Looking to dip my toes into Linux for the first time. I have a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with pretty solid specs collecting dust right now that I think I’m going to use. Research so far has indicated to me that the two best options for me are likely Mint or Elementary OS. Does anyone have any insight? Also open to other OS’s. I would consider myself decently tech savvy but I am not a programmer or anything. Comfortable dipping into the terminal when the need arises and all that.

@linux #linux

  •  Guenther_Amanita   ( @Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de ) 
    1•1 year ago

    You can install packages normally? I think you got something wrong here.

    Yeah, you can, that’s right. But it’s absolutely not recommended (except drivers or stuff like that). You only do that when there is absolutely no other way.

    But I’m not that exactly sure on how “bad” it is on rpm-ostree tbh. I’ve definitively done my research when I switched to Silverblue, and reason for the direct-install-disrecommendation didn’t get explained good enough for me. Afaik it is only an additional layer on top of the base, so it is also not OS-changing. Please do me the favor and explain it to me if you can :)

    I disagree with Debian. Apt is horrible, updates are bad.

    I said “Debian based”, not plain Debian. I never got warm with it tbh, for deskop I prefer rpm-based distros, I don’t even know why. But, like it or not, Ubuntu (and therefore Debian) is just the standard if you google " how to do x on Linux". And a newcomer, who doesn’t know the difference between apt and dnf for example, will get into trouble sooner or later.

    •  Pantherina   ( @Pantherina@feddit.de ) 
      1•1 year ago

      True Ubuntu and debian is standard and to this day many external Devs just provide .deb files or now even snaps XD

      So layering, as far as I understood:

      1. your OS on your PC, every package traced through OSTree as with using Git
      2. an ostree remote, which is not directly a repository but the exact OS they build.
      3. Your PC compares the packages with the packages there and downloads the diffs.
      4. Your PC then builds another image, being exactly the one on their servers

      If you install/layer additional RPMs, after 3. you have an additional step, where rpm-ostree also uses traditional Fedora repos and downloads regular RPMs to your system. You can use any regular Repos, even COPR but you need to add the .repo files manually to /etc/yum.repos.d/. RPMFusion has a fancy way where you layer a package and that handles the updating of the repo files to your current version, really nice.

      So this package is installed along, and as its done through rpm-ostree its very well traced. It will do changes but an rpm-ostree uninstall PACKAGE will completely remove it again. If you are not entirely sure rpm-ostree reset will completely reset your system to be a mirror of the ostree remote.

      If you have a background service, you could reset the system every month or so. Not necessary but this would make extra sure your system directories are not weirdly modified. You would do this through

      rpm-ostree reset --install PACKAGE1 --install PACKAGE2

      Or maybe that doesnt work, not sure, and you need

      rpm-ostree reset && rpm-ostree install PACKAGE1 PACKAGE2

      Here you can also remove added packages like Kwrite or firefox + firefox-langpacks