It’s horrible. My laptop with hybrid graphics works ok except for a brief flicker every time it wakes from sleep. It’s not a big deal. My desktop with dedicated nvidia is a hot mess - constant flickering. Steam is borderline non-functional and there are all kinds of graphical glitches on the desktop. I’m stuck with X11 on that machine.

I have been very happy with my X1 Extreme. I did have an issue with the keyboard and later the touchpad, but I paid for onsite support so it wasn’t a big deal. They came out a day later and fixed it right there at my dining table.

I would say buying a ThinkPad is worth it for their paid support options alone. When I had a keyboard problem on my old MacBook, AppleCare took like 10 days to fix it. Lenovo’s premium support is reasonably priced and they don’t mess around. A person picks up the phone when you call and they treat you like you are important. If it’s a hardware problem, they are not removeding around. They don’t care how it happened or ask a bunch of questions. It’s covered and they are fixing it. Fast.

The X1 is also super easy to work on. It’s easily disassembled with normal tools and upgradable parts like SSD and RAM are right there when you open it up. They don’t do dumb things like solder in the RAM or leave you without an open slot. This thing is designed to be repairable.

Linux support is flawless.

So help him out instead of trying to steal the project out from under him. I see there are other contributors in the kbin repository. This fork comes off as really sleazy.

Ernest put in the work and established a community. Now somebody comes along and tries to move that community over to a fork. That’s some bullremoved. Zero creativity with the name too. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this group tries to monetize this thing if they manage to replace kbin. Community-focused my ass. If it was community-focused, you wouldn’t be on here trying to split the community.

Yeah, it’s also the same group of people who are always complaining about how much RAM a desktop environment or app uses, that app being whichever one they are using right now.

Dude, just build a better product and let it speak for itself. Or maybe try contributing to kbin. It’s not cool to always be harping on the guy for his development pace and trying to pull people over to your fork. Like, we’re supposed to hop over there because you’ve made more commits this week? How do we know your project would be any better off if it ever blows up the way kbin did?

That kbin dude got tens of thousands of subscribers overnight and then put on blast with bug reports and feature requests. He’s done a good job running the site too. He’s got a pretty good track record as far as I’m concerned. He hasn’t asked for removed in return except a little space to maintain his sanity.

You’re missing out on watching a lot of progress bars while you reinstall all the time. If you like what you have, keep using it. All you get from switching is a different package manager, a few slightly different package names, maybe faster updates and a new default desktop background. You’ll still be using all the same apps, probably similar versions, probably systemd. It’s a bigger difference logging into a new desktop environment than a new distro.

Check out ublue. They have Silverblue/Kinoite images with some extras to make it a more usable without having to layer it yourself. It updates in the background and you get the new version whenever you decide to reboot. It keeps a few snapshots so you can rollback right in the grub menu. You can even run an Arch container on top of Kinoite with distrobox and get apps from there. Or you can fork their image and make your own immutable OS.

In that case, this is the one you want: https://github.com/ublue-os/startingpoint

The instructions are here: https://universal-blue.org/tinker/make-your-own/

You need a GitHub account first. Use the web installer they link to under the setup section. Don’t forget to enable the actions in your repository because they aren’t enabled by default. Everything else is in the instructions. No coding required.

Their startingpoint repository makes it really easy. You fork it and just have to edit a .yml file to customize your packages. GitHub actions will automatically build it daily and rpm-ostree upgrade works like normal.

You could also look at something like the bazzite repository if you want to do things manually. It’s basically a Containerfile and a bunch of shell scripts that run inside the container before it’s committed. Then you have the same GitHub actions for automatic builds of your image.

Kitty, although I was using Alacritty until last week. I got an update that had a bug related to launching Alacritty full screen. I’m in a terminal all day so I couldn’t be bothered with it. I installed kitty and adapted my configuration pretty easily. I can’t tell the difference between them except for the icon.

Or GNU stow.

The usual suspects are ThinkPad T, P or X1, Framework or System76. Some people also like the Dell XPS but I don’t because of the lack of ports. I use a ThinkPad X1 Extreme. It runs great, it’s repairable and there are good premium support options available.

I don’t care as long as the placement is ok and I can map it to something useful. I’m a GNOME user so the Windows/Super key gets a lot of use. It’s nice to have. A new key that I use for all my custom shortcuts would actually be kind of nice. Who cares that the default key caps are a Windows icon and this Copilot thing? Change the key caps and they are just keys.

Not necessarily. You probably want to optimize the kernel and a few packages. Then there are some apps where you want to build them with specific features. Then there’s a bunch of stuff that takes forever to build where a binary would be convenient. Flags and optimizations aren’t that important for KDE frameworks or Firefox.

Offering binaries is a really nice middle ground. Gentoo makes it so easy to build custom packages from source but it’s always been all or nothing. I don’t want to wait 2-3 hours building updated libraries or Firefox every time there’s a patch.

Personally, I would be interested in a distro that had binary packages, easy builds like Gentoo and something like Arch’s AUR.

Yeah, it works fine. You might want to tinker with the packages as others have suggested but it’s exactly what you expect from Fedora. The only difference is it’s Plasma instead of GNOME.

