New Laptop and Linux Distro and Desktop Environment Musings

Published: 02 October 2024

It's past 6am and I feel the urge to write another gemlog entry with some late night musings. Well, I guess early morning musings at this point. If I'm not careful this might turn into a habit. I really ought to at least make some attempt to fix my sleep schedule...

New Laptop

Anywho, I made a post on Station[1] earlier after discovering that was a thing:

My Post on Station Pondering a Laptop

I was in the market for a reasonably priced laptop that I could use to do some basic things like browsing, watching media, and some coding work. In the end, I decided to go with a ThinkPad T450s that I found for about £140. I think that's a fairly decent price for this venerable workhorse laptop. The specs aren't particularly anything to write home about:





They're pretty baseline, but certainly enough for the tasks I have in mind for it. It's arriving on Friday and I'm looking forward to getting it set up.

What's in a name?

Thanks for the replies on Station indicating that the ThinkPads are pretty well supported by Linux, although mrrobinhood5 threw another spanner in the works by asking me what I'll be naming it. I was going to use something like "tiff-laptop", but now I feel compelled to come up with something a little more creative. Perhaps space themed...

The Distro Dilemma

The one downside of the device I bought is that it's coming pre-installed with Windows. While Windows has its place, it's certainly not something I'll be using on this laptop. So, my first port of call when it arrives will be fixing that. Linux, err I mean GNU/Linux ;), is my preferred choice.

Now, I'm someone that's done my fair amount of distro-hopping back in the day. Outside of the really obscure or specialised distros I've probably tried most of the typical "mainstream" ones. I'm someone that's generally favoured the stability of Debian historically, although on the laptop I used for uni I decided to be a little more adventurous and use Slackware. That was always rock-solid and good to me. Taught me a fair amount of the under-the-hood stuff too.

These days though I've been preferring things a little more up-to-date. My desktop is currently running the Fedora 41 beta release after upgrading from F40 and I couldn't be happier with it. Since trying Fedora a couple of years ago, it was something I felt compelled to stick with. It's not as "bleeding edge" as something like Arch, but it occupies a nice balance of stability while also keeping package versions fairly recent. New technologies usually make their way into Fedora fairly early on which keeps things interesting also.

I guess the question in my head is whether I decide to just go with what I know and use Fedora on my new laptop, or put something else entirely on it purely for experimentation purposes. I could try out Arch, maybe, or perhaps put Pop!_OS on it to try the shiny new COSMIC desktop environment built in Rust. Decisions, decisions...

Going nuclear, in the atomic desktop sense

One thing that has been catching my eye as of late is trend of atomic (immutable) distros[2]. For anyone in the dark, they're essentially image-based distributions with a read-only root filesystem. The approach is massively different to the traditional way of installing software using a package manager, such as dnf or apt, as that obviously isn't possible when your FS is read-only. The preferred way of using software on top of the base image is to install it using something like flatpaks, or within their own semi-isolated containers. It is possible to layer packages from the repositories onto the base image though when that's desired.

This is a cleaner and more secure approach. It also comes with the added bonus of being able to "rebase" to a different image whenever you want[3]. Want to try KDE on Fedora 41? It's a simple rebase command away. Don't like it and want to go back to GNOME, or want to downgrade back to Fedora 40 due to some bugs? You can just rebase back to those images from F41. It's certainly a very interesting way of managing your OS, although it does take a little getting used to.

If I do decide to go down the atomic route, I'll probably be sticking with Fedora purely because I'm familiar with how to manage images using rpm-ostree.

Desktop Environment/Window Managers

Of course, outside of the atomic/immutable distros, the fact is there's really not that much difference between the main Linux distros these days in terms of the base system. Sure some have different philosophies on how bleeding edge they are and whatnot and may have slightly different ways of managing packages, but a great many share the same base of the typical desktops, binaries, and the systemd init system and its plethora of tools.

A more pressing concern, one could argue, is which desktop environment I might choose to use.

GNOME

Originally when I installed Fedora, I ran with its default GNOME DE. Don't get me wrong, GNOME certainly has its charm. I actually grew to like the workflow even though it took a little getting used to. One aspect that I did find problematic, however, was the fact that anything you want to do outside of the GNOME developers' very opinionated way of presenting and using the desktop required an extension. In an of itself this isn't particularly a big deal. It becomes a problem, however, when there's a major GNOME update and several extensions you use aren't updated yet. Worse, when those extensions are never updated due to them being abandoned. Don't get me wrong I'm incredibly grateful to the developers who make and maintain the extensions, but I can't help but feel that relying on third party efforts for core functionality is inherently flawed.

To avoid those frustrations, I think GNOME is probably best used as close to stock and unmodified as possible and fully subscribing to how the GNOME devs want you to use it. This approach doesn't work for me, however, so I probably won't be running with GNOME on my new install.

KDE to the rescue!

KDE Plasma 6 was where I ended up after moving on from GNOME on my desktop. Ironically, my current KDE desktop is configured to look very much like GNOME:

Screenshot of My Current KDE Desktop

KDE is so configurable and has all of the functionality I could possibly want baked in, meaning I never have to wrestle with extensions and updates while still being able to enjoy a GNOME-like aesthetic. KDE used to have a little bit of a reputation as a little buggy, and as an old Slackware user I can most certainly confirm some of that reputation to be well-deserved. Plasma 6 really has been a different beast though and my metaphorical hat is truly off to what they've been able to achieve. KDE has certainly arrived and is now absolutely a first-class DE in my eyes.

A new frontier: tiling window managers

While just using KDE on my new device would be the safe option, something I've not really tried has been running without a fully-fledged DE and trying out a tiling window manager. I've tried i3 a little in a virtual machine one time and was actually really surprised at how much I liked the workflow and how efficient tiling WMs use screen real estate, so I'm giving some serious thought to the idea of running with one on my new laptop.

Fedora actually has a dedicated release ("spin") for Sway[4]:

Fedora Sway Spin - The Fedora Project

They also have an atomic version of their Sway release as well[5].

Sway is essentially the i3 X11 WM and backwards compatible with its configurations, but built from scratch as a Wayland compositor. Not only would it be lightweight for the lower-end laptop hardware, but a workflow centered around different workspaces would mitigate the limitation having just a single laptop screen to use when not connected to any external monitors. It would also make the most of the limited screen space the 14" display has.

Closing Thoughts

I think I've probably talked myself into trying Sway during the course of writing this gemlog, so it's probably time to whack it up in a VM prior to my new laptop's arrival and play around with some configuration. Which distro I go with and whether it's atomic or not is still up in the air though, so if anyone has suggestions on anything I've wrote or experience with atomic distributions and has an opinion on them after using them for awhile feel free to reach out to me. I always enjoy hearing peoples' viewpoints and ideas!

For now though, I should probably focus on the more pressing matter of getting some sleep...

References

[1] My Post on Station

[2] Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops - Fedora Magazine

[3] Trying different desktop environments using "rpm-ostree rebase" - Fedora Magazine

[4] Fedora Sway Spin - The Fedora Project

[5] Fedora Sway Atomic - The Fedora Project

Mailbag

Comments and replies to this post are welcome. Feel free to send a cosmic raven to:

Misfin: tiff@valkyrieshowl.com

Email: surges.colts_0s@icloud.com

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