MPV is a much lighter video player. Try that.

Punch cards. The “true” PC era.

“Stone” tablets? Luxury. Ours were dried mammoth dung.

Are you running Trinity or KDE?

Not sure why I get so much less unless it is that. Or are you saying you run Trinity 64 bit?

I agree that 32 bit is not often going to be 50% less in practice. Sometimes I think we should be running 64 bit kernels with 32 bit userland.

I found my people.

I have Linux on a 2009 and 2012 MacBook Pro and 2013 and 2017 MacBook Airs.

The 2009 is getting a bit sluggish but for regular stuff, they all work great. We even played a Steam game on the 2012 earlier today (not AAA obviously).

All Chimera Linux.

It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.

You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).

.NET runs fast on Linux

Hahahahahaha. Good one.

Who told you that?

I live in fear of distros like Debian shipping ancient drivers and having to listen to 3 more years of people saying Wayland does not work. Debian 13 may ship with NVIDIA 535 drivers.

GDM launches other environments too. I do not think it is about GNOME itself.

A big thing missing from Wayland are all the other X11 window managers (hundreds of them) and desktop environments (like XFCE and Cinnamon) that people may want to use.

Ok. So now both Apple and Microsoft are distributors of the Linux kernel. What a timeline.

I do not like being accused of attacking Manjaro but since you asked….

1. the project has had lots of governance and quality problems. Maybe those are all in the past. Maybe.

2. By design, Manjaro is not compatible with the Arch repos or the AUR. One of the biggest problems is that they hold their software back a few weeks. In theory this is for quality (not my experience). Regardless, many people have had problems, especially with the AUR. I am one. Others say they have not. Some even claim the rest of us have not either. Manajaro has “brought down” AUR itself (compared to a DDOS attack but really just quality again).

I used Manjaro for over 2 years and would never touch it again. And if what you want is an Arch based distro with an easy install, there is EOS. I have used EndeavousOS for I think maybe 5 years and I love it. Recently I have moved to Chimera Linux, which is not for everyone (it is awesome but I am not recommending it). It is not because of anything wrong with EOS.

EndeavourOS. The default desktop is KDE these days.

Easy to install.

Attractive desktops out of the box. KDE is the default. A few nice quality of life utilities.

It uses the Arch repos and kernel. The AUR (yay) is installed out-of-the-box. So, the biggest package selection in the Linux world. Always up-to-date. Updates fast.

Great community in the EOS forums. Some of the best Linux docs on the web in the Arch wiki. The Arch wiki is an amazing resource for learning.

Very stable. Breakages are rare, especially if you use an LTS kernel. The current LTS kernel is the same one that Debian 13 will release with “soon”. So, not exactly ancient.

Biggest “downside” is that there is no GUI software installer out-of-the-box.

If that is really a deal-breaker, just install one like pamac or octopi. “yay -S octopi” should do it.

Or install a menu driven text based package manager like pacseek. “yay -S pacseek”

Or just take a few minutes to learn how to use pacman or yay at the command-line. You said you wanted to learn.

You can think of Docker and Podman as an almost zero overhead (CPU and RAM) way of running one distribution on another. So, you can run an application in Docker that expects to be running on a different distro from what you use (say Ubuntu Jenkins but actually running on Debian). The environment that the applications run in are called “containers”. Mostly they contain the filesystem layout and application libraries that the app expects.

Docker itself is designed to sandbox the application away from your host system. A related technology, Distrobox, uses the same containers but in a way that the applications know they are running on your system with full access to your display manager and home directory.

I run an Arch Distrobox on every distro that I use. This allows me full access to all the Arch repos and the AUR even on other distros ( eg. Alpine, Chinese Linux, or Debian).

Flatpak also uses containers and so you can consider Distrobox as a Flatpak alternative. Flatpak containers are not the same as those that Docker uses but they rely on the same underlying Linux kernel features to do what they do. In Flatpak, you are essentially running the Freedesktop distro on top of your host distro (so much like Distrobox with the guest distro chosen for you).

Debian?

You can absolutely use Linux without any GNU software. I use Chimera Linux for example (no Glibc, no GCC, no GNU utils). I even get away from some software that Red Hat created according to your definition like SystemD. However, even still, I know that Red Hat is responsible for much of the software I run since I use software like X, Wayland, Mesa, Podman, KVM, PulseAudio, and PipeWire.

It is VERY hard to run a Linux system without using code contributed by Red Hat.

No, Red Hat did not “create” glibc, GCC, or GNOME. They just contributed tens of thousands of lines of code to them. Perhaps more than anybody else over the last 20 years. Ever heard of Ulrich Drepper?

Actually, it is impossible to use Linux without using code contributed by Red Hat as they have been one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel itself for multiple decades now.

And to clarify, the Linux kernel is absolutely NOT a GNU project. Very few packages in a typical Linux distro are actually. The full list of GNU packages is here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.en.html#allgnupkgs

Compare it with this list:

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions

GNU has been influential but is not essential as you can create a complete Linux distribution without any of it (again see Chimera Linux). Code contributed by Red Hat however is totally unavoidable and completely essential. It is not possible to run a Linux system without it. All the distributions you listed heavily rely on code contributed by Red Hat.

To say otherwise is not just misleading. It is wrong.

I do not use any Red Hat distributions. I do benefit from their contributions and am thankful for them.

You sir, may be the highest quality person on the Internet.

We may disagree. One of us may be wrong. Or it may simply be two sides of the coin. Regardless, I respect your opinion and values and cannot begin to express how impressed I am with your response here. I hope someday to achieve the same level of maturity.

We cannot expect companies to be “good” but that is absolutely something we can strive for in ourselves.

I am not sure how you arrived at “none” from your second sentence. The second sentence is exactly my point.

Alternatively then, can I just use the Microsoft source code and claim that I got it from AI? That seems to be your point here.

I had the same impression of Bookworm. Debian including non-free firmware made a big difference. Trixie may be a game changer for Debian on the desktop.

You might consider installing Arch in a Distrobox and adding yay to it to get access to the AUR on your current system. I use a MUSL based distro these days but use Distrobox to bring the AUR with me. This would be a way to give you a feel for the AUR without having to quit your current distro of choice cold turkey.

I have considered trying LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) with a an Arch/Distrobox. That would be a base system of Debian Stable (stable), a reasonably up-to-date but not “bleeding edge” desktop (Mint), and the AUR for up-to-the minute versions of every package I can think of if I want them. Maybe I will try it when LMDE 7 launches. Could be good.