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> Debian: something I can trust, that gets out of my way, and changes slowly.

Wholeheartedly agree. Debian has won the distro wars in my opinion. Their massive effort in safety and not breaking things means I can use stable as a "it just works" tool and focus on my actual work/fun.

Unfortunately, Debian is like Linux on desktop, always 80% there. You just cannot trust that plain Debian will get it right, even if it works that one time you install it. Two most recent issues that made me change to something else: 1) VLC in Debian is modified so it cannot play RTSP streams so you cannot watch video from your security camera. Windows VLC wroks. Flatpak VLC works. 2) Debian kernel update in point release broke NVIDIA driver so you cannot even see your desktop. Debian STABLE is just Linux kernel with old software. If it doesn't work now then it will definitely not work for next 2 years and if it does work now it can break at any time. All other Linux distros are not much better. Every update has 50% chance of breaking some software from distro repository but at least other distros fix their f-ups faster than Debian.

Debian and Devuan and OFC by proxy GNUinos has backports. Probably a newer VLC has been backported wit the bundled compile flags.

If not, run apt-get build dep vlc, apt-src the package, make the changes and debuild it.

I've been pretty happy with Pop (downstream from Debian/Ubuntu) myself. Not sure why it doesn't get much love compared to say Mint.

Linux Mint is basically what Windows should have been. An OS for productive use. Defaults are good enough that you’re almost never tempted to change them. Just install your software and do work. XP (SP3?) was it and Win7 was it too. Everything after that is fighting against you.

macOS is close too, but there’s a couple of painful points. Some basic windows management (solved by rectangle), iCloud doing too many things, and too much locking down for “security”.

I realize this... I was suggesting that Pop is every bit as ready to use as Mint.

How long have you got?

• The tiling is clunky, and underneath it's still GNOME, my #1 most hated Linux desktop.

• systemd-boot is clunky, does not play well with others, does not dual boot well at all, and it needs a huge ESP yet does not supply tooling to resize the ESP -- and Gparted can't resize FAT32 partitions as small as the typical ESP.

• It replaces Snap with Flatpak, which is not an improvement in any meaningful way: the only advocates who bleat that it's more open don't understand what the word means, and architecturally, OStree is a Lovecraftian horror.

• The installer is poor and could not handle using an existing `/home` partition when I first tried it (although that did get fixed). It is co-developed with Elementary, which is remarkable because the Elementary one worked better. They'd be better off learning what openness really means and working with Calamares instead.

• In summary, it shows many of the defects you'd expect from a distro designed by a hardware manufacturer: poor installation, poor handling of dual boot, poor handling of existing partitions, and poor handling of being put on an existing machine, especially an older one.

I find its advocates don't dual boot, don't use older kit, don't do complex partitioning, and so don't notice its defects and are unmoved because the problems do not affect them.

Gracefully handling interop and existing tech is one of the things Linux does best, far better than the BSDs for instance, and it is exactly where Pop OS falls down.

> architecturally, OStree is a Lovecraftian horror.

What makes you say this?

OStree describes itself as "Git for binaries".

Git is a Lovecraftian horror.

QED.

I mean, this is the stuff of jokes:

https://xkcd.com/1597/

Or

https://x.com/agnoster/status/44636629423497217

"git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space."

Generally I dedicate a drive to Linux and a separate drive to Windows, using a full disk option for Linux install. So, you are right, I'm unlikely to see a lot of the issues you mention.

I rsync my home directory, at least the subdirectories that matter to me, to my NAS and have scripts to do the inverse on a new config. A lot of what is important to me is either in my Dropbox directory, or in git(hub|lab) repositories. I don't have much else that concerns me generally on my local system.

I appreciate what Pop has done above/beyond Gnome, and looking forward to Cosmos, even if it may be a while.

OK. But as a general design principle, it's vital to understand what people actually do with your product, as opposed to what you intended them to do. See the concept of "Chesterton's fence".

> I appreciate what Pop has done above/beyond Gnome

As it happens, as far as GNOME goes, I agree with you!

I like GUIs. I like WIMPs. I am adept at managing my own windows, apps, and files, thanks. I like a desktop that makes it easy for me to manage it as I wish.

GNOME is not. GNOME is a desktop inspired by smartphones and tablets, and it hides window management and app switching as much as possible. No buttons for minimise/maximise. No visual list of windows or apps, unless summoned with a keystroke or a mysterious ambiguous keyword ("Activities") now replaced with an inscrutable symbol.

GNOME is a desktop for people who don't manage windows and who live in a few maximised ones all the time. I do not, so I don't want that.

Pop tries to take that and turn it into a tiling environment, with smart automatic window placement. I don't want that -- I know where I want my windows, thanks -- but I appreciate that they tried and I think as a result it's better than GNOME which tries to make the whole issue go away.

But I tried it, and I wouldn't use it from choice.

