shell instead of bash
- mosh instead of ssh
- btop instead of top/htop
- gdu instead of du/ncdu
- bat instead of cat
- eza instead of ls
- fd instead of find
- ripgrep instead of grep
- broot instead of tree
- skim instead of fzf
Impressive list! What is the benefit of using Opal compared to LUKS?
Opal drives are self-encrypting, so they're done by the disk's own controller transparently. The main advantage is that there's almost no performance overhead because the encryption is fully hardware backed. The second advantage is that the encryption is transparent to the OS - so you could have a multi-boot OS setup (Windows and FreeBSD etc) all on the same encrypted drive, so there's no need to bother with Bitlocker, Veracrypt etc to secure your other OSes. This also means you no longer have a the bootloader limitation of not being able to boot from an encrypted boot partition, like in the case of certain filesystems. And because your entire disk is encrypted (including the ESP), it's more secure.
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My next project is to slim down my Gnome desktop installation, but I guess this is quite common in the Debian community.
This is pretty easy on Debian.
- Uncheck all tasksel entries during initial installation
- Reboot
sudo apt install gnome-shell gnome-terminal nautilus - Reboot again.
It'll boot right into a fully functional Gnome desktop and hardly anything else. The only extra software this installs are yelp, gnome-shell-extension-prefs and network-manager-gnome. Uninstall them with sudo apt purge and sudo apt autoremove --purge if you don't need them. sudo apt install cups if you need printing and remove your wifi device from /etc/network/devices to let network-manager-gnome handle wifi if you use it.
Your system will require 2.8GB of disk space.
Yes Debian, then use Flatpack to get all the latest desktop software and enjoy.
Yep, that's exactly the purpose of this.
Thanks for the list.
The way I setup my minimal systems is to uncheck everything during tasksel, then switch to another virtual console, chroot to /target and install what I need. Saves one reboot and hassles, when installing via thump drive. (Did this for Xfce in the past.)
I've never had a problem with ext4 after power failure.
Zram is not a substitute for swap. Your system is less optimal by not having at least a small swap.
Firewalls should never default to on. It's an advanced tool and it should be left to advanced users.
Not to mention how much grief it would cause distro maintainers. If they don't auto configure the firewall they get blasted by people who don't know why their stuff isn't working. If they auto configure they get blasted by people upset that the auto configurator dared change their precious firewall rules. You just can't win.
Honnestly. Firewalls shut be enabled by default. Specially on laptops connecting to public places.
A good default shut be choosen by the disteo maintainer. A default shut not overwrite your own config. Like any config really. So no upset folks that like to change the firewall. Also if you dont block much outgoing trafic you are not likely to run into problems. And for people that like to poke holes in the incoming trafic. Your a "advanced" user anyway.
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What is the difference between physical swap and having a swap partition on ZRAM, especially for the kernel? To the best of my knowledge, nearly no Linux distribution supports suspend to disk any more, any ZRAM swap looks for the kernel like ... swap. Thanks to the virtual file system. Further, I have high trust in the Fedora community, which decided to use ZRAM.
We can agree to disagree about the firewalls, especially for people who don't now why their stuff isn't working, it protects them and is much better than having unconfigured services with open ports on a laptop in a public network IMHO.
Why does not having swap make the system less optimal? Considering obviously it has more than enough ram available.
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What about fedora silverblue? Would it have saved you?
I totally love the idea of Fedora Silverblue and UBlue. Played around with Silverblue and perhaps it will replace my Debian installation on my multi media laptop. Still, no substitute for Debian since the kernel is too new/fast changing (problems with VM and I don't want to pin an old kernel w/o security updates forever) and I have a very custom (but fully automated) setup via Ansible, which wouldn't work like this on Silverblue. (I would have to use Ansible for the host and then create a lot of custom containers, to the best of my understanding.)
- /boot and root partition: i dont use swap (i dont need it, i have plenty of ram) and i usually encrypt the root partition with luks
- ext4: ppl keep telling me btrfs is better and all that but idk shit about filesystems and ext4 just works
- any x11 wm: currently im using qtile and ive used bunch of wms in the past
- alacritty: its fast and it has easy config with great doc
- firefox with arkenfox userjs, ublock and tor proxy configuration
- (neo)vim
- qemu/kvm/virt-manager
- doas
- fish shell
Well, almost the opposite of you, I currently use Fedora Silverblue (including BTRFS which I very much appreciate for versioned backups), except that I override GNOME Software (never got it to work properly for me) and Fedora's Firefox (I use the Firefox from Flathub but not Fedora).
