Public key cryptography and signatures are common technologies nowadays.

It is possible to build an age verification system, where you use your actual ID with a cryptographic process without any personal data. The technology has existed for decades now.

They are using the wrong kind of Linux! My kind of Linux is superior, because it’s broken in a different way and more difficult than yours.

Homebrew is supported on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.

I use it on my recent Linux Mint install. Mint has pretty old packages or enormously bloated flatpacks, that come with limitations.

neovim only came in an ancient version, that doesn’t support lazyvim. Nicotine+ came as ancient from the Mint packages or as a 4 GB monster via flatpack.

I used Homebrew and everything installed quickly in current versions and worked like a breeze.

The great thing about Homebrew is that removing it is as easy as rm -r /home/linuxbrew

Nix is great as well of course and very powerful. Can be a bit of a bitch to write all the config files though.

Best of both worlds:

• install boring stable distro
• use Homebrew to install bleeding edge stuff, separately from the base system.

Arch takes a long time to install, even if you have done it before.

Fedora is pretty good. However in order to install drivers or firmware for specific hardware can be more difficult as it involves adding extra repositories.

the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel

A more common issue with Nvidia is older hardware no longer being supported by Nvidia’s current drivers and the kernel not supporting the old drivers. For older cards, you need to run kernel 6.8 or older for the binary drivers to work. The open source Nouveau driver is noticeably slower and getting hardware accelerated video to work can be difficult. So you can easily end up with mesa-llvm, meaning your CPU emulates OpenGL.

The easiest way to get this to work is to install Linux Mint 22.1.

You have the ability to break anything. Your distro, maintainers, developers also like to break things from time to time.

Don’t blame yourself for others breaking things.

What distro are you running Niri and Noctalia on? Did you find it easy to install?

Lexx was a British-German-Canadian production.

Lexx is a British-Canadian-German production.

it’s on YouTube for free

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZVMGCh7sZUjUiCdLnH2koZbTpTM5wp9m

Season 2 is peak Lexx

It’s one of my favorite tv shows.

Sounds kinda nice, I mist admit.

Niri implements a scrolling windowmanager like PaperWM instead of tiling like Hyprland. Tiling resizes your windows constantly, while scrolling only resizes when you want it to. If you keep opening windows, Niri opens them to the right of the last one on an infinitely wide workspace. Workspaces are organized vertically downwards. There’s no fixed number of workspaces, they grow on demand. There’s also a zoomed out overview showing you all workspaces and windows. Niri and Hyprland have some similarities though otherwise like lots of keyboard commands to move, resize, arrange windows.

Niri is friendlier overall I would say. It’s worth trying both since they are distinct.

Omarchy is the most complete package for Hyprland, I have seen so far. Installs in under 10 minutes and comes with everything you need installed, nicely configured, and good documentation.

Distros might package some stuff for you, yes.

Most window managers come with no GUI apps. They don’t even have a launcher (start menu), status bar, notification area, wifi menu, task bar, dock, etc.

For most window managers you pick and choose a shell, launcher, etc, to combine it with. Then you configure all those separate tools and the window manager to your liking

There are preconfigured packages, distros, and scripts that make sensible choices for this already. Even they usually don’t bring a lot of applications with them.

Omarchy brings a lot of applications in their default install. Check out this uninstall script to get an idea. KDEnlive is a KDE application, gnome-calculator, nautilus, gnome-diskutil, gnome-keyring are GNOME. Chromium is GTK too, I actually don’t know if LibreOffice is. So not many I would dare say. Others ship less.

Dank Linux, a full features shell for Niri, Wayland, mangowc describes it pretty well.

Batteries Included

The age of assembling your desktop from dozens of separate tools and spending hours trying to make it feel cohesive is over. While traditional Wayland setups require you to hunt down, configure, and maintain a sprawling collection of utilities, Dank Linux delivers everything in one cohesive package with minimal dependencies.

The Traditional Way: Package Hunting Simulator

A typical Hyprland, niri, Sway, MangoWC, dwl, labwc, Miracle WM, or generic Wayland setup forces you to learn about and configure a dozen or more separate tools, such as:

• Status Bar: waybar, eww, or custom scripts
• Notifications: mako, swaync, or dunst
• App Launcher: rofi, wofi, fuzzel, or tofi
• Screen Locking: swaylock, hyprlock, or gtklock
• Idle Management: swayidle, hypridle
• System Tools: htop, btop, nm-applet, blueman, pavucontrol
• Audio Control: pavucontrol, pamixer scripts
• Brightness Control: brightnessctl with custom bindings
• Clipboard Manager: clipman, cliphist, or wl-clipboard scripts
• Wallpaper Management: swaybg, swww, hyprpaper, or wpaperd
• Theming: manually configuring gtk, qt, various apps, bars, compositor gaps and colors
• Power Management: custom scripts or additional daemons
• Greeter: gdm, sddm, lightdm, greetd

Each tool has its own configuration format, its own quirks, and its own dependencies. You’ll spend hours writing glue scripts, debugging integration issues, and discovering missing functionality at the worst possible moments.

I used Niri with KDE apps for a month recently and liked it a lot. Niri is easiest to install already configured as a useable desktop using Dank Linux or Noctalia.

If you like PaperWM, you will love Niri.

XFCE is great, although a little stale and slow to evolve. I used it for many years. Still remember when Thunar finally got thumbnail previews.