You would run Windows software with Wine (Bottles is great for this). If you can find an older installer, you would (in theory) install it in a specific directory structured for Wine (called a wine prefix).
If software is too big or heavy, there’s ways to manually install a specific package version on Arch, or you can tell pacman not to upgrade a package you have already installed by noting it should be ignored via a specific section of your pacman.conf
I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a specific section in /etc/pacman.conf for ignoring specific or group/meta packages. You absolutely can ignore specific packages and run a typical pacman -Syu to update everything else just fine.
ETA: and you can upgrade a single package with pacman -Sy <package name>
Can confirm. I have an old 2015 laptop running Bazzite, and it still updates and runs like a champ (and though that’s Fedora, it should be functionally identical to Arch or Debian for most things).
For arch I just have a snapper pacman hook to automatically create snapshots for my btrfs system so I can roll back if an update is just not working.
And if they go with CachyOS and choose Limine as the bootloader, it will be set up automatically! You can also install after the fact, as I did, but I agree that having hooks before and after package updates is very helpful and has come in handy a couple of times.
You’re still in the mindset of Microsoft/Apple. “The latest” doesn’t mean software bloat. Hell, I just updated my packages last night, and the space they took up went down. Package updates typically bring improvements, and I’m always excited to see what optimizations they’ve added. Sometimes, major version changes (e.g. 5.4 to 6.0) bring big changes you might not want or need, but…
…nobody is forcing anything. You get to decide what gets upgraded and when. Arch/Debian isn’t some overarching company dictating when updates happen and what gets updated. It’s a community-driven project, mostly by hobbyists, and updates happen in a piecemeal fashion as individual package maintainers make improvements.
It sounds to me like you should try out both options in a VM. And if you’re planning on Debian, be sure to give PikaOS a try, too.
Yep. For example, Gnome migrated to Gitlab some time ago. Obviously it’s not as ethical as Codeberg, but maybe it offers certain features that Codeberg doesn’t (yet) have that they require. PikaOS is (was?) on Gitea.
For my part, I’ve left Github and will only do development on Codeberg. I’ll still make pull requests to upstream projects that only exist on Github, but I have no control where those parent projects are hosted, and improving those projects is still a net benefit to everyone.
Noctalia is a fork of Quickshell, and it provides a bar, dock, background handling, plugins store, and easy settings menus to adjust everything. It feels nice and polished, and it’s got a lot of “nice to haves” covered. It also works with Sway! The scrolling logic is a Niri thing, so no need to worry about that.
Wallpaper Engine is a tool hosted through Steam that allows people to have animated desktops, sometimes ones that have sound and even interactivity. The problem is that it’s 100% built to work with Windows only. Because it’s changing something on your system and not just drawing things on screen like a game, there’s really no way for Proton or Wine to help.
And that’s what Linux Wallpaper Engine is for! It can take the wallpaper resources and apply them to window managers that support the zwlr_layer_shell protocol, which allows a z-positioning order for the background for Wayland clients. Noctalia has a plugin that makes that integration much easier to manage, so it feels like it’s part of the system rather than a hacky workaround.
It might not work, yeah. KDE has integrated KWin and Plasma very purposely that I would be impressed if you could implement the one without the other. Not saying it can’t be done, because this is Linux after all, but KDE didn’t design Plasma to be modular software, so I would imagine you’d experience broken integrations and such that “just work” with KWin.
Niri + Noctalia shell. I find the scrolling tiles to be excellent for my workflow, and the desktop shell feels nice and polished. Plus, Niri supports the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell, which means I can finally use Wallpaper Engine; there’s even a Noctalia plugin for it.
Niri has been great for gaming and streaming, so be sure to check it out if you haven’t.
I would be hesitant to use anything but KWin with Plasma. They were designed together as a set (like Mutter and Gnome), and I suspect replacing the WM would be no small task.
It sounds like you’re concerned with EEE: embrace, extend, extinguish. While that might be a problem for centralized pieces of software, who are dependent upon revenue streams, core distros like Debian, Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE are developed and maintained by the community (and sponsors).
If sponsors all pulled their funding tomorrow, the projects would not suddenly cease to get updates. By extension, sponsors don’t get special seats at the table just for being a sponsor; it’s not some corporate buy-in where they get 5% voting share for donating $1M to fund hobbyists to work on the code full-time. Likewise, they don’t have special push access to inject “features” (read: enshittification) into the codebase that will eventually hamstring the code. Somebody would notice a bad pull-request and say something.
And even if they miraculously did, the codebase is open source. There are enough motivated people in the world who would fork the code into something free and open again. It’s one of the biggest strengths of FOSS.
Sponsorships help the development happen faster, but sponsors are not the drivers of Linux—we are. Choose the distro you like, and enjoy!
As a sidenote, you might be asking why sponsors would give money to these projects:
If it has a borderless windowed option, does it produce the same problems?
That’s a really strange one, and I have to wonder how the devs programmed it. Games sometimes don’t detect my keyboard layout correctly (I use Colemak), but I can’t recall a time where the keyboard wasn’t recognized at all.
No, I vote they change it to be just an unpronounceable symbol. You know, kind of like the artist formerly known as Prince.
It’s a lot harder to complain about a name change if it’s not a name!
How you gonna make the good shit without POOP?
Nope, but it’s a nicer way to say, “Y’all are fucking stupid for caring this much about a name change for software that’s free.”
I’d rather let people read between the lines on their own!
Also tbh, if it does the same things as before, they could call it POOP, and I’d still use it. The name has no bearing on how it functions.
Who is really out here getting bent out of shape over a name?
There’s a way to create aliases to the programs in the containers so that you can run them on the host as if they were installed. Look into the Boxy app (should be able to find it as a flatpak) for a GUI way to do it, but you might also look into nix to set up different dev environments. If it’s not already a ujust recipe, look into how you can layer it and how to load up different nix configs for your different environments.
Eww, Reddit. No thanks. However, !linkedinlunatics@sh.itjust.works exists!
Windows 10 has been sitting unused on a separate drive…
Maybe you could clarify a few things. You say Windows was on a separate drive, but then you talk about dual booting. Do you mean that Windows was on another partition on a shared drive, or do you have two separate hard drives?
If you have Mint on one hard drive and uBlue on another, seems to me what you should be looking at is adding an entry to Grub. I’ve only ever done this with Limine, but I would imagine it similarly involves editing some config and running a rebuild command to refresh Grub. There should be plenty of info about how to do this, given how old and ubiquitous Grub is.
If it’s two partitions on the same drive, it might be similar, but I don’t know.
Tbh though, I’m at a loss as to why you want to dual boot an atomic distro and a typical one. You should be able to do almost everything a normal distro can do by using Distrobox. If you prefer having total control over everything, why bother with an atomic distro? What problem are you trying to solve?
Also there are already a lot of binary blobs in the kernel, that also makes me nervous a bit.
You can compile your own kernel, you know?
I would agree with that wisdom in general. I don’t think any package manager would prefer a user piecemeal updates like that.