The chap behind the above video is actually a huge fan of Garuda and he's given it a lot of testing. Here's what he said a few months ago after using Garuda for 3 months...
1 Like
"Watch the video and let me know what you think in the comments..."
And then he deletes the ones he doesn't like.
It's never been easier to earn money with other people's work.
1 Like
I like to have a well-functioning gut, so I use Pleroma instead. Much more performant and much better features. Plus, the project itself isnât politically oriented (unlike Mastodon). I might try moving to Misskey, in the future. That project looks pretty cool.
âMr. Lightyear needs more (magnetic) tape!â Also, better compression algorithms would be welcome.
Plus, âthe consequence of this increasing reliance on dataâ means reject modernity; retvrn to monke.
Is there a way to make it not dependent on systemd and still run fine? Maybe a fork or something could be called Pathground, like how Heads is a systemd-less version of Tails.
Awesome. I hope we less need to use systemd in things, going forward. I think it should be more of an option than a "requirement," like it seems to currently be. Similar to choosing between Arch-based and Debian-based distros.
I honestly don't know a lot about the systemd situation, but my gut feeling is that we (people, in general) shouldn't be so dependent on it.
If you want to learn more about it, just read through a few of the one million threads that have gone back and forth on the topic on basically every Linux forum in existence for longer than a decade. It is one of the more well-beaten-to-death topics in Linux history.
Ten years ago, when Arch first officially adopted systemd, it was way more controversial. It was a big departure from how init systems worked at the time, and it was also a lot more than just an init system. That was a major criticism against it, in fact: the Unix philosophy has always been that a software should do a specific thing very well, and systemd was always too extensible to fit into that philosophy.
There are still folks who are passionate about systemd (for or against), but a lot of the hostility toward it has petered out over the years as it has continued to get better and become more reliable and useful. Since so many distros have adopted it, it also lays a common framework for system management (as opposed to having to learn basically a completely new system for every distro, which was the old way).
A typical user will learn about whatever feature it has that they need for whatever they are trying to do, and basically not really think or care about it in a meaningful way beyond that.
Itâs not a requirement by any means, anyone is welcome to build a distro with whatever init system they want.
Plenty of popular distros do not use systemd: Artix (like c00ter mentioned), Alpine Linux, Void Linux, MX Linux, Nitrux, DevuanâŠjust do a web search and youâll find entire sprawling communities of folks who are happy to hate systemd forâŠwell, for whatever reason they hate it for. 
5 Likes
Sure you can find distros sans systemd, but it's kind of like going back to using a rotary phone once you've used modern telecommunications technology.
7 Likes
Btrfs with Linux 6.3 introduces block group allocation class heuristics to pack files by size for helping to avoid fragmentation in block groups. Btrfs with Linux 6.3 also has continued code clean-ups and refactoring around its native RAID5 and RAID6 handling. It was just with Linux 6.2 as well that Btrfs received RAID 5/6 reliability improvements while this code path continues to be enhanced with this follow-on cycle.
11 Likes
2 Likes
On the subject of flatpaks..
In a surprise move, Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package across all eight of Ubuntuâs official flavors, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release.
Ubuntu says the decision will âimprove the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experienceâ for new users by making it clearer about what the âUbuntu experienceâ is.
They reason, someone using a flavor offering Flatpak might assume the tech will get the same level of support, bug fixes, and development attention from Ubuntu/Canonical as repo and snap apps.
The Linux kernel since last year already supports BIG TCP for IPv6 traffic to allow for larger TSO/GRO packet sizes. This has yielded significant speed-ups for IPv6 performance particularly in the 25~100+ Gbit networking space while also yielding lower latencies. With Linux 6.3, similar benefits are now being provided in the IPv4 space.
5 Likes
Meanwhile, Flatpak is now installed by default with Archâs Archinstall routine. I swear to Gawd it is.
8 Likes
Highlights of Mesa 23 include Radeon Memory Visualizer support, various raytracing, graphics pipeline library, and RDNA3 improvements for the RADV (Radeon Vulkan) driver, Rise of the Tomb Raiderâs Ambient Occlusion pass misrenders (swimming shadows), improved support for the KDE Plasma desktop environment when using the Plasma Wayland session and the Gallium LLVMpipe driver.
1 Like
# 111+ Linux Statistics and Facts â Linux Rocks!
2 Likes
While it will likely still be a while before this Wayland driver becomes usable for a native Windows applications/games on Wayland experience with the Linux desktop, it's good to see progress being made toward upstreaming.
3 Likes
Talk by Richard Stallman on March 17th regarding the dangers of cell phones
Learn more here...
https://www.fsf.org/events/talk-by-rms-on-march-17
Why so much Flathub hub-bub lately, from all sides of the aisles?
KDE and GNOME seek $100k to turn Flathub into a store for the Linux desktop
4 Likes
A dev commit adds an option to enable this long-requested capability to the Qt-based webkit browser. The option will be available in the next stable release of the browser but it wonât be turned on by default. Users have to explicitly turn it on to benefit.
Why? Well, though hardware acceleration in Falkon works well (for me, and for a few others already using it) itâs not considered 100% robust enough for a wider rollout â not yet.
But with it the feature a mere check-box away, thereâll be wider testing and, hopefully, further contributions to improve it.
Better still, the feature works on both X11 and Wayland.
If youâre unfamiliar with it, Spot is unofficial Spotify client for Linux built in Rust and GTK, and using the open-source librespot library (which means the app can only work with Spotify Premium accounts, sadly).
âWhy use an unofficial Spotify client? Isnât the official Spotify client for Linux good enough?â
Hmm, kinda.
Features-wise the official Spotify app for Linux is on-par with the official apps for other systems. However, the Linux app is infrequently updated, and because itâs built using web-technologies it is mildly more demanding on system resources than it ought to be.
Spot in comparison is fast, lightweight, looks great on GNOME desktops, works on ARM systems, and adapts its UI gracefully as the window gets smaller (meaning those on Linux mobile devices can use it without issue too).
3 Likes
Isnât the official Spotify client actually unofficial? Taken from Spotify snap:
Note: Spotify for Linux is a labor of love from our engineers that wanted to listen to Spotify on their Linux development machines. They work on it in their spare time and it is currently not a platform that we actively support. The experience may differ from our other Spotify Desktop clients, such as Windows and Mac.
3 Likes
2 Likes
Dubbed âVon Neumann,â FFmpeg 6.0 is here more than a year after FFmpeg 5.0 âLorentzâ and introduces several new features like support for the Radiance HDR (RGBE) image format, VA-API (Video Acceleration API) decoding and encoding for 10bit and 12bit 422/444 HEVC and VP9 streams, as well as a new mode to the cropdetect filter to allow it to detect crop-area based on motion vectors and edges.
FFmpeg 6.0 also introduces support for the WBMP (Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap) image format, NVEC AV1 encoding support, oneVPL support for QSV, and support for the filtergraph syntax in FFmpegâs command line interface to pass file contents as option values by prefixing the option name with â/â.
3 Likes