First Linux experience beyond retro station. I love bazzite. Super fucking easy!

*Except their stand on software patents and video acceleration
Eh?
Fedora includes incomplete video codecs that can’t use GPU acceleration. This forces the CPU to do the decoding. Fedora claims it’s because of imaginary “patent issues” due to its IBM backing. You can install the correct ones from RPM Fusion, but it’s an extra step and it’s not made clear that this is even a problem. You might notice only after you wonder why you have such high CPU temperatures while doing basic things like browsing the web.
I’m using fedora 42 kde on my new laptop since I couldn’t get mint working - fucking visit drivers.
Anywho, doom: the dark ages runs like wet ass and I’m wondering if it has something to do with video codecs or mesa )don’t know what mesa is and there’s a 5080 in there.
I reinstalled tempeh and all my videos work, but - any chance you could point me towards what to do with the video codecs just so I can confirm? If you can offer some guidance on how to install whatever mesa is I want to try that to see if it helps (even though afaik the game should be using the ncidia drivers anyway).
The laptop has a ryzen cpu btw.
Also cool if you can’t help. Figured I’d ask. I’m new to fedora.
Edit: it just suddenly works fine now for no particular reason.
Fedora doesn’t ship video accelerated mesa drivers(which are open source) by default and is a bit of pain in the ass to setup. They do that because they are very much tied to IBM and have to respect software patents(maybe for legal reasons). This is for intel and AMD graphics and if you take fedora as plug and play, browsers will use cpu to decode vidoes and and heats up as if i’m gaming when i play a simple video.
I use fedora too but hates this specific thing. Most other distros ship with official mesa drivers.
I’ve just installed Fedora. Apart from some installer wonkiness (tbf in Windows) that would totally put off casual adopters it’s been fine and I don’t have to fiddle with anything.
Install Guix
Guix’s FOSS stance is cool, but Nix is much more mature
Guix’s FOSS stance is… cool… I guess… but can be very impractical. The main channel only ships linux-libre which will give you problems on most modern hardware. I immediately had to add
nonguixto get my laptop working.No, the reason I went with Guix is because their tools and APIs seem/feel a bit more polished than Nix. I also feel better about learning Guile Scheme because it’s a more general-purpose language than Nixlang and I just personally found it more intuitive.
But yeah Nix is definitely more mature, has more packages, and has more documentation scattered about. Also, Guix uses GNU Shepherd instead of systemd… which… I don’t know how I feel about that yet…
How do you do Flakes with Guix? When I tried to use it, the closest I could get was a script using time-machine to output a lockfile, and it was still missing many other important features such as inputting other Flakes and their dependencies. Also NixOS/Home Manager have tons of configuration options that integrate with each other (i.e. Shell integrations, stylix) that Guix doesn’t have so with Guix I had to use dotfiles directly which is less powerful. Also on aarch64 Guix is way bugger and like half of the large packages wouldn’t compile a lot of the time, their lack of quality control was also one of the things that pushed me to Nix.
The one thing I do miss from Guix though is the containerized shells.
How do you do Flakes with Guix?
Good question. I haven’t gotten there yet… but I hear yeah, something with
channels.scmandtime-machine? I haven’t tried that workflow yet. Also, something about inferiors?NixOS/Home Manager … with Guix I had to use dotfiles directly which is less powerful
I actually found that I like using the
home-dotfiles-service-typebecause I already have everything in dot files. Although, I have a very simple setup, so I’m not sure more powerful features would be useful for me… maybe? idk.aarch64 Guix is way bugger
Ah, ok. I haven’t tried this.
half of the large packages wouldn’t compile a lot of the time
Hm, weird. Maybe this has gotten better? I haven’t had a problem with anything compiling yet. I did run into a bug with Obsidian not launching correctly and that took a few weeks to resolve, I think.
Guix is definitely lacking manpower for sure, but I’m vibing with the foundations so far. So I’m hoping things get better over time.
This was the closest I managed to get to a Flake with Guix. I’m bad at Guile so there might be other things I missed.
With Nix I made a Flake that automatically configures a text editor that can be imported into other Flakes for my own projects which is easy to do with Nix.
For system configurations, the flake-parts based configuration makes it easy to mix and match modules for different systems that edit parts of program configurations that I need (i.e. different modules add different aliases to Nushell). Idk how Guix handles this since I haven’t figured out Guile well.
I did run into a bug with Obsidian not launching correctly and that took a few weeks to resolve, I think.
