Debian KDE: Right Linux distribution for professional digital painting in 2024

When I was talking about switching to wayland with a colleague, who was already moved over at the time, he tried to convince me that having no copy paste is better for security.

And I, using a password manager that generates unspeakably complex passwords everywhere, was kinda stunned by that blindsightedness.

If you don't want copy and paste, use Qubes OS. That's the philosophy matching the rest of the architecture of the OS.

But as long as you have a binary named "[" on your system, don't try to convince people that you are doing it in the name of security. There is much more rotten fish to throw away before that.

The only thing that recently convinced me to give wayland another go is hyprland. Seeing all kinds of nice WM concepts being implemented in it, maybe hyprland is "the interoperability specification" we needed all along.

You're speaking as though there is someone out there operating without that capability, when my experience has been the opposite. If that was the case you'd hear about it in every single "Wayland is bad" video, instead of the usual focus on nvidia (which I also have no issues with, even using Prime).

Yet, I’m back on Windows, I like well defined screen, I have a 4K another one of lower resolution, to handle that well, I need Wayland, heck KDE just sometimes has less features or less solved bug on X11 now.

And at night I just want to watch one or two things before sleeping, I just need to turn my screen to my bed, and choose one the suggestions of plateforms like YouTube or Netflix with my mouse. …Yet, sometimes I like to type something, it’s usually short so I just use and on screen keyboard program which I’ve still wait to find one that works for Wayland.

This is so dum, it’s crazy to me that we used to fly away from all the dysfunctions of Windows to go the sane Linux ecosystem to only find that is starting to look a bit absurd on that side too. And we look at the discourse of Wayland devs, they speak exactly like corporate would do.

So that and few package management breakage and I think this is also a weak point of the ecosystem, tends to break, to upgrade everything when you only need one thing, too complex too trouble shoot.We usually think we have superior technological paleform on with Linux kernel, but package management is one of the weak point IMO.

All of that pushed me outside of Linux for now.When I encounter something that looks infuriating on Windows, I just think I might see something like this on Linux.

Edit: typos

Concerning AppImages: I have no interest at all in them and although Flatpak still has its share of problems, basically all important communities adopted it (but Ubuntu).

Flatpak integrates in your system, has sandboxes, has automatic updates, shares dependencies etc.

Is Flatpak perfect or running w/o problems? Certainly not.

But IMHO AppImages add nothing over Flatpak, but lack the unified infrastructure and integration into packet managers etc.

We all would benefit from agreeing on one standard, and by now it looks like Flatpak is that one standard. So, I don't want to download random AppImages from the internet, I want a certified Flatpak which integrates with my system.

(Being a member of the Linux community for longer than most people using Linux are alive by now, of course and invetible, once Flatpak is working and established, it will be replaced by some broken other solution. :-P)

I think most people don't like AppImages mostly because they don't provide any sandboxing. I think that's a silly reason myself, but I'm also an old, and us olds aren't terrified of using our computers like the youngs seem to be ;-). Though, other OSes are getting sandboxing for applications and Linux needs to not get left behind, so I'm glad it's being solved.

I also think fragmentation is a (valid) reason people dislike AppImage also. It's nothing wrong with AppImage specifically, but that its existence harms adoption of Flatpak by making it easy for people to not use Flatpak. Personally I see them occupying different niches. I use App Images for things like Kdenlive, Logseq, Upscayl, and UHK Agent. Those could all be Flatpaks, but developer effort matters. If devs provide an App Image build I think we should be praising them from the rooftops for caring about Linux!

Another reason is that it clashes with immutable OSes like Fedora Silverblue or SteamOS that are heavily container-based.

What I'd love to see is a tool that takes an App Image and automatically builds it into a Flatpak (possibly with predefined metadata). Flathub could easily be populated this way so that it's easy for developers/distributors to package and ship, but also Flatpak is the standard.

I think they are all worse than the other packaging methods

With a NixOS configuration I can install almost all software I use in a single command

Even in window I mostly use scoop/chocolatey

The fundamental problem is that AppImages are literally just an archive with a bunch of files in them, including libraries and other expected system files. These files have to be selected by the developer. It's really hard to tell which libraries can be expected to exist on every distribution, which libraries you can bundle and which ones you absolutely cannot due to dependence on some system component you can't bundle either, or things like mesa/graphics drivers. There's tools to help developers with this, "linuxdeploy" is one, but they're not perfect. Every single AppImage tutorial will tell you: Test the AppImage on every distribution you intend this to run on.

At the end of the day, this situation burdens both the developer (have I tested every distribution my users will use? both LTS and non-LTS?) as well as the user (what is this weird error? why isn't it working on my system?), and even if this all somehow works, newer versions of distributions are not guaranteed to work.

Flatpak, for all its bells and whistles, at least provides one universal guarantee: Whatever the developer tests, is exactly what the user will experience. I think this is a problem that needed solving for many people.

...it hurts a lot to say this as a longtime flatpak avoider, still always prefer distribution packaging, but I've come to accept that there's a genuine utility to flatpak, if only to cover for letting users test different versions of software easily, and similar situations that distributions just cannot facilitate no matter how fancy their package manager.