I had the same experience with GNOME on the family computer. I had to add extensions to make it more accessible. Then when they auto update you get dumped into vanilla GNOME until you log out and back in to re-enable extensions. I would get called over every time that happened. I switched it to Plasma and everyone is happy.

One thing worth pointing out is the dash to dock/panel, just perfection and appindicator GNOME extensions are all in the Fedora repository. When you install them from there, you don’t get that janky behavior during updates where you have to re-enable them. Those extensions go a long way towards making GNOME more accessible to users coming from Windows or Mac. Default GNOME is great if you use keyboard shortcuts but it’s not very intuitive when you’re starting out.

It’s been that way since the dawn of computing. Developers will push hardware to its limits and the hardware people will keep making a faster chip. A lot of software was laggy as hell back in the day. Not to mention, it didn’t have any features compared to the stuff now. Plus our removed would crash all the time and take down the whole PC. Sure, you run across some shockingly fast and good apps but those have always been few and far between.

On the surface, the biggest difference between distros will be the package manager and the update cadence. Most package managers are generally comparable so I won’t get into that. The cadence has to do with release type - rolling or fixed - and the speed with which updates are released. Do you want the newest packages, LTS or somewhere in the middle? This is probably the first big decision to make when choosing a distro. The only real must-have here is you want a distro that provides timely security updates. Even a highly stable LTS should be pushing out security updates asap.

Then you have default package choices, which are often superficial like DE or default apps. This can all be changed so it’s not much of a concern. But there could also be more impactful choices like whether a distro uses systemd or glibc vs musl. The mainstream distros tend to use systemd and glibc, which is generally good, but know that you have other options if your specific use case requires it. There’s also package availability, meaning the number of packages available in the repository, although this is less important than it used to be because you have options like Flatpak or Nix for getting packages that aren’t in your distro’s repository.

There are also some distros created with a specific use case in mind, such as Alpine for containers or Kali for testing network security.

Finally, you have structure and governance. Some distros have corporate backing, others are community supported and still others aren’t much more than a hobby. The ones with corporate backing typically have options for paid support. In general, you want something with stable and competent governance where it will continue to thrive even as team members change. You can find examples of this in corporate-backed distros as well as community distros.

So your biggest choices are going to be cadence, structure/governance, and whether you may need paid support now or in the future.

As for what distro developers actually do… First, they build the tooling and infrastructure to make their distro work - package manager, packaging tools, repository, etc. Then, they are responsible for packaging everything available in the distro. They are pulling in source code for all these apps, compiling it and putting binaries in the repository. They rebuild packages as required when there are updates to the source code. Some distros like Arch will build vanilla packages, meaning they don’t make changes to upstream code. Others may apply their own patches for various reasons. Some like Red Hat will provide patches to upstream apps requested by customers as part of their paid support services. So let’s say something isn’t working the way you need it for some random FOSS app included with the distro. You can put in a request and they will change it for you.

As for your specific question about simulating Ubuntu on Fedora, that is not possible. They each use their own distinct package manager and repository. They generally have similar packages, but they are not interchangeable. However, there are tools like distrobox and distros like VanillaOS that have mechanisms for using another distro’s packages. These use containers under the hood so it’s not quite the same as just installing .deb on Fedora or .rpm on Ubuntu.

Just try it out and see how you like it. It’s been around as long as it has for a reason. And if you don’t like it, there are other fast moving distros. Fedora and Arch/Endeavour have similar packages.

For starters, consider another distro if you want to make things easy on yourself. Alpine is probably a poor choice unless you have a reason to use it. I guess you could use it as a desktop if you really want to, but it’s more geared for containers and embedded devices. It uses musl instead of glibc so you will have problems running software that isn’t packaged for Alpine. The issue with Puppy is you will have a hard time getting help when you need it because it’s kind of a niche distro.

For your first time, you’re better off using something more mainstream. You are going to run into some issues and it’s a lot easier finding solutions for popular distros. Debian would be a fine choice because it’s widely used and runs great on older hardware. Beyond that, you could look at Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS and Mint.

Don’t do it.

First off, I love Linux. It’s my daily driver and I wouldn’t want to use anything else.

But in my past career I was the CIO at a very large firm. Lawyers need Microsoft Office and Windows. If you hire a good assistant or paralegal with word processing experience, they are going to need Microsoft Word. LibreOffice is good, but it’s not a replacement in this scenario. Good word processors are like wizards and will save you hours. It’s not worth it to make them learn something else.

Then there’s drafting software, templating, practice-specific tools, etc. Anything geared for legal is going to run on Windows. What are you using for time entry? What about accounting?

Not to mention, you have some information security obligations under the model rules and you don’t want to mess with that. Although Linux has security advantages over Windows, you still have to take measures to secure it. Maybe that’s easy enough for you to do on your own laptop, but your practice will grow to at least a few staff and an associate. Somebody has to do IT because you’re sure as hell not going to waste billable hours on it.

I had to use Windows in that old gig and it really wasn’t bad. It’s stable, reliable, easy to support. Everyone you hire will have used it before. It’s an unpopular opinion around here, but it’s a quality operating system that’s affordable. I guarantee your cost of ownership will be lower on Windows in your particular situation.