Agree. I wouldn’t even mind it if they were more open about what they’re actually doing, as picking a well working set of apps from the sea open-source apps can have value.
That said, if you read through that site it feels like they want to appear like it’s them who created all that software.
Although, at least with DRM-free games you’re given all the tools to preserve the game yourself if you want to.
Good catch. Never used Remote Assistance, so I don’t know how different it is, and if it actually requires telemetry.
Although the broader issue isn’t the why, it’s that it does those things at all without clearly communicating them to the user. Even their documentation has severe lack of any kind of explanation.
I thought so as well for a time, but that tool in particular is what finally made me lose faith that there might be any good debloat tool out there.
Basically, someone mentioned that it does a weird thing, so I’ve decided to take a look closer, and stumbled about a whole lot of dumb choices. To exemplify, I’ll just repost that part of my comment from back then:
Oh yeah, I’ve just skimmed what else the “Disable Telemetry” script does to the registry, and I honestly can’t classify it as anything other than batshit insane.
A few highlights:
- The popup delay of nested context menus and mouse hover popups
- Disables the prompt when there are open programs when shutting down
- Switches the explorer from the default view to This PC
- Enables long file paths
- Expands the file copy dialog by default
- Straight up disables RDP???
And this is only one script out of a few dozen this “tool” has. Not to mention this is listed under “Essential Tweaks” that are, according to the documentation “Essential Tweaks are modifications and optimizations that are generally safe for most users to implement.”
Problem is, there are no good debloat scripts. It’s all written by amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, messing up the system in subtle ways that then take ages to figure out.
Less packages really doesn’t mean much in terms of how easy the system will be to manage. If anything, I’d say a distro with more, but pre installed packages is easier to manage because the maintainers will make sure that those packages will be as easy to work with and upgrade as possible.
That said, I’m definitely not going to stop you from trying Arch though. You can even get similar (or better) optimizations by using the ALHP repos and a kernel like linux-tkg or linux-cachyos for example, although the difference really is negligible in most cases.
For basic gaming the experience should be at the very least about equal for all GPU vendors right now. If you want anything fancy beyond that, like HDR or properly paced and multi-monitor VRR then Wayland is the only way to even have a chance of it working.
Yup. Those 64 GB SSDs many retailers put into cheap laptops already come dangerously close to violating the Geneva Convention. 8GB is just stupid, even for a Linux system.
I’d be wary of that fork. It’s run by a former Thunderbird dev that got banned for his toxic attitude and hasn’t really improved since. Just take a look at the projects website. Being so unrespectful towards your upstream project should have no place in open-source.
Can recommend as well. I recently checked what’s out when it comes to anything terminal-related and for the multiplexer I landed on zellij. Works well, looks neat, is easy to learn and well configured out of the box.
My current stack looks like this:
Depends. There’s also the included archinstall script, which skips all of that. Just some minimal configuration you find on most distros (Language/Time Zones/Mirrors…) and that’s it.
So yeah, nowadays it’s totally possible to end up with a working Arch installation without knowing anything about it besides that one command.
Year-based version numbers are pretty neat IMO, particularly for applications. Not only can you quickly estimate how up-to-date any particular application is, it also avoids the version number racing problem between competing applications, because some people equate lower version numbers with a less developed application.
For programming libraries though semantic versioning is still the good ol’ reliable.
Slightly off-topic, but this annoyed me during the Win 8.1/10 start screen era as well. Just because an interface is touch-friendlier doesn’t mean it can’t also be an improvement for keyboard/mouse users as well.
Then they ditched all that and made it a worse experience for everyone in Win 11, so un turn I ditched their mess and fully switched over.
I’ve switched over a year ago and that’s the thing that, looking back, sticks out to me the most as well. It’s just insane that practically every application I used had its own update routine. Lesser used apps I had to update every single time before using them. Just constant interruptions everywhere.
Winget is a step in the right directions, but it still has to build upon and work around that same shaky foundation, and it shows.
Yup. For me it similar. I was getting frustrated with the lack of customization in Win11, while at the same time seeing that Linux is actually viable for me with the Steam Deck.
I’ve been running Linux for a year now and while it was good enough for me to switch back then, it’s incredible how much better it has gotten since then.
I see. So it’s less about editing the pictures themself, and more about what they’ll be used for.
And yeah, Krita is main image editing and drawing tool as well, helped out by Inkscape for vector graphics and Aseprite for pixel art.
Instead, I think Krita has a good chance of moving into photo editing with enough funding.
As someone who doesn’t really do photo editing, one thing I never quite understood is what’s missing for that to be viable right now.
For reference, the one time I had to edit a photo a few years ago, I just used Krita to move/remove a few objects and do some basic color grading. It didn’t feel like there was anything missing.
Granted, I never used software like Photoshop either.
You can enable it, but it just won’t work when more than a single monitor is connected to an Nvidia GPU.
Right now the only workaround other than turning off secondary monitors while gaming is connecting all but one monitor to an iGPU, assuming you have one.
As far as I know Nvidia has recently confirmed that they can reproduce the issue, so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.
Surely they didn’t mention multi-monitor VRR support because the work for that is already done and just about to arrive in the next beta driver any day now, right?
I’ve worked around the issue with an AMD iGPU, but still.
Depends on how you break it. Broken partitions? Sure, Gparted it is. Everything else? Most often can be fixed with a quick
arch-chrootand then undoing whatever caused the mess.So yeah, I agree with the Ventoy suggestion. Such a neat little tool that it’s earned it’s place on my key-chain.