N.E.P.T.R

Linux Mint is built on top of Ubuntu, which itself was a fork of Debian. Ubuntu is not something I would call a “clean base”. It is clunky, slow to adopt new technologies, and very (Canonical) opinionated. Linux Mint actively works against its Ubuntu base by removing Snap and other Canonical weirdness.

Tumbleweed and Leap offer the option to add or remove ANY package from your system before you even install it through their GUI installer, actually 2 GUI package choosers for either simple or advanced users. I don’t think it is accurate to suggest that Linux Mint is minimalist with its packages, especially when comparing to openSUSE distros.

I will not argue against Linux Mint being user friendly, it is pretty good. But “not bloated”, especially when comparing against openSUSE, is inaccurate.

How is Linux Mint less bloated? Linux Mint also suffers from poor Wayland support and isnt a (semi-)rolling release distro like Fedora or Tumbleweed. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone other than people who are tech iliterate. Even then, I would still suggest VanillaOS or Fedora Workstation. I used Mint as my daily driver for a year and it was fine, nothing amazing.

Bazzite is a good distro, I convinced a friend to move to Linux from Windows 10 and Bazzite was the only one that worked well with their nvidia hardware.

Nyarch honestly looks like a joke distro and most of its features are not worth IMO.

I used Tumbleweed for a long time as a daily driver and then as my admin workstation. Worked really well, GUI admin panels are nice, and I didnt find anything too difficult.

The weakest link of any secured system is the user. I know that will never change, especially as computers/software become more complicated over time. But I don’t understand why many people argue that “since the user is the weakest link, we don’t need more secure systems, we need better users.” We need both.

X.Org server has been largely abandoned by maintainers and developers.

Here are some links:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/30/x_server_lead_maintainer_declares
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-Abandonware
https://www.osnews.com/story/132507/its-time-to-admit-it-the-x-org-server-is-abandonware/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement

I would agree but it still heavily relies/requires X11 for many of the core components and apps. Wayland support on the horizon. For now though I wouldn’t recommend anyone use any DE that doesnt support Wayland, since X.Org is has been unmaintained for many years, it is a bloated protocol, and is insecure by design. This is because it was designed 40+ years ago in a time before security was a big concern to developers.

I recommend GNOME from a purely security perspective. Currently, “GNOME is the only desktop that secures privileged wayland protocols like screencopy.” It also has a nice permission system for (dis)allowing microphone, camera, and location access. I wish the developers were more open to encouraging customization of the certain GUI elements, like KDE. KDE Plasma does not protect against screen capture, though it is on their radar.

Canonical, the owners of Ubuntu, love to steal open source projects. They’ll help a project with development power, then force the contributors to sign a CLA (for an example see the fork of LXD called Incus). Canonical also uses and forces proprietary systems onto the user’s, e.g. Snap uses the proprietary and hardcoded Canonical repository, which Ubuntu now defaults to using Snap for installing packages.

Side note, if it wasnt for Snap using a proprietary backend and also depending on AppArmor (generally regarded as a weaker MAC than SELinux), I would prefer Snap over Flatpak. It creates a better sandbox (aka the actually Security of the software), avoids sandbox escapes, blacklists against broad permissions (e.g. $HOME access), and Snap packages generally have stricter permissions (which determines the real-world security of Snap). Sandboxing is very important for Desktop (and server) security. Android is does the best job of this, but it would be nice if projects like Sydbox, Crablock, or Bubblejail were adopted and built-in to the package manager.

But even without any of the previously mentioned problems, I just think Fedora is a better OS. Fedora comes preconfigured with SELinux policies to confine system services they are quicker to adopt new technologies. Fedora is also a semi-rolling distro, meaning packages are quicker to get updated than on Ubuntu. Fedora stays FOSS, where as Ubuntu becomes more locked down. Also, the package Brace made by the developer of DivestOS is great for quickly hardening a Fedora system.

Fixed

Since SteamOS isnt available on desktop, check out these distros instead:

Bazzite (the best option)

Nobara (another good option)

Waydroid run a rootful LXC container and removes disables much of Android’s security (for example SELinux). With a container escape, an attack could trivially gain root on the host.

Just get doasedit. I remember finding scripts that achieve similar functionality as sudoedit.

That sounds awful. I’m sorry your experience on Linux was filled with troubleshooting. Sounds like hardware issues.

My favorite distros at the moment for “ease of use” is Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue. They have a large user base and are well supported, making it easier to fix problems, which personally I have experienced very little.

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No one has until they look at distro watch /j

Some made a pull request with all the changes made already. The issue that the PR addressed was the excessive use of he/him in the docs when referring to developers (aka the person reading the docs). Contributors expressed that they didnt think using male only pronouns in the docs made much sense when referring to any developer reading the docs. This wasn’t some entitled person trying to force the ladybird dev to rewrite the docs, all they needed to do was merge the changes.

Thought so. Thanks for the reply.

This isnt for you, nor for me. I don’t need an AI-capable chip, I could just use my GPU if for some reason I wanted to run a local transformer model.