I’ve experienced this with Nix before for a different program, although once I made an issue request it got responses immediately and I didn’t even do anything else. Meanwhile for Guix, I tried contributing a package that I spent several hours working on, and I asked multiple channels for support and didn’t get a response, then when I submitted it no response for a year before it was finally rejected, so my experience with the maintainers wasn’t great either and this made me hesitant to invest more time into the ecosystem.
install mint
When I started using Linux again, I used Linux Mint :3
Still happy with Fedora.
If it works, don’t try to fix it
Use NixOS
There is a lot of propaganda for Fedora these days. Something I see much less frequently for Arch and its derivatives. Isn’t that meme based on old facts?
It’s not propaganda. Fedora’s just that good. Been using it since 2019 myself. Never felt the need to distrohop after.
Opposite experience from me. I feel at home with Debian and Arch but there was always something wrong with Fedora.
I’m on kubuntu. I can just Google questions with ubuntu attached to the query and it tells me a gui solution if it’s available. Bonus, there’s far less people telling me I’m doing it wrong, they just assume I’m a newbie.
I feel this way about hyprland…
Well you can just install that alongside your DE and try it out
I’ve been running cachyOS for the last few months…

i’ve heard a bunch of people talking about cachyos
i use endeavour os, and when i get my pc back (i moved and haven’t been able to build it yet) i’m planning on installing base arch
so, what are the upsides to cachyos?
As a gaming-oriented distro, CachyOS is ready to use right out of the box. It’s similar to Endeavor, but goes a few steps further with its opinions. I’d still be using it if it weren’t for AUR’s serious malware problems.
hmmm interesting. i might use it, but now i need to know more about the AUR’s malware problems. i haven’t heard of them and am now kinda scared
I was thinking install KDE because of its theme modifications, still went with fedora because everyone works fine on my setup and I like the interface, it’s so different.
There’s a Fedora KDE flavour. I’ve been rocking it since 2020.
Yea I know, but I wanted the full fedora experience.
What’s missing from the KDE versión?
I don’t really know, it’s been long time since I used it to be true l.
I have the same problem with NixOS and Debian.
Currently every family computer and server in the house runs Debian 12 as a base. But the urge to convert everything to Nix one day still tickles me, who knows someday…
I have Nix installs on two computers and have moved one of them twice to different hardware. Works, as it says, on the side of the tin.
BUUUUT… It’s a bear to get under control. It adds a lot complexity to things that should be simple, it makes some things nearly impossible, and then makes really hugely difficult things cake.
for example, one of a thousands things I want to do that’s easy
If I want to run parsec client. (there is no server available sadly)
nix search nixpkgs parsec
- legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.parsec-bin (150_97c) Remote streaming service client
nix-shell -p parsec-bin #ephemeral install, puts it in the store but only links it for this shell
done! Let’s start it!
parsec
parsec: command not found
parsec-bin
parsec-bin: command not found
parsec-client
parsec-client: command not found
google: nixos parsec
a million ways to run parsec but none from the package manager
google: nixos packages->https://search.nixos.org/packages
https://search.nixos.org/packages
parsec-bin
nothing about how to run it
but there are at least notes about how to install it permanently
so you plow through /nix/store looking for parsec, 4 minutes later
parsecd
they could have just included that in the docs, but nope…
Honestly, I really enjoy it, it feels like I’m in slackware back in the 90’s completely lost and confused learning everything new, and moving an install from box to box with a home directory sync and two files? chef’s kiss
Figuring out why a rebuild isn’t working is pain. Figuring out why an update won’t run, is pain.
ohh and you only get a month after a major release to install it before they stop putting in security updates for the previous version. And historically all the revisions before 25.05 were generally not just one and done. 24.11 ended up with me doing a wipe, fresh install, restoring my home folder and slowly easing parts of configuration.nix back in one rebuild at a time. but to be fair, they’ve been fighting wayland for a while now.
My desktops are Nix, my servers are Debian.
Thanks for your experience, it’s easy to forget have stable debian really are and glorify nix as the one config to rule them all. Backports and lts kernels vs a four weeks update window are miles apart. I should go back and enjoy all my systemd services and sync/backup scripts instead.
But the urge still tickles, hopefully I can contain it inside a vm :)
I tried three times. Failed 3 times.
And I started with Slackware in the 90s. I can handle jank.
But Nix really needs to take a clue from Arch on the documentation front…
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