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Xfs filesystem and a kernel with BORE scheduler, which are the default on CachyOs for a faster and snappier system.
Once, some years back, I posted a topic on how could I slim down my Gnome DE.
It sparked a rather long and complex discussion and the bottom line was that Gnome integration was already at a point where so many parts depended on so many it was not an easy task.
I opted to move to a GTK compatible DE. Currently I use XFCE but spent years with Mate.
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Fedora Workstation (i.e. the Gnome one)
Separate /home partition
Then the only other changes are to a few keyboard shortcuts, icons, and changing Firefox to a GTK4-style theme.
I'm coming back to linux as a main desktop, finally ditching windows (again). I tried out fedora workstation and the fedora KDE spin. KdE looks so good now, before i atteibuted it to a windows wanna-be knock off. This was back in the windows xp days... now it looks so polished. I probably prefer it to gnome because I've been a windows user for so long but gnome is nice with its minimal approach, looks nice and clean. Can't get away from how nice KDE looks though, I'm going to stick with that I think.
Gnome with Wayland: I am just too used to the touchpad gestures and sleek looking apps to go back. Even windows looks and behaves janky in comparison
Firefox: plain better than the alternatives, the scrolling is so much better under Wayland too
The auto dark mode GNOME extention: it between dark and light mode depending on the time of day
Rounded window corners GNOME extension: forces all 4 corners of applications to have rounded corners
Separate /home partition, very useful for distro hopping or in case just going the nuclear option and reinstalling everything is the easiest way to deal with a breakage
Nothing radical, but I've used mplayer as default video player since FreeBSD 4.0, and that's not changing any time soon. VLC is good and all, I just prefer mplayer.
Oh, and for general purpose storage partitions I use XFS, as it plays nice with beegfs.
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EndeavourOS as the distro of choice for easy installation and AUR access.
Depending on the DE, if it's not MATE, I almost always install Caja, Engrampa, and MATE Calculator since they just have the most sane look and UX to them for my use cases.
- Waterfox as my browser of choice (reason over Firefox is that it offers tabs below address bar as an option in Preferences rather than mucking about in userChrome.css files that often break on updates)
- Vivaldi as a secondary browser for websites that only render right in Chromium
- Kitty as my terminal of choice.
- Clementine as my music player of choice
- yt-dlp for downloading Youtube videos as mp3s
- htop over top, also have gotop for a more graphical look
- exa over ls
Interesting browser choices. ;-) I like what I see from Vivaldi, but I rarely need Chrome compatibility and Chromium is in the repositories of all distributions I use, so I never opt for Vivaldi. Just a personal preference or any good reason to use Vivaldi over Chromium etc.?
Honestly because it's quite customizable, that's about it. Being able to customize my software to look and work the way I want them to is a big reason why I use certain programs over others.
- Void
- EFI and LUKS partition, containing an LVM with root/home/swap. Ext4 partitions. I'm vaguely aware of btrfs and zram but haven't taken them for a spin yet.
- ufw
- wayland
- basic plasma install + desired apps.
i always use:
- KDE
- yakuake
- kate
- vlc
- fishshell
- gparted
- firefox
no matter what the default might be
- btrfs unless I know I'm not gonna use it that much (might check out bcachefs soon)
- Kitty as the terminal, life is better without fancy multiplexers
- Firefox
- fastfetch > neofetch
- zsh without oh-my-zsh
- tbsm as DM (if available)
- Hyprland as the WM
- Plasma if I have to use a DE
- ~~Swapfile instead of partition so I don't risk losing my data if I don't have enough memory (haven't checked out ZRAM yet)~~ Welp that changed quickly, ZRAM looks insane
- GRUB as bootloader, also a separate install for every distro, kinda just out of fear that I'll break it somehow
I tried to use kitty but I have to ssh in to remote machines often for work, usually one of a few hundred edge devices, and I can't configure them all to work properly with it. Is solid ssh support just not a deal breaker for others?
I never had a reason to use SSH after I switched to Kitty.
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