BladeFederation

Most anything that used KDE or GNOME will use all Wayland features. Every once in a while some distros with GNOME won’t but I forget who and they may have fixed it by now. KDE has better customization and looks more like Mint/Windows by default so I’d stick with that personally.

I use Fedora KDE. It gets more updates than Ubuntu based stuff but nowhere near what rolling distros like Arch do. It’s a very well documented “regular person” distro. I like their package manager better than apt. Can still use KDE Discover for just about any app installation. Downsides: you have to install Nvidia drivers manually, and sign them + your Secure Boot keys if you want to use Secure Boot. Not relevant to you though.

Bazzite is Fedora Atomic but with additional gaming tweaks. Atomic/immutable means you can’t break it, but also aren’t supposed to/can’t install native packages and drivers yourself. But Bazzite gives you everything you need from the jump like drivers. Also Secure Boot needs Universal Blue’s signature I think which isn’t too hard but you will have to look it up. You must use flatpaks only.

Cachy OS is Arch but with a sane installer that walks you through everything in GUI. It has even more optimizations than Bazzite, and is #1 for gaming. It also holds back updates slightly from regular Arch, so breaking happens less often. But it’s still “basically” a rolling distro, so breakage may happen. You pretty much have to use their app store instead of KDE Discover or whatnot. No Secure Boot.

Overall Fedora and Bazzite are both easy to medium difficulty at worst, but for different reasons. Cachy is medium difficulty but best at gaming & general performance optimization.

It definitely takes time, and stable distros should exist. Wayland has been the clear choice moving forward for 7 years though. It feels like Mint & a few others are just stalling at this point.

Wayland: display server. The thing that shows the visual stuff on screen. Wayland=new and more features (features explained below). X11=old but stable and takes time to transition from without bugs.

HDR: high dynamic range. If you have a really nice TV or monitor, this gives you better color accuracy. Make sure you have good brightness levels with brightness cranked up, or it will counter intuitively look worse, like the brown filter PS3 era of video games.

VRR: variable refresh rate. When you run a game, some parts are harder to render than others due to increased detail and things happening in the screen. Thus, your frame rate will dip, making a noticeable jittery effect that is not smooth, especially if you have a high refresh rate monitor. My monitor refreshes 165 times per second to detect changes, and if the frame rate goes from 140 frames generated to 90, that is very noticeable. VRR syncs the refresh rate of your monitor to the GPU itself, so it knows exactly how many frames it will be getting. My monitor will refresh 90 times for that second that I got a frame drop instead of 165, which drastically decreases the jittery effect of the dropped frames. You can still kind of tell, but it is more smooth and responsive in terms of what is happening on screen.

Heterogeneous displays: monitors of different resolutions.

Fractional scaling: this allows you to set display zoom at different percentages on different monitors, as well as setting non-integer scaling (integer is 100% to 200%, non integer is 100% to 125%). This is important because 100% scaling is often too small on high resolutions, and 200% is comically large. Also for the multiple monitor scenario, most people have a new monitor and their old monitor as the secondary. For example, 4k will require 150% scaling at least to be readable st most screen sizes. 1080p will look too zoomed in at over 100%, and not match the look of the other monitor.

In summary, most of this is going to matter only if you are a gamer or watch HDR content like movies on your computer. Having matching monitors despite non matching resolutions is pretty nice though. But if you have matching monitors or 1 monitor it doesn’t matter either. Hence, Mint is not a good choice for a gaming or home theater situation, but its hyper focus on being stable makes everyone else like it more because they never do anything different unless it is for sure going to work. At this point though, most distros are using Wayland with no issues.

And Arch is for trans people. Damn, when will they make a distros that straight people can use? 😔

That would include not installing Nvidia drivers though, no?

Interesting, are their really no other major differences than the container images? Have you ran into any additional hurdles with the atomic experience? You may have convinced me to try Bazzite or SecureBlue.

It is technically fully community driven though. And if you moved it up you’d need more squares. No way in hell is it on the same level of corporate as Ubuntu, or especially Android.

There’s an argument that it would be between Fedora and Ubuntu, since being immutable makes it more locked down and you are beholden to the devs to push out important updates like drivers. Then again it is basicallt customized Fedora Atomic so if we’re counting “Fedora” as an average of all Fedora versions, maybe not

They got pretty bad in the mid to late 10s, but build quality is a lot better now. No iPhone bend-gate level stuff in a while.

This did happen. Supposedly they stopped after they got fined. You can say liquid glass is a less blatant version of that hidden as a feature, but as far as I can tell they don’t directly do the “slow down” button for new hardware. And if we’re going to talk bloat, Microsoft is far worse. Linux is holding out for us.

You can get an M5 Air for under a thousand bucks with an education discount, which isn’t verified. I’d go for the 24 GB RAM 512 storagw version which would bring you to 1200. Might be able to snag an M4 for even cheaper if they’re trying to dump inventory. The Neo has a better chip than anything close to its price range of $500. You won’t be able to find better build quality OR specs for either of those 2 price ranges, let alone both. Believe me, I remember when they were overpriced 2k Intel machines. They’re not that anymore, they’re the gold standard, and looking even better with how Windows laptop manufacturers have gotten so greedy. You can barely find anything at all decent that’s x86 for under 1k. There’s a point where it doesn’t make sense to go Apple if you need a ton of RAM and local storage, but most people aren’t going to get a 128 GB RAM Macbook Pro.

macOS is demonstrably better for privacy than Windows. Better than Linux? Of course not. Sabotaging apps? Huh?

