• 25 Posts
  • 216 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • … I do not want to argue with you and Linux hardware support certainly is much better than decades ago (I was there, I know :-P) … but even my hardware, which was bought with Linux support in mind, I have several problems… one of my laptops WIFI card has problems with Linux sleep mode, one of my Lenovo machines has audio trouble with the microphone after being used for longer online calls and the list goes on. I hope that I am just very unlucky with my hardware picks, but when you have known hardware components in a mass produced device like Google Pixel, I hope we get Apple level support of hardware.


  • Unless you invested a lot of money and time, you are certainly already running an OS with a lot of BLOBs at the most important parts (WIFI driver, etc).

    Given AOSP and a decent smartphone, I am basically at exactly the same level I am with running Linux on my desktop. Actually, the smartphone could be better, if it is a Pixel, because at least I’ll have 100% hardware support. … and again, AFAIK one will be able to run Debian in a virtual environment.

    Long story short: I would never buy hardware with vendor lock in, but middle to high class Android smartphones are actually standardized hardware which run excellent with Linux. Total win for me.




  • Thank you for your elaborate response!

    I brought up the standards to simply understand if there are any benefits following them. After the whole discussion it seems it does not matter at all for my personal needs (but now I have a more informed understanding).

    What I really liked is learning about the Fish shells ~/.config/fish/functions directory, this IMHO makes sense in contemporary Linux and is a great idea.





  • Thanks, I think I get the idea, I just don’t understand the number-prefix, why did you start this convention?

    (Btw.: For some years now I stick to the convention, that everything import is under one sub directory under my home. As long as I have a tarball backup of that sub directory, I am good to lose the whole hard disk w/o fear (e.g. ready for a clean upgrade, distro hop or just go traveling w/o fearing that I forgot to switch off the oven ;-)).







  • Debian stable (ok, writing this on Debian Trixie which is not stable yet, but nonetheless works w/o trouble in a virtual machine).

    I am using Debian for work and on my servers.

    Why Debian? Because for my use cases there are no real alternatives at this moment.

    • I need stable support for Aarch64 and AMD64, which already rules out nearly every other distribution
    • For desktops I use a highly customized Gnome, which takes some work and my workflow depends on a few plugins, which rules out Fedora
    • For work I need some 3rd party software repositories which again rule out fast moving distributions and other non mainstream distributions
    • By now I think I run Debian and distributions based on Debian for nearly 3 decades, everything I need works stable and good enough at this moment and I accumulated a lot of knowledge about how things work in Debian
    • Some of my hardware needs workarounds (not because it is too new), and again I know my way around Debian and how to patch/fix things for my hardware
    • It is nice that I can use Debian for my desktops and my servers on all hardware I own, I would not want to have to learn different Linux systems for desktops and servers or have different versions of software (think Fedora vs. RHEL/CentOS/Alma etc.)

    Every 6 month I’ll boot Fedoras live cd and play around with the newest Gnome/KDE, but seriously, for at least the last 5 years I never feel like essential improvements are pushed in the newest iterations of Gnome/KDE and I can happily wait the maximum of 2 years until they are released with Debian.

    Saying that, I also own a Steam Deck and as an entertainment/media station I totally love what Valve is doing there. I would also be totally happy to run a De-Googled ChromeOS if it would support all the platforms/software etc. I need. For containers I’ll also happily use Alpine Linux, if it is possible, but again, I’ll mostly default to Debian simply because I know my way around.

    In the end, an operating system is just a necessary evil to allow me to do what I want to do with a computer. As long as I have a stable OS which I can tweak to my liking/needs automatically and central package management, I am good. (Unless it is your hobby to play around with your operating system ;-)).