Why is it that if they have this information and build these supposedly accurate profiles about you that they would still be willing to show ads at all to the kind of people who are likely to frequent this community? For example, if someone who runs linux, adblockers, firefox with strict profile, etc, etc is being broadcast to these advertisers. Why would they want to bid for advertising space for that person at all?

KMail isn’t available on flathub, so the only way you would see it in discover is if you have done what everyone is telling you not to do on arch. You need to uninstall all of the packagekit dependices. Then you will be able to use discover safely and only install flatpaks.

• Phone numbers
• social security numbers

Stop making personal information into digital ids because when it inevitably ends up in some kind of data breach. These companies all throw their hands up saying sucks to be you.

What tablet if you don’t mind me asking?

You are right. I don’t use vivaldi, but gave it a try and sure enough it didn’t display. Well I would say most chromium browsers and electron apps do then.

To my knowledge they still use gtk for their linux integration, but Mozilla seems to have to stopped them from exporting their menus by default. I remember when that happend some years ago. Technically, you can still patch them unless they decide to migrate to gtk4 for their linux integration in which case patching probably won’t help or be as easy. Anyways, it is a hassle either way. Funny enough, all chromium browsers and electron apps do export their menus though and thus still work. However, I will continue to use firefox.

Meanwhile, I refuse to give it up, so I have been using less gtk4 apps.

Honestly, I would say it isn’t great for anyone who has to do something low level even once. Now that there are open source nvidia kernel drivers that has solved a pretty big issue for most people who would be interested in immutable distros, but there are still many other drivers and issues that your regular user may face.

One example off the top of my head is that flatpaks specifically can’t ship systemd services if I recall correctly. A lot of wayland apps for thigns like input have to use daemons because of wayland’s security model. Lact for AMD and now Nvidia GPU control, ydotool, or even gui versions of such tools for remapping input.

Snaps require custom kernel modules that aren’t used outside of ubuntu, so I hesitate to trust them regardless of any of the other issues people have with them.

This basically leaves appimages which aren’t available for everything and don’t always seem to work at least not as reliably as flatpak. I even tried to package the rstudio forensic software as an appimage myself, so I could have an easy way to use that proprietary piece of software, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t get it to work with distrobox either using the official methods they provide to install it on linux. I did get it working in a chroot for some reason, but it had graphical issues. In the end, I made a PKGBUILD for arch and got it working that way.

The point of all this is that a lot of times people say immutable is great for average, non tech savvy people, but I believe that literally everybody ends up needing to do low level stuff at least once or twice every so often. Which simply isn’t a great experience since you end up having to do layering which throws these theoretical average users right back into the normal complexity of a mutable system, but with even more uncertainty in my opinion.

Now then with all of these caveats. I do still agree that immutable distros are great for the aforementioned group of people and I know this statement contradicts a lot of what I have described above. The reason why I think they are great for the less tech savvy people however isn’t because of any actual technical merit of the systems design though. Immutable distros are great for people like Linus Sebastion because it limits what they can do. You simply have to accept what is there the same way that you have to on proprietary systems like Mac and Windows. Those systems force you to do things a certain way unlike Linux and that is what people like Linus need because they have no business mucking around with the system to begin with.

Lastly, all of this only works because devices like the Steam Deck are being run on specific hardware thus guaranteeing there compatibility. This is what we ultimately need. There would be much less need for low level operations to get drivers or change settings to make wifi or audio work right on a billion different devices if these people were buying linux compatible hardware in the first place.

Honestly, I don’t even believe these articles. At some point it just starts to sound like they are making things up.

Which is just as good in my opinion if I am understanding the situation correctly.

Exactly. Another example of people who are on forums like this are worlds apart from people who know quite literally less than nothing about computers.

I’ve recently gotten into using cockpit. I just wish it was as expansive as openSUSE’s yast.

KDE since it is my desktop of choice, waydroid cause I really want the dev to keep going with that. Probably some others once I can think of them.

And nothing of value was lost.

Technically yes, but practically no. For the same reasons that manjaro might struggle with the aur even though it is technically arch based.

Yeah, while lots of people have plenty of other reasons for using Arch. The packaging system is my personal favorite. I have made packages for deb and rpm based systems before, but Arch is just so dead simple with little scripts preinstalled to make it even easier.

Wish I could still use privacy.com, but they won’t let me connect through debit card anymore and I’m not using Plaid. Seems like plenty of others have had this issue as well.

Seems like a really big release. I’ve never used it, but I appreciate that they exist.

Well yes, but not really as not all desktops agree on and implement various wayland protocols and other features like the system tray, server side decorations, etc, etc. Quite a number of apps don’t work everywhere or appear broken depending on their environment. I’ve seen it happen live in a couple of youtube videos. People trying linux and having a problem that only exists on the desktop environment they were using.

But I agree with the sentiment. Better than before.

This is what I was thinking. This isn’t new and it isn’t in the best of maintained state. There have been some recent contributions, but not enough to claim that KDE as a whole is doing some huge undertaking such as developing a real alternative to word.