The Laptop Shenanigans because this Goose was let Loose!
Since my last post about solving the Foot Terminal Curse…I had been on a journey with my Laptop. I literally decided to go on a spree of trying a variety of different Linux distros that might’ve worked in for me and my personal workflow. However, unfortunately, a lot of them were not right for me in the moment. As either my brain could not cope with the workflow (as right now, my skill level is middling at best). Here’s a list, human written because I hate AI Listicles. Fuck AI! I won’t include all the Fedora Atomic distro experiments, they had no real problems…Just worked, I wanted to something else.
-
KaOS: I really like the idea of this distro abandoning KDE, but still sticking with QT by adopting Niri+Noctalia shell! This Linux distro is more for those that are keen on tinkering with programs as the repo is quite limited. However, they do support Flatpak which means you aren’t constrained to a purely tinkering experience. The default package manager is Pacman because it is quite ubiquitous in the Linux space. Now I may have experienced a bug, but the Live ISO installation flow did not work successfully for me as I ended up with a non-booting system. It may be that this is the kind of distro that requires pre-configuration of storage partitions and the like. It seemed like the standard Fedora Graphical Installer that would be able to handle all of that and end with having a bootable system at the end. Alas, I might try them out at a later date.
-
Nitrux: This is a beautiful immutable distro that doesn’t depend on systemd. I honestly wanted to love Nitrux, however, for the life of me I could not get Distrobox/shelf to work. Despite installing the Konsole and Ptyxis terminal via Flatpak. Normally this would’ve worked for me. However, I could not get Distroshelf to connect correctly to either of the terminals which normally work on other immutable distros. I had not enough sleep to diagnose the issues which were happening on this distro and I decided to scuttle this installation. As the distro wasn’t going to work for me personally, my mind wasn’t designed to utilize the power of Nitrux at the moment. I will be keeping Nitrux in mind for the future, when I am mentally prepared to engage with how it works and be adapted to the workflow asked of me.
-
Solus: Solus, it is a distro that I tried before. My first and second try of the KDE version it took me less than 10 minutes to get it installed as the installer is stupid fast. Solus is a rolling release distro that has a sane update schedule of a weekly sync every Friday. Sometimes this sync is big or it is particularly small to the point of being a singular change! This distro has all the major WMs that you could desire, sane defaults out of the box, one time MOK configuration (set and fucking forget forever), a decent software repo. I have to say, I love their built from the ground up package manager, eopkg. That little guy is speedy as fuck, even big updates takes a mere 4 minutes based on download speeds (mine are pretty good) it also displays all the steps it is taking when downloading and installing. If there are errors you can clearly tell, as successes, failures, downloads are all color coded for easy visual parsing. Distrobox and the graphical Distroshelf work flawlessly on the KDE version of Solus.
Solus is a labor of love and their passion shows in how well this distro performs on my hardware and how well it is built. I love them so much that I donate here as if we can, we should support the open source projects we love! Ultimately, I will likely stick with Solus for a long time because it just fucking works. It’s lovely, approachable nature makes it easy to love. Fills a space that Ubuntu once did before Canonical began to huff Microsoft’s miasma and warped into something very cursed.
Having said all of this…I might still experiment with Gentoo as comfort, who fucking needs it?! I like a little torment with my open source projects. It would be a massive undertaking, but given the laptop is fairly modern, it wouldn’t take long for it to compile Gentoo. LMAO I wish that I could settle and just enjoy my two mains: Garuda Linux on the Desktop and Solus on my Laptop.