OK but how to replace the ASCII Tux in the blue screen of death?

Thanks for sharing your work!

Do you feel there is anything deeply problematic with the page cache that would make this kind of side channel likely to be around elsewhere too or is it more of a specific case?

If you are ready to build your own packages and host your own repos, go for it. You should have some form of automation to at least get security updates, and it will take some recurring maintenance time no matter how you go about it. I haven’t looked closer at Poseidons repos but I think if this is a good idea or not depends a lot on the state of their build/packaging/distro code. It could be just a matter of cloning the repos, changing a few config parameters and running a couple of commands, or it could mean significant work, depending on how well it is engineered. You could start out and if you find yourself digging to deep in the process of getting a build, back out and reassess.

Kind of like others suggested, there are lighter options. All the big dists should have some form of build tooling to make kickstart/preseed/spins/whatever they call it where you can prepare a custom install ISO with your own set of packages. There are tools like packer and Nix that you can use either as part of building OS images or just script to run on a clean base installation of some dist. You can make an ansible playbook to automate setup and have that run by cloud-init. You could make a shell script to automate the installation of packages and setting up of environment.

Why?

It’s a snapshot with supposedly higher chance of working than any other point in time as it’s been more thoroughly tested. It’s a common reference point. It has prebuilt images and installers.

Don’t Arch and Tumbleweed do the same thing just without giving them names?

I haven’t tried this with Cinnamon but with other Desktop Environments you can run your own Window Manager inside it, if that’s something you’d like. That way you can take benefit of background services and desktop integrations of the DE but use any WM you like.

i3 under Xfce or KDE is very common, for example.

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It’s been continuously improving. There are devices that are a hassle but you’re a lot more likely to have things Just Working compared to a few years ago.

My understanding is that Ampere and others should run perfectly like any old x86 with a normal dist like vanilla Debian mostly due to a lot of hard work from individuals in the wider community.

Much of the time, dtb (device tree) and device drivers are what it comes down to.

For more estoric or finicky hardware, I think the dists with the best ARM support are Armbian, OpenWrt, and PostmarketOS.

Jeff Geerling has been reporting a lot about his experiments. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/

I wrote about getting Debian running on a device based on a popular Rockchip SoC last year. I assume the kernel situation has improved since trixie. https://blog.kumio.org/posts/2025/01/bananapim7-hvm.html

Try running it on something like an older Celeron, a RaspberryPi 3, a PinePhone, or a constrained VM. For me alt+tab can take seconds on GNOME but still be almost instant in Xfce on the same hardware.

I assume it’s from Wayland not performing as well on these platforms combined with fancy animated transitions being enabled by default on G.

It can be about not having to change hardware as much as about habits.

This community is funny.

From what I can tell this is is basically the spiritual evolution of Bazzite, by the same team and built with a similar approach. Yet look at how differently they are received.

Brand identity memes are truly impactful these days. Names and presentation seem to drive majority sentiment.

Remember Serverless? Servers all the way down.

INTERMEDIARY BUILD LAYERS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE GIVEN NAMES

DAYS OF REBASING yet NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND for building on anything above fedora:atomic

Wanted to base your image on someone elses anyway to save some work? We had a tool for that, it was called “FORKING”

“Distroless is built on GNOME OS” “error: /Tree contains both /etc and /usr/etc” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged.

LOOK at what Devs have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the servers and window managers we built for them (These are REAL distros, done by REAL devs)

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite-firmware-nonfree/commits/bf835aec77e3af803acceffb789f8fb076fd779c/

https://github.com/ublue-os/akmods/commit/70af39999c681566bd1c66f23834daa37b996aaa

https://github.com/ublue-os/main/pull/771

“Hello I would like 1.8 pixels please”

They have played us for absolute fools.

BunDGiE LiNuxXx 🤪

There are some bug fixes that are relevant for installs and base images. For example, security update in GPG is probably not a big deal for you but might be for someone building and pushing things from these.
Kernel, firmware and microcode updates might only affect a small minority of users depending on hardware.

I adored Budgie precisely because it was still on X11 🥲

Anyway, for a relatively simple and clean holistic GNOME-that’s-not-GNOME, it’s a very polished desktop. Worth checking out for your F&F.

The need to think about and deal with snaps is the reason I don’t recommend Ubuntu to noobs in general. It’s confusing and unnecessary and adds to the frustration of being forced to make judgement calls about things you don’t want to understand just to do your thing (we have enough of that as it is). And if you do decide against snaps, it’s a bit of an uphill battle and it’s easy to start feeling that the OS, like what they came from, is antagonistic. Canonical decided to isolate and take control of part of the Ubuntu ecosystem with snaps and that has made the distro a bit more niche compared to before.

For better or worse Ubuntu is also known to be on the edge with new developments on the desktop. Switching to new shiny desktop environments between major versions, being very early on Wayland-first, etc. Having to learn new OS UI after an upgrade is not ideal if you are not an enthusiast.

Other than that, Ubuntu can be a fine distro, both for server and desktop. If you either accept the particularities like snaps or know how to work around them, it can be a very good experience and it’s well-maintained in general. But it’s less of a no-brainer and more situational if it’s appropriate or not.

Like Alpine or Gentoo: Great distros but for different reasons not anything I would recommend a non-technical Linux virgin to replace their Windows or macOS with.

Good first distros for beginners:

• Linux Mint Debian Edition
• EndeavourOS
• Debian
• Pop! OS
• Fedora Workstation

Not Good first distros but still getting picked up by people who don’t know:

• Manjaro
• Ubuntu
• Omarchy
• Zorin
• Garuda

Everyone: If you’ve only used one of the latter, try another distro before you believe “Desktop Linux is not ready” or “Linux is not for me”.

Specifically on Steam: Which hardware you run on can affect on which distro it runs out of the box on and if you need to fiddle with drivers and firmware or not to get things running smoothly. There is also some difference between installation methods (some people swear by the flatpak version and others swear off it).

Maybe also check the health of your SSD and that your firmware/BIOS are up to date.

zsh envy is dead

What would your father say? Real fathers use real startx.

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💁🦋

I think that might be the same RK3588 chip as the Bananapi M7 which I did a write-up on last year. Trying a different kernel might help with your issue - it did for me.

https://blog.kumio.org/posts/2025/01/bananapim7-hvm.html#kernel-versions

I should probably update the table for trixie.