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!

KO, the bcachefs dev, did things in the kernel in a way that caused quite a bit drama. But with time and after some push back, KO now has adapted to the development process (and no drama since then).

Since it’s also fully experimental, it’s more harmful than beneficial to keep it in the kernel imo.

Its experimental but its an fs, it doesn’t affect anyone who doesn’t want to use it. Many drivers are also mainlined in an experimental state and then slowly worked upstream (for e.g. the new nova nvidia gpus driver).

why? Its not going to affect you if you dont use it.

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).

The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don’t lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.

Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.

Yeah fedora does it even for small updates, not just kernel updates. But only if you update through the store.

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.

thats a very fair point, I had not seen anyone else make this one But the problem is that in this case, this functionality was entirely undocumented. I dont think it was intended for programmers.

Now if the firmware was open source, people would have gotten to know about this much sooner even if not documented. Also such functionality should ideally be gated somehow through some auth mechanism.

Also just like how the linux kernel allows decades old devices to be at the very least patched for security risks, open firmware would allow users of this chip to patch it themselves for bugs, security issues.

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.

Its really a shame Huawei went for a closed source OS on phones (and probably laptops in the future if not now) instead of Linux or another open source OS (they even started with an open source version of their os). I hope this harmony os doesn’t take up in other countries or we would be going backwards.

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We really should be pushing for fully open source stack (firmware, os) in all iot devices. They are not very complicated so this should be entirely possible. Probably will need a EU law though.

aha thanks! i was wondering how ppl do this yeah but tbf discord has a lot of features