They should at least make a docs tag or similar and tag all these documentation like posts with it.

Another thing is that my laptop might be using Legacy BIOS, so systemd isn’t compatible with it.

Oh sorry, then Fedora isnt a good idea. They have deprecated support for Legacy BIOS.

Anything with LXQT 2.1 available should give the same experience however right now it seems only rolling distros ship with 2.1. Lubuntu 25.04 will ship (in ~April) with LXQT 2.1 but it wont default to wayland so you might have to do some manual config. Its also not an lts release.

storage requirements

shouldn’t be a big problem. lxqt is super lightweight. If you go with lubuntu, I recommend turning off snap to save some space.

Linux Mint MATE or XFCE are really good if you dont necessarily want wayland support.

Another option is the Raspberry Pi OS. Debian based, should be very lightweight and runs wayland. I haven’t personally tried it though.

Try Fedora LXQT too, it ll default to wayland in the next fedora release (~4th april i think). Its very lightweight.

I mean Fedora is open source but if they really wanted a european base, they could have gone with opensuse. AFAIK opensuse is the only fully european linux distro plus they use many of the same tech that redhat/fedora does.

Ultimately I think it doesn’t matter too much since even the linux foundation is based in the US and large parts of what makes the linux desktop are maintained by non-EU companies (on top of all the major projects hosted by Github, Gitlab including most of Flathub). If its all open source, I think the risks are pretty low e.g. huawei was able to use Android despite all the restrictions.

You can also get the appimage on https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

After downloading, set the execute bit: chmod +x ./GIMP-3.0.0-x86_64.AppImage and then open the file to open gimp.

yep very underrated piece of software, its so fast and reliable compared to like packagekit

If you dont mind using the terminal, there is topgrade which can update many different kinds of packages with a single command (topgrade).

You can also build mintinstall (linux mints updater/store) on ubuntu.

One thing I’m doing differently in Arch this time is I’m trying out installing as many things as possible as flatpaks. I’ve successfully ignored them until now. Surprisingly, a lot of my apps are already packaged as flatpaks.

Yeah I have grown a liking to flatpaks too but I dont think I can live with only flatpaks yet.

The other thing I’m borrowing is distrobox+podman. I didn’t know about that before. This seems useful for dev environments.

Distrobox is really nice, I even run some gui applications in containers.

That being said, I’ve never had a problem with pacman breaking my system, so I don’t see major value in doing this… other than… it’s helping me procrastinate! I should be doing real work right now. 😄

This is the only thing keeping from arch tbh. I shudder to think of all the ways I can procrastinate on arch!

Thanks, didn’t knew it was based on Debian Sid though that makes a lot of sense for an immutable distro since I assume you can easily rollback in case of issues.

I had the same suspicion that it probably doesn’t work well for seasoned linux users but its nice to see its otherwise fine. I have used ublue in the past and my experience was similar.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer.

Did you use the linux-surface kernel? It has additional community maintained patches for surface devices and detailed installation instructions for the best linux experience. From their feature matrix they seem to have full support for sgo2.

Not sure if its available on pmOS though.

sorry its OT but what has been your experience so far with VanillaOS? I remember there was a lot of discussion about it a while back but haven’t heard much since then.

There is also Merkuro Mail which has a more modern design that some might prefer (to Kmail).

I wonder if immutable systems could negate the need for kernel anti cheat. If the game can ensure the current kernel and image is one from a list of acceptable ones, it doesn’t need to kernel anti cheat. They could do this by comparing the checksum or something.

Unfortunately it seems to be a completely proprietary kernel. I did find a paper on it (presented by Huawei in a conference): https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-haibo

The first line of the abstract reads

This paper presents the design and implementation of HongMeng kernel (HM), a commercialized general-purpose microkernel that preserves most of the virtues of microkernels while addressing the above challenges.

Another interesting tidbit from the paper:

We started the HongMeng kernel (HM) project over 7 years ago to re-examine and retrofit the microkernel into a general OS kernel for emerging scenarios. To be practical for production deployment, HM achieves full Linux API/ABI compatibility and is capable of reusing the Linux applications and driver ecosystems such that it can run complex frameworks like AOSP [42] and OpenHarmony [35] with rich peripherals.

It was a skin, now its a completely different OS. The initial version, HarmonyOS, was based on Android/Linux, the new HarmonyOS Next, is a proprietary version (or successor) of HarmonyOS based on an open source project/OS, OpenHarmony. It uses a new microkernel instead of the linux kernel.

OpenHarmony is essentially an open source base for making an operating system on top. Its not like the Linux kernel, in the sense that its not just a kernel (in fact you can use the linux kernel with it), but rather a bunch of components people can build upon. And since it uses a permissive license, you can build a proprietary OS on top of it (like the HarmonyOS Next).

Huawei actually launched OpenHarmony many years back but it was not ready for phone usage yet. It was only with the launch of the 5th version that Huawei was confident enough in it to start using it on their own phones.

rpm-ostree is intended to be the last resort because layering causes issues with updates and other things

AMD and Intel both have very good linux support. On that note there shouldn’t be much of a difference.

In fact, AMD GPU drivers are quite a bit ahead of Intel on Linux. And the AMD laptop has a significantly more powerful iGPU plus it has DDR5 ram. So it should give you noticeably better performance.

More problematic could be the wifi chip, fingerprint reader and maybe the camera.

Wifi nowadays works well on Linux so I don’t think that should be much of a problem. Intel Wifi usually has better support though.

Cameras also mostly work though the IR sensor might not work.

Fingerprint support on linux is 50/50 (from linux-hardware, it seems fingerprint on similar models is not working unfortunately). If you know the exact fingerprint reader model on the laptop you can check if it has linux support.

Thinkpads usually have good support on Linux overall so I won’t be too worried with either option. I couldn’t find the exact models on linux-hardware.org, however I did find similar models:

All AMD models by this name (E14 Gen 6)

All Intel models by this name (E14 Gen 5)

21M3002TGE

21JK0009SP

Let Linus see through the Rust inclusion in Linux. I dont think it will go well without him. He is well respected in the Linux community so people are more willing to compromise with him.