At the end of the day, I try to get whoever I can convince to go to Linux. I try to convince whoever I can to get a desktop instead of a laptop, especially for gaming. But if they NEED a laptop, or if they NEED apps that aren’t on Linux, especially creative apps like Adobe and CAD, I’m sure not going to recommend Windows, from any perspective, hardware or software. Microsoft is just awful these days, and has no redeeming qualities left, with Proton being as good as it is for games. So its going to be a Macbook. If they’re a student or general user with a budget that doesn’t need a lot of performance, get whatever refurbished business laptop you can get a good deal on with 16 GB RAM, 32 if you can swing it, for like 300 bucks, and put Linux on it.

Lol definitely not a bot. I’ve always been more of an Apple hater due to the ecosystem and business practices, but they’ve turned it around a lot in the 2020s. They’re still a trillion dollar company and not to be trusted, but yeah, they make great laptops.

I main Linux on my desktop and old laptops, like I mentioned. You can say ARM doesn’t belongin laptops but Apple has proven that’s not true. They outperform just about any chip, with battery life efficiency that is not even approachable by any other laptop chips. That’s just the facts. You can spend 3k for a laptop chip that is as good in performance as an M5 (which costs 1k), or you can get a Snapdragon chip that is almost as good as an M5 for efficiency, for over 1k. But not both. That’s where we’re at. Intel especially is asleep at the wheel. At least AMD is making good desktop CPUs still.

I’m also excited for RISC V, I’m considering getting one on an SBC to make a CyberDeck out of. It’s not come as far as ARM yet but it’s promising and we need an open standard.

I meant more if you have knowledge about something that wasn’t publicly known. This was 7 years ago and got btfo’d, hence the article about the firings you posted. Also everyone I know turns off Siri because it is useless.

Could you elaborate please? I’m interested to know.

For sure, it isn’t even only the corporate or specifically beginner focused distros that are like this these days either. Most distros have gotten with the program of having GUI choices for most things, easy ways to install proprietary drivers if they weren’t allowed tk bundle them already, and even their own ecosystem like an app store.

Some FOSS software does not work as a full replacement for missing professional software, but that’s about all that comes to mind as far as issues.

Hardware specs have gone up, prices have come down, competition prices have gone up, competition software has gone way down. The only way I’d recommend a laptop besides a Macbook is if you can find some nice second hand or refurbished laptops, preferably lightly used business class and/or from an auction. And even then, I’d only recommend it if they’re wanting to commit tk Linux and need a laptop specifically, or need a Windows only application. Vendors are really out here selling Windows laptops with 8 GB RAM, horrendous build quality, at damn near 1k. My work provided Windows machine is an i7 (2024 I think, maybe 2023) 32 GB RAM and sits at 16 GB RAM with my basic set of Office applications and browser tabs open. My work provided Mac has an M2 and 8 GB RAM, sits at a little under 7 GB RAM, and feels less laggy with the same programs and tabs open.

Desktops are a different story, though in specific use cases, Mac Studio/Mini/iMac are decent options too.

Huh? You don’t have to have icons on your home screen.

Have you ran into issues with Tahoe?

WiFi I can’t say I have a lot of experience with, just my home and work, and those work. One is 5 GHz, one is 2.4 GHz.

The keyboard shortcut to switch spaces works for me. So does the trackpad 3 finger gesture and magic mouse swipe. I’m on the latest update but it’s never not worked. USB-c monitor.

I also hate that direction, but that’s just tech right now unfortunately. Apple seems to be resisting most of it. Apple Intelligence is half assed at best, and not forced upon you. I forget it is there. Really just so they can say they did something Ai related for investors without actually wasting too much money.

Linux is better for telemetry obviously, and there should be zero, but again Apple is far ahead of everyone else, and mostly only strengthened their commitments, with some VERY noticeable exceptions like client side scanning in the UK. Even privacy enthusiasts like Michael Bazzel recommend it for privacy and security if you are too tech illiterate or need it for work stuff. After changing settings of course.

Storage options are abysmal but luckily there are encrypted cloud options, you don’t have to use Apple’s. I’m glad I am not limited to buying Apple’s storage, I need it for my data hoard at home. For work though it doesn’t impact me, cloud is better in fact.

“Unverified” apps is complete bullshit, you got me there. Everyone else seems to be pushing it too besides Microsoft and Linux. I will be PISSED if they take it away the same way they do on iOS, and I’m hoping the App Store monopoly lawsuits go somewhere.

M’lady

No but for real, that was one of the main reasons it took me so long to test Fedora. I associated fedoras (and Linux in general) with sweaty basement dwellers for many years. Not to mention “red hat” has a different connotation than it did in the 90s. Yeesh. But I’m glad I got over it, Fedora works the best for my needs and Linux isn’t nearly as hard as it’s made out to be. Might try Cachy at some point though.

I am curious to know what features you’re referring to. I’m not saying they don’t exist, I’m relatively new to the Mac train after all and I tend to not be as plugged into the Apple community because uh…well you know. The only thing I’ve heard is some people not liking liquid glass for a potential performance hit, but I haven’t seen any tbh. They’re also dumping Rosetta soon but I think it’s been a reasonable enough amount of time.

You know, over the last few years, I’ve gained a begrudging respect for Apple. They really care about UX, Ui, build quality, OS efficiency, battery life, and they’re even the best value proposition at several price tiers. I main Fedora and GrapheneOS at home, yes, but I enjoy macOS and iOS at work. macOS has some of those key professional applications that haven’t made it to Linux yet.

Apple is a pretty easy 2nd place in most areas, 1st for laptops specifically. Windows & ChromeOS can fight for 3rd but they’re miles below macOS and Linux.