Dev needs to eat.

• xtream
• mpv

It’s a simple IPTV app. It supports m3u as well as xtream. It can be controlled by keyboard and opens videos/streams in a new mpv window.

I really like it although it does not do advanced things like showing program etc.

Arch requires reading the manual to install it, so installing it successfully is an accomplishment.

It’s rolling release with a large repo which fits perfectly for regularly used systems which require up-to-date drivers. In that sense it’s quite unique as e.g. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has less packages.

It has basically any desktop available without any preference or customisations by default.

They have a great short name and solid logo.

Arch is community-based and is quite pragmatic when it comes to packaging. E.g. they don’t remove proprietary codecs like e.g. Fedora.

Ubuntu is made by a company and Canonical wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best. This makes them develop things like snap to work for them (as it’s their project) instead of using e.g. flatpak (which is only an alternative for a subset of snaps features). This corporate mindset clashes with the terminally online Linux desktop community.

Also, they seem to focus more on their enterprise server experience, as that is where their income stream comes from.

But like always, people with strong opinions are those voicing them loudly. Most Linux users don’t care and use what works best for them. For that crowd Ubuntu is a good default without any major downsides.

Edit: A major advantage of Ubuntu are their extended security updates not found on any other distro (others simply do not patch them). Those are locked behind a subscription for companies and a free account for a few devices for personal use.

I’m using zram on all my systems, be it 4GB or 16GB. Usually swap is empty, so there’s no compressing for the CPU to do anyway. If a RPI is capable of ZRAM, your PC won’t break a sweat.

ZSTD is really fast. I’m using btrfs compression too, and don’t notice any performance impact either.

There’s two reasons why r/linux is popular on Reddit:

1. Reddit is popular
2. r/linux is popular

Regular btrfs scrubs is a good idea to detect data loss/drive failure early. I have a monthly sytemd timer run it automatically.

Btrfs balance can also free up space but I don’t run it regularly.

“given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can recreate bit-by-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts”

NixOS does not guarantee bit-by-bit identical results. NixOS hashes the inputs and provides a reproducible build environment but this does not necessarily mean the artifacts are identical.

E.g. if a build somehow includes a timestamp, each build will have a different checksum.

I do the this and it’s great. An entire distro takes up only a few GB. Many graphical installers don’t support installing on an existing btrfs partition (or subvolume) and want to create a new one. This can often be solved by manual intervention (via terminal).

If your anything like me you’ll forget what PPAs you’ve added in a few months. Or rather, forget that you’ve even added things like PPAs. That’s why I stick to flatpak if its not in my distro’s repos.

These tools are also useful for finding large files in your home directory. E.g. I’ve found a large amount of Linux ISOs I didn’t need anymore.

Do you delete all your files on a reinstall? Documents, photos, videos, games?

Fclones is a great tool, but it’s for finding duplicate files and replacing them with sym-/hard-/reflinks.

I recommend using the --cache option to make subsequent runs extremely quick.

If you need a more interactive method, gdu is awesome. And if you’re using btrfs, btdu gives preliminary results instantly (which get more precise over time).

Ladybird is new and some people seem to think it’ll be useable for normal desktop usage in the coming years. Servo is 12 years old and markets itself as an embedded browser and thus it’s understood that it won’t catch up to Firefox and Chromium.

I have no idea why people think Ladybird would be the saviour independent browser when there’s Mozilla with Firefox failing at exaty that. How would Ladybird even finance itself? Ads? Then you’ve got the Mozilla Firefox situation again.

Good point. I’ll have to stop using immutable and stay with atomic (and declarative).

Interestingly /bin and /usr/bin are not in PATH by default, so /bin/chewy can only be executed by its path directly and won’t affect the systems reliability.

Fully agreed. On almost any atomic distro, /home/user is writeable like usual, so any attacker is able to persist itself by editing ~/.bashrc and putting a binary somewhere.

NixOS is immutable and atomic, but it isn’t image-based.

Immutable simply refers to how the running system configuration can’t be changed by simply putting a file somewhere (e.g. copy a binary to /bin, which is a bad idea).

For example, Fedora Atomic and derivatives are image based, although they are more flexible than the A/B types like SteamOS.

OpenSUSE MicroOS uses btrfs snapshots to apply updates atomically, and is more flexible than most image based immutable distros.

Edit: But I don’t think those terms have a single definition, so how would you differentiate these terms?

MPV also supports pipewire.

Yes, ~/.local/share/flatpak includes all user installed flatpaks, while /var/lib/flatpak includes all system wide installed flatpaks. Both include repository information and required runtimes (i.e. dependencies).

This does not include user data, which is stored in ~/.var/app.

Make sure to test your backup just in case on another system/VM.