Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an “easy” desktop environment.

Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent “easy” method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.

For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.

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I dunno, I still have a soft spot for Proxmox. I want ZFS, so it’s about the only game in town with support.

(TrueNAS Scale looks good, but it would increase too much my Hetzner costs, because of their requirement of having a dedicated root pool. And I don’t want an LTS distro that supports root-on-ZFS “oficially”. That narrows the field quite a bit.)

(For work and for my workstations, I’m very pleased with Incus on top of Debian… but that’s because I don’t need ZFS on those.)

Ah, sucks :(

I’m looking forward to see where Incus OS goes, or TrueNAS Scale. Honestly, I was very tempted to automate a procedure to take a Proxmox ZFS install and replace the Proxmox bits with Incus bits :) Incus + ZFS as an appliance would be nice. I kinda don’t want to think about the underlying OS.

It’s on backports :D

(I’m actually running it from the Zabbly repos.)

I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.

Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.

Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you’ll be stuck in Debian 12’s KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?

(You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I’d consider stable first.)

My crazy idea is: write software so that Flatpaks can run on Windows and macOS. Plus, make high-quality Flatpak-building templates available for as many programming languages, UI toolkits, etc. as possible.

Because everything that Flatpaks provide is OSS, making shims for Windows and macOS compatibility would be tedious, but doable.

Same with crosscompiling Flatpaks, compared to the difficulties of crosscompiling for Windows or macOS from any other OS, multiplatform Flatpaks should be doable to crosscompile.

So this would lead to a world where a very convenient way to package for Windows and macOS… is creating a Flatpak that works on Linux!

I’m still a huge fan of Ventoy, but lately I have been finding more and more issues with it.

So I decided to investigate using a Raspberry Pi Zero with a USB adapter to create a virtual drive:

https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/hardware/using-an-rpi-zero-as-an-usb-drive-to-install-operating-systems.md

It’s very wonky and manual at the moment, but I have managed to boot all Linux ISOs successfully so far. Unfortunately, I think only ISOhybrid works OOB, so Windows ISO do not work. I have found some scripts to take Windows ISO and make them ISOhybrid, but haven’t gotten around to doing that yet.

I think it should be doable to package this nicely.