Warning, this is my opinion:

No, a distro with a modified depricated non-upstream window manager is not a good introduction to Linux.

I am looking at you Cinnamon. Cinnamon is for Linux users who don’t want to use Gnome 3 or KDE Plasma, I think.

I always recommend Fedora to newbs and Debian to newbs with existing Linux knowledge, because all the desktops are as close to upstream as possible. This is why I cannot recommend Ubuntu or any Ubuntu based distro for the desktop. ubuntu-server can ve good enough on servers only.

No, thx, I’ll check it out.

Thx for sharing your experience! I think I will try WAU tomorrow. In the meantime I have read, it has block/allow lists, too.

At my institution GPO/intune is not allowed; we have on-premis ActiveDirectory, and my access is restricted to the clients I need to manage.

So far, I could preinstall almost all apps with the --silent flag. I assume that this also means, that they will update gracefully as SYSTEM user managed by WAU. Having the updates only applied when any normal AD user without admin rights logs on, is not an issue, as long as it works.

There is only one specific app to install user certificates; this can stay a manual task after first logon, because it requires user credentials anyway. (:

This lets Gentoo look like a beginner/user-friendly distro next to NixOS.

The fact that my OS should not be a project anymore made me switch to Debian instead to NixOS. But I need to try an immutable distro some time.

There is tooling in Debian to use systemd-boot, it even integrates into the upgrade process so that your boot menu always points to the current version of the kernel.

It is not default; you would need to bootstrap Debian yourself instead of using the installer, but it works. Bootstrapping opens additional possibilities like choosing btrfs on LUKS and suspend to disk. My previous Gentoo experience was very helpful.

Despite what Alan has written I want the ability to disable snaps in Ubuntu entirely. Are there any options?

While going full ZFS is certainly interesting I would already be glad if zfs-dkms would rebuild automatically on every kernel update including pulling in the corresponding linux-headers on standard Debian 13.

I cannot automount my ZFS mirror, anyway, because I decided to go with encryption. I know, there are ways with a key file on a usb-stick. Maybe I’ll do that for my next ZFS-related project.

I think, I will borrow the idea, but I likely will use more a log-style date format in the persistent history file like this: [2026-01-09 12:34:56] command

I had it when I was still using Gentoo.

Maybe it can help getting software to work that would otherwise only work with older Windows version, eg: software for scientific equipment.

I should generally make more use of things lile podman and systemd-nspawn. Thx!

I guess running Bedrock Linux inside podman wouldn’t work, I guess. Not sure how well nesting works with containers.

Oh, that underlines my impression of Python being used more widely for Gnome programs.

I have seen at least one person moving from Gentoo to Exherbo. Would I leave Debian behind for it? No, not currently, but maybe there is time for an experiment in the future.

I’ve tried Sabayon briefly, but not seriously. At the time, it was interesting to have more pre-built binaries. Looking back now, the Gentoo binrepos are the better solution, I think.

Sadly xrdp comes to mind. The builtin-in rdp server of Gnome is not on par yet and behaves differently.

Xrdp server prompts for the login of an existing user while Gnome new implementation has a kind of additional user/password which all users need to know. I did not find an option to disable it.

What is neat about the new implementation is, that you can login to a running sessiom remotely without being logged out at the local machine. This feels more like desktop sharing. Awesome, and in this case, having a seperate user/password makes sense.

The only thing I have found, is, that Microsoft now have a multi-installer themselves, but it can only install a limited selection from their own store.

I hope, Ninite did not become “sketchy”.

How much can one trust this Ninite thing? Sounds like the thing I want for work for easier Windows client management.

We know, who is clicking at MX Linux? And the other distros that are currently at the top?

My top distros:

1. Debian
2. Fedora
3. Gentoo

How well does waydroid run on PostmarketOS?

I am not a huge fan of the pipe operator, but together with PFA code can look cleaner, I guess.

Nested function calls are not a bad thing in my opinion.

neat