The missing piece is perhaps some sort of AppImage installer which can be registered as the handler for the AppImage filetype. When ran it could read metadata (packaged as part of the AppImage?) and generate the support files. Ideally would also maintain a database of changes to be rolled back on uninstall and provide a PackageKit or AppStream provider to manage updates with your DE's store.

Now none of that addresses dependency duplication, but thats clearly not in scope for AppImage.

If an app is so hard to distribute in any other way, that to me is a red flag that the app is not up to my quality standards or otherwise violates my sensibilities in some way. On my Linux desktop, I am very much in the camp of "that which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent".

(I fully recognize that I am extreme outlier in general, and perhaps a slight outlier among Linux users. Just offering one perspective, I make no claims that this it the correct perspective for most Linux users.)

After using Ubuntu for years, this change made myself and many others I know switch. I've been on MX for the past two years and love it.

> As a user I want to download the thing and run it. AppImages provide that.

Because Linux userspace libraries aren't designed to handle long term binary compatibility. There is no guarantee that a simple package upgrade or a simple distro version upgrade will not break things.

There is no guarantee that an Appimage will continue working 3 months later. If it relies on web communication, there is no guarantee that the application will stay secure since you have to bundle core system libraries like OpenSSL with your application (unlike Windows and MacOS).

I will even go and say especially GNU stuff is made specifically to make reasonable (imo at least 5 years) binary only i.e. closed-source software friendly distribution hard.

It is the culture adopted by all middle layer libraries and desktop environments too. The only supported form is source and every piece of software in Linux world assumes it is built as a part of an entire distro.

That's why Snap and Flatpak actually install a common standardized base distro on top of your distro or why Docker in its current form exists (basically packaging and running entire distro filesystems).

Only way to get around it is basically recreating and reengineering the entire Linux userspace as we know it. Nobody wants to do that.

Creating long term stable APIs that allow tweaking is very difficult, requires lots of experience in designing complex software. Even then you fail here and there and forced to support multiple legacy APIs. Nobody will do that unless they are both very intelligent and paid well (at the same level as an Apple, Microsoft or Android engineers). It is not fun and rewarding most of the time.

FWIW my package manager of choice is GNU Guix, which solves all of the same problems as snap and flatpak in a much more elegant way.

Loudly declaring your ignorance is not an opinion. If really cared, you would go look at the large volume of the well-thought-out complaints. But you don't.

Yes. And no.

About 70-80% of AppImages I downloaded in the past didn't even start. 100% of my installed Flatpaks have been running fine on any distro I tried. I would love a world where Flatpak was redundant, but it very clearly isn't.

To me that also raises the issue of Snap/Flatpacks and Wayland both handling part of sandboxing/capabilities. Ultimately if you want to handle how your apps can be run and got resort back to lower primitive and you’re handling very different things like files acces(Snap/Flatpacks) and visual elements(Wayland) and maybe got back to the Linux kernel to handle that.

I'm on an immutable distribution (Fedora Kinoite) so installing native packages is discouraged. I have everything running in Flatpaks, even Steam and all games. I haven't experienced any performance impact. I think Snaps do something weird with squashfs, but Flatpaks just set up and manage symlinks to dependencies via ostree.

AppImages are good for certain use case. Recreational vehicles are also good for certain use cases. But just as a I don't live in RV parked in my garage when I'm at home, I don't use AppImages as my primary way of running locally-installed software on my main system.

> As an app developer I want to create one single package that works everywhere that users can just download.

You should just release source tarballs (or static binaries if you're not FOSS), and let the distros do their job of packaging and distributing the software. AppImages are fine to maintain in parallel for specific use cases, but I just want normal software binaries running in the OS environment I've already set up to my liking, not embedded in someone else's encapsulated runtime environment that's inconsistent in dozens of ways from my system config.

> Most software is best installed by the native package manager. For the few exception AppImages are perfects.

Exactly. But static builds are far superior to AppImage.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

When I tried installing Linux on there, I had a ton of trouble getting Wayland to work in any capacity (it was very glitchy when I tried), and I had to go back to X, before nuking the Linux install and going back to macOS.

I think is more probable that anyone will have a problem in Wayland than X

There's a pending Mutter MR[1] to allow XWayland applications to handle the scaling themselves (which IntelliJ IDEs can do) but it hasn't been merged yet, and I'm probably never gonna see it on 24.04 anyway. Apparently KDE already supports this, but the Gnome folks have been reluctant to adopt the same approach.

I ended up going back to 100% scaling, increasing the system font size, and then setting `GDK_DPI_SCALE=1.25` in `/etc/environment` to tell all GTK programs to increase their scale. It's not perfect, but most things are the right size. I definitely would not have wanted to switch to Wayland any sooner than this though. Transitional periods are such a pain.

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3567

It does matter who is willing to work on code. And no one is willing to do the work on the X11 codebase that it needs.

That's it. Plain and simple.

Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen.