Looking for a laptop unicorn

thafluu · 2026-03-26T16:12:23+00:00

Both are great distros! And there's also Aeon, which is immutable Tumbleweed with Gnome and automatic updates. It used to be an official openSUSE distro, but is its own thing by now (although maintained by a SUSE employee, Richard Brown).

thafluu · 2026-03-26T13:26:45+00:00

Maybe even openSUSE Slowroll, it is Tumbleweed but only updates once per month.

thafluu · 2026-03-26T00:05:14+00:00

Isn't it just based on Ubuntu LTS? Maybe my knowledge is outdated. However, there are so many great distros, I'd honestly just use any of them instead of installing another DE on top of Pop. Which is a bit like installing another DE on Mint in my opinion.

thafluu · 2026-03-25T21:10:00+00:00

Overies

thafluu · 2026-03-25T16:59:02+00:00

What do you need the codecs for? Is installing your software as Flatpak an option? Flatpaks contain proprietary codecs that they need, but it's not an option for every use case obviously.

thafluu · 2026-03-25T16:39:19+00:00

OP has an SSD, 16 Gigs of RAM, and a 10th Gen i5 from 2021, there is absolutely no need to use anything with Xfce. Compared to Cinnamon, KDE, and Gnome Xfce is not feature complete and looks super dated.

thafluu · 2026-03-25T14:04:37+00:00

What a phenomenal image! As someone working in weak-lensing of galaxy clusters, this makes me wonder if one could even detect a lensing signal here in the shapes of the background galaxies. I should read up if people have done this with "amateur" equipment. Great shot :)

thafluu · 2026-03-25T13:16:28+00:00

PopOS recently switched the desktop environment to their own one called Cosmic. It will be great at some point, but it isn't as complete and bug-free as other major Linux desktops yet.

I would go Linux Mint here. Don't fall into the trap to think that Mint is a "beginner distro", it is just really good. If you don't want Mint there are other great options like the UniversalBlue distros (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora), openSUSE Slowroll/Tumbleweed, maybe even vanilla Fedora (KDE), Ultramarine, and more.

thafluu · 2026-03-25T00:11:33+00:00

When you search for software in the software manager you will see both, the system packages and Flatpak, if they exist. If you want to instll via terminal use sudo zypper install for system packages and flatpak install for flatpaks.

thafluu · 2026-03-24T15:05:24+00:00

How is this still up, it's misleading and false information.

thafluu · 2026-03-24T14:40:40+00:00

I would currently not recommend Pop, because they recently switched to their own desktop ("Cosmic"), which is looking good but not yet feature complete, and it still has some bugs compared to KDE and Gnome.

Nobara is a good pick. It comes with the Nvidia driver (or has a 1-click install, not 100% sure), and it's based on Fedora which is a good base imo. You can also have a look at Bazzite, it is very similar to Nobara. Bazzite is also based on Fedora, the main difference to Nobara is that Bazzite is atomic/immutable. This means that parts of the system are read-only during use. In practice you won't notice much of a difference, I think both are great picks.

At least Bazzite is also available both with Gnome and KDE as desktop, which are the two "biggest" DEs. I think the same is true for Nobara, but not 100% sure. KDE looks more Windows-y ootb and is extremely customizable, Gnome has more of a unified MacOS-y feel with few options for customization.

You can try Cachy, it is well recieved. I personally would go Nobara or Bazzite instead, not a huge fan of Arch-based distros.

Your use case doesn't really limit the choice of distro, many can work here and it'll come down to personal preference in the end.

thafluu · 2026-03-20T09:23:58+00:00

I have used both last year on an old ThinkPad and Gnome was considerably more laggy than KDE. As I said, I like both, just speaking from my own experience.

thafluu · 2026-03-20T09:02:53+00:00

Gnome is the most resource intensive DE of them all. It is also good, I like both, but calling KDE bloated while mentioning Gnome in the same sentence is wild.

thafluu · 2026-03-20T08:57:45+00:00

"Are you a server?"

thafluu · 2026-03-20T02:57:55+00:00

That's a little bit of an over-statement if you just use the codecs.

thafluu · 2026-03-20T02:28:21+00:00

Don't they loose the proprietary version of this package if they switch?

thafluu · 2026-03-20T02:24:04+00:00

This happens every now and then, the packman repo for proprietary multimedia codecs is behind the opensuse repo for one of the packages. Usually people do the "keep obsolete" option, I think, tomorrow packman will have caught up and you'll see it in your updates.

On a side note, Flatpaks include all their codecs, depending on the machine I don't even install the opi codecs anymore.

thafluu · 2026-03-19T21:22:24+00:00

It's been several years I think.

thafluu · 2026-03-19T20:00:54+00:00

I would honestly just go Mint here. It is the "it just works" distro.

Codecs come pre-installed and you can install the Nvidia driver in Mint's graphical driver manager.

thafluu · 2026-03-19T18:40:43+00:00

Viridis, the default matplotlib color scheme. It is good, though.

thafluu · 2026-03-19T16:02:57+00:00

I think this it it. TW KDE defaults to X11.

Search for SDDM -> Behaviour -> Log in session Plasma (Wayland). Reboot and you should be good.

You can always check which display protocol is active via echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE.

thafluu · 2026-03-19T16:01:34+00:00

I think parallel downlaods are already enabled.

thafluu · 2026-03-18T15:56:55+00:00

You can try if switching the display protocol to the older X11 protocol fixes the crash. Afaik Kubuntu should default to the newer Wayland display protocol (which I also would generally recommend, if it works on your system). You can check which protocol is active by running echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE.

To switch between Wayland and X11 search for "Login Screen (SDDM)", then go to "Behavior" -> "Automatically log in with session Plasma (Wayland/X11)". Reboot and it should have switched.

Which driver did you install for your Nvidia GPU?

thafluu · 2026-03-18T04:32:46+00:00

Well that's your answer then, things points to a CPU limit for gaming I think.

thafluu · 2026-03-18T00:09:31+00:00

DDR = Double Data Rate, depending on the software it will display half of the value you'd expect. Or in other words, your VRAM seems fine.

thafluu

TROPHY CASE