This is me talking out of my ass a but since I do not do it, but you can create your own AUR packages pretty easily. If you have the Deb, you could be rocking it in Arch too.

On Chimera Linux, I do make my own packages. Just so easy.

In the AUR maybe. I certainly have had to trim lots of old electron and other bloat.

My favourite package manager is APK 3. No clean-up required there almost by definition.

Because it is less trouble.

I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.

Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.

Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.

Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.

When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.

After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.

I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.

I agree that the opportunity for Frame is to be “big screen” portable gaming.

Desktop stuff will just come along for the ride.

And yes, the ecosystem is in place. Steam is already the de facto distribution channel for games, proton makes most of them work great on Linux, and FEX should make most of those work on Frame.

I am not sure how well FEX works today but it is obviously going to get a lot more love. And the CPU is not the bottleneck for games anyway as the GPU is doing all the heavy lifting.

Debian has stopped 32 but in Debian 13. He is talking about Debian 12 which is still supported.

The Debian 12 based version of Q4OS has committed to supporting 32 bit through 2028.

I made the same recommendation. Sadly the “latest” version in 64 bit only. Unsurprising as it is Debian based.

The older release is still available and still supported though. It would be a great option though the clock is ticking on it of course.

The most “batteries included” distro that is I can think of that is not Debian based is Adelie.

DSL is just AntiX with a curated list of software in a CD image. Just go with AntiX if you want to go that route.

Another option to consider is Q4OS Trinity. Trinity is essentially the KDE 3 desktop which is still surprisingly good and very light on resources.

All of these, including MX Linux, are Debian based and have access to the full Debian repos.

A potential issue with all these Debian based distros though is that Debian itself has moved away from 32 bit in Debian 13. It is hard to say how long these others will stay the course.

Adelie Linux is another one people forget about and certainly worth giving a spin. It is not Debian based.

Tiny Core will be the “fastest” as it runs out of RAM but of course that leaves you even less RAM for other things (like a browser). So it depends on your use case.

Are you sure CachyOS has 32 bit support?

Yes, it is gorgeous

Agreed. That does not change what I said though.

For me, “baloo” is the worst offender.

Also, great to see another btop fan. I use it a lot.

No argument.

I do not see much chance of a middle-man though and the alternative means much less adoption.

My issue is not with Kent’s strong technical opinions. I like those. Well, except that abusing other people as cover for his inability to follow the rules is not cool.

Linus can be a dick but he is typically making technical arguments at least (and usually quite good ones). Kent likes to play the “engineering” card but the drama is always about process, not technology, and he is the one being called out. So trying to pretend he is defending better engineering just makes the behaviour worse.

NVIDIA were breaking the rules (legally even). They have come around.

More big endiian in the kernel for no reason is a negative.

Not sure about the Intel engineer. Linus can be a jerk though so not assuming he was right if I do not know the situation.

And, while I like old hardware, the first x86-64 chips shipped in 2003. So, this is not exactly a Windows 11 situation.

Hardware older than that is going to struggle with modern browsers. A PC from that era would probably have less than 1 GB of RAM and perhaps a max RAM well under 4 GB (the theoretical limit). Using older software versions is probably best anyway.

Ironically, I think it may be because of Skia. So Google.

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The replies here make me so mad at Kent Overstreet.

I love bcachefs and was using it on quite a few systems. When it was in the mainline kernel, interest was building. I feel like we could have been just a few months from experimental coming off and adoption skyrocketing.

Then Kent got it pulled from the kernel (so not interested in the “fighting for users” misdirection). Now, as evidenced by the comments here, most users will not touch it.

I needed it in the kernel so I have been migrating away too but it breaks my heart.

I am sure somebody will use it, maybe even more than the small number that have historically. And Kent will probably tell himself that is ok.

It sucks.

Now, I did not write a COW filesystem. So I guess I am getting what I am owed (nothing). That does not dull the sting much though.

It was quite good for a while but I feel like it has crept up again. It is over 1.5G at start for me these days.

It used to be under a gig.

It makes a difference when you only have 8G on a laptop.

Niri is a scrolling tiler. You do not even have to scroll if you really don’t want to.

Niri is absolutely the best tier for a laptop with a smaller screen. It provides all the benefits of tiling without the tiny, cramped windows that tiling tends to result in.

On other tilers, you end up using workspaces for single apps to avoid splitting the screen.

See my other post. EndeavourOS works out of the box on MacBooks before 2019. This is with vanilla EOS.

For 2019 and 2020 Intel MacBooks, there is a T2 version of EndeavourOS that includes a custom kernel that again makes everything work after a fresh install. You can just use the package manager after that and it all keeps working, even across kernel updates.

What year?

I have several Mac laptops running Linux with hardware from 2012 to 2020. I find that EndeavourOS works best and WiFi works out of the box.

It uses the wl drivers generally (NOT b43) with DKMS so the module is automatically rebuilt when you upgrade the kernel. You can just upgrade the kernel using the package manager and it “just works” when you reboot. I have been using Linux on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air systems for years and never had a problem (2012, 2013, 2017, 2020). Also iMacs back to 2008.

If you have a T2 chip system, you need a special kernel and apple an wifi/bluetooth firmware blob. In most distros you have to extract the firmware from macOS yourself but it is available in the AUR so there is a special T2 addition of EndeavourOS that makes everything work out of the box. These are the 2019 or 2020 systems I think.

Are you talking about Ladybird?

The US government is a mess but US companies still have all the money. Most Canadian companies have US revenues and will benefit from US deductions.

The first big Ladybird sponsor was Shopify. They are a Canadian company that recently moved their headquarters to the US.

Agree with your last sentence.