As I’ve found out recently, finding true alternatives can be difficult. Take bread for instance. I just discovered Bimbo Bakeries own at least 26 brands. So when you’re on the bread aisle you probably have a moderate to high chance of buying one of their products.
For me it really depends on the use-case. A lot of times I want persistence but don’t really care to access the data outside of the container. So rather than using the extra brainpower to make up folders myself and ensure paths don’t change I just let Docker handle those details for me. Also I use Podman a fair amount and it seems to be more troublesome when it comes to bind mounts.
I was on Ubuntu for years but the Snaps annoyed me and I was looking for alternatives so I went to Fedora (Bazzite). Couldn’t be happier. I installed Bluefin on my laptop (slightly different flavor) and that’s been nice too, although some things don’t work as seamlessly as I think it should.
I probably made a small mistake in setting that up but I tried making the dedicated “home movies” folder and it wouldn’t show my videos.
Only issues I’ve had with Jellyfin are reduced flexibility in naming/organizing files and inability (for me at least) to detect personal media.
I mainly use my Bazzite machine for gaming and it was rough at first (~1 year ago) but it seems like compatibility has made leaps and bounds recently. I don’t play a ton of different games but I’ve had to do very little tweaking to make them work. 90% have been install-and-play. Usually ProtonDB can help you work out the kinks.
Bluefin and Bazzite have been good to me so far.
Pros and cons on the app store thing. Microsoft may curate a bit more but I think it’s inherently more dangerous. A malicious Windows app probably doesn’t have as many hurdles to get the necessary access to take over your system or otherwise cause trouble. To my knowledge, flatpaks can’t run with root permissions unless you executed as root (i.e. enter your password). Seeing that pop up should be way more of a red flag than seeing the “elevate permissions” pop up on Windows.
I think this approach is going to fair the best for mainstream adoption (i.e. Windows refugees). So I would agree that the “future” is going to involve immutable distros as a large, possibly majority, of all Linux installations.
I think it turned to shit when buzz became their currency. I sometimes scroll new content and I’ve blocked dozens of posters because they decide uploading 20 images with the exact same prompt is worthwhile.
Baldurs Gate 3
I don’t know the support model for Framework but they should really be able to work through these issues for such a common distro. With the various things you mentioned it doesn’t sound like bad configuration, it sounds like a hardware issue. Given that Windows is so different from Linux it may be the case that Win11 does a better job masking the issues.
In addition to other advice you could also use SSH over Wireguard. Wireguard basically makes the open port invisible. If you don’t provide the proper key upfront you get no response. To an attacker the port might as well be closed.
Here’s at least one article on the subject: https://rair.dev/wireguard-ssh/
I’ve never hosted anything outside my home. Aren’t there services that are basically 3rd party Docker hosts for which you could run some kind of email container? Preferably not one of the big three, otherwise why leave Gmail?
https://www.system-rescue.org/disk-partitioning/Repairing-a-damaged-Grub/
I would also suggest, if you get grub back, to choose the 2nd kernel version in the list. The latest/top one will probably put you back to your broken state.
Super happy with Bazzite as a gaming PC. I think only a power user might find the “immutableness” of it annoying. You can still install OS packages, it’s just highly discouraged. 90% of the time you’d just be running Flatpaks (a mostly self-contained app that is easy to install and remove). I’m using it with an old-ish NVIDIA card and at first it was troublesome but I think it worked itself out after a few updates. AMD has better compatibility from what I understand.
Mine (XPS 15) might surpass an hour but I rarely work on it constantly while unplugged. I mostly say the battery is piss poor because even suspended the battery will die in a few hours. It probably didn’t suspend to RAM so it was effectively running with a blank screen. Hibernate also resulted in a hard reset half the time.
I feel simultaneously good and bad that the least modern team at my company is the Windows admin team. I hope they were embarrassed as shit when they were asked how that automated process I help them create 9 months ago was going and they said, “Uh, we’ll be rolling it out this quarter.” They’re constantly at least 2 steps behind our Linux admins.
I have Mission Center. It’s great but at the process level it only shows current usage, not a time series average or summation.
If it’s a mostly self-contained app, like a game or a utility, then Flatpak is just fine. If a Flatpak needs to interact with other apps on the host or, worst case, another Flatpak it gets tricky or even impossible. From what I’ve seen though, AppImage and Snap are even worse at this.