If you want to use it as a server, Fedora is annoying because the support lifetimes are so short.
If you want the Fedora / Red Hat experience, consider Alma Linux. Skills wise, it is like using Res Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) which is an in-demand skill set.
The only way to fix Xorg is to break org. It requires a redesign.
The Xorg devs chose to do that by starting a separate project. The breakage has been in Wayland, now maturing, while Xorg was left stable. Xlibre wants bring this disruption to the X codebase itself.
Do you use any of the other XFCE stuff with Niri? Or just the terminal?
MPV is a much lighter video player. Try that.
I was trying to think of the oldest hardware I have run modern Linux on (probably an old Pentium II) when I remembered that I used to run SLS on a 486 (33 MHz, 4 MB of RAM).
Punch cards. The “true” PC era.
“Stone” tablets? Luxury. Ours were dried mammoth dung.
Are you running Trinity or KDE?
Not sure why I get so much less unless it is that. Or are you saying you run Trinity 64 bit?
I agree that 32 bit is not often going to be 50% less in practice. Sometimes I think we should be running 64 bit kernels with 32 bit userland.
It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.
You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).
.NET runs fast on Linux
I use Plasma 6 on Wayland on devices as old as 2009 and as new as 2020. Apple laptops to Intel desktops with GPUs from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
Wayland is better than Xorg on every machine I run.
I can absolutely deny that Wayland has stability issues. Plasma 6 under Wayland is the most stable desktop I have used.
In any Wayland discussion, I think people using Debian or older NVIDIA drivers (pre-555 for sure) need to identify themselves. They seem to be the ones most convinced that Wayland does not work yet (because they are still experiencing what it was like years ago).
As for “support”, that is desktop environment dependent as it mostly depends on protocol and XDG desktop portal maturity. KDE has the most complete support (not a bias-just a fact), then GNOME, then Hyprland and the Wlroots based environments, with MATE and Cinnamon not quite there yet, and XFCE totally trailing.
Any information generated or collected by government should only be stored in open file formats. That is the biggest issue right there.
Any software that citizens are required to use MUST be Open Source is the next biggest one.
Third is that any software created with public funds must be Open Source.
Finally, Open Source should be the preference in all government procurement. Exceptions where viable Open Source options do not exist should be allowed.
All government data needs to be stored in-country if possible and at least on continent if not. Suppliers bound in their home country by laws which could threaten the data sovereignty of their customers should be excluded from government contracts (so all US based companies).
Do you have a spare SSD? Throw Linux on it and try it out for a while. You can always go back.
Let’s say there are 2 billion desktop computers in the world and that Linux is installed on 3% of them.
That is 60 million Linux desktop users.
That is more than enough to sustain a vibrant ecosystem. Linux does not really need more market share to keep being an excellent option.
GDM launches other environments too. I do not think it is about GNOME itself.
A big thing missing from Wayland are all the other X11 window managers (hundreds of them) and desktop environments (like XFCE and Cinnamon) that people may want to use.
Ok. So now both Apple and Microsoft are distributors of the Linux kernel. What a timeline.
I do not like being accused of attacking Manjaro but since you asked….
the project has had lots of governance and quality problems. Maybe those are all in the past. Maybe.
By design, Manjaro is not compatible with the Arch repos or the AUR. One of the biggest problems is that they hold their software back a few weeks. In theory this is for quality (not my experience). Regardless, many people have had problems, especially with the AUR. I am one. Others say they have not. Some even claim the rest of us have not either. Manajaro has “brought down” AUR itself (compared to a DDOS attack but really just quality again).
I used Manjaro for over 2 years and would never touch it again. And if what you want is an Arch based distro with an easy install, there is EOS. I have used EndeavousOS for I think maybe 5 years and I love it. Recently I have moved to Chimera Linux, which is not for everyone (it is awesome but I am not recommending it). It is not because of anything wrong with EOS.
EndeavourOS. The default desktop is KDE these days.
Easy to install.
Attractive desktops out of the box. KDE is the default. A few nice quality of life utilities.
It uses the Arch repos and kernel. The AUR (yay) is installed out-of-the-box. So, the biggest package selection in the Linux world. Always up-to-date. Updates fast.
Great community in the EOS forums. Some of the best Linux docs on the web in the Arch wiki. The Arch wiki is an amazing resource for learning.
Very stable. Breakages are rare, especially if you use an LTS kernel. The current LTS kernel is the same one that Debian 13 will release with “soon”. So, not exactly ancient.
Biggest “downside” is that there is no GUI software installer out-of-the-box.
If that is really a deal-breaker, just install one like pamac or octopi. “yay -S octopi” should do it.
Or install a menu driven text based package manager like pacseek. “yay -S pacseek”
Or just take a few minutes to learn how to use pacman or yay at the command-line. You said you wanted to learn.
I have not used Nix, so I may not know what I am talking about.
That said, I have been using Chimera Linux which uses the APK package manager. It works by maintaining a single file in /etc/apk/world that specifies all the packages the user wants on the system. This is used to calculate dependencies and install packages. When you “add” and “del” packages, all it is really doing is adding and removing from this list. If you remove a package, it will remove all the dependencies too unless they appear in the “world” file.
If you do not specify a version number for a package, you get the latest. But you can pin versions of you want.
If you copy the world file from one system to another, you get the same set of installed packages.
So, if I use git to backup my world file, maybe a couple of other entries in /etc, and the dot files in my home directory, I have pretty much everything I need to completely recreate my system.
Is it really worth all the extra complexity of Nix?