Font rendering (kerning specifically) is horrific. Scaling for 4k monitors doesn't work right. Multimonitor doesn't work properly. Paddings/margins, font sizes, and icons are all over the place and lack consistency/polish.

It also doesn't have a reliable backup system included (rsync is not reliable; backups should use snapshots) and you can't roll back system updates if something breaks (which will happen). Bluetooth, audio and suspend/resume still don't work consistently.

Linux isn't all bad but if you expect things to Just Work you'll be sorely disappointed.

Linux is a power user tool and I think that's great. Linux Mint and others are trying to lower the learning curve, but they don't have the same resources that Microsoft and Apple have. But they do manage to do well.

You can create a distro that do all these things well. But that would require coordination across the board and result in something close to Android or Chromebooks.

> Bluetooth, audio and suspend/resume still don't work consistently.

That's a hardware problem. Most manufactures don't bother building drivers for linux or releasing the specifications for their devices.

You can't do rally without knowledge in cars. Linux for the most part is raw computing so having some computer knowledge is a necessity.

I've run Debian stable + Flatpaks for a while now because new software matters, and it is a good experience if your hardware isn't brand new.

Been playing around with Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite though, and watching bugs get fixed instead of working around them is surprisingly refreshing.

Funny enough, I argue the exact same thing... about openSUSE.

In Mac vs Windows I'm Mac for $reasons. That said my personal daily driver is desktop (not laptop) Linux. I've used primarily Macs at work for several decades; that said, my work focuses on systems running primarily Linux these days, and occasionally BSD or in the distant past VMS (once in a while some embedded stuff). I run Linux in a VM on my personal laptop so that I can run KDE desktop apps in the native Mac windowing environment (X forwarding).

Working for a threat mitigation company, I built KDE actual with Brew on my company-issued Macbook. Admittedly that was masochism. We didn't use Brew for anything; we didn't do any development at all on our laptops. Fast forward. I transferred to the threat intel team; we did some work in VMs on our laptops, still no Brew. We got bought.

New overlords wanted to swap spit / infect themselves with that threaty DNA so loaned me to their prod team. They did all their development in Brew, and deployed to cloudy Linux. They said "use Brew, be like us" and I said no way I am doing that, because my laptop touches bad shit; everything needs to be isolated; loan me a different laptop. But no can do. So I used the devops runbook (and submitted edits!) to build the deployment environment in VMs on my laptop. Prod didn't take kindly to this and threw me back. Left shortly thereafter for $reasons.

But not before I made a runbook for the threat team. Some months later heard through the grapevine that the threat team had been tasked with red teaming the actual deployed system which prod was responsible for and that the pwnage was epic.

The moral is obvious: your security team shouldn't be the only team eating dog food.

> At home, I no longer dual-boot because I vm.

Curious, do you have a Windows host and Linux guest(s)? Or the other way around?

I currently have Linux as my primary with a Windows guest OS for when I need it (e.g. Office - I actually think Excel is great - or if I'm doing any Win32/C++ dev). But, I'm thinking of doing it the other way around on my next PC.

Windows host, because I play VR games and GPU passthrough would be inconvenient.

I just fullscreen the linux VM and it feels native for all the non-3D tasks I do with it. Even media viewing is a breeze.

My experience has been that Linux is significantly more stable under a VM on Windows or Mac than directly on all but the most conservative hardware. Fewer weird multimedia glitches, no needing to involve any part of the Linux wireless stack of any kind (Bluetooth especially, but also WiFi), fewer video driver issues, fewer program or windowing system crashes.

Because the virtual hardware is a more stable surface, than the plethora of hardware Linux is supposed to run on.

That is what I have been doing since hardware virtualization became mainstream.

Currently doing the same with macOS as the host. Still have the nice apps but with a better dev platform.

Doing the same thing, it's fantastic.

I know, I've nearly forgotten all compatibility woes!

When I made my linux vm, I actually just took a real linux system's drive and told vmware to just use the drive as-is.

So, it was really convenient to no longer have to deal with driver nonsense, while retaining the original disk.

Makes sense!

What's the current best virtualisation software on Windows in your opinion?

I tried searching online for this. And quickly realised that highly ranked sites targeting Windows users are quite low quality.

Sadly, vmware, which scares me now that broadcom owns it. It's had the best balance of seamless + good-enough graphics performance (for media, not games)

My personal rank is

vmware

virtualbox

qemu

I never tried hyper-v by itself. vmware actually can use hyper-v as a hypervisor if its enabled (as you need it when using WSL), but its inferior to using vmware's own solution, as I end up with weird networking behavior. it does work though.

I think on linux qemu may be the best, but on windows it is rough. I think vmware just has better video technology and better integration technology, such that its easy to copy-paste files, share clipboards, full screen etc.

> replace finder, to replace the dock with a taskbar, and to rebind the keys, so that everything acted like linux/windows

What apps did you use to accomplish this?