It’s too good not to be posted here :

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the “ratio studiorum” of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions…

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.

Be sure to click the link to a fuller version provided beneath this one. Eco is just excellent.

In my case, The rollback feature bricked its onw disk because on a 30g system partition, an install with a separate home partition (not included in the backups) will drown itself in factory settings backups.

It’s a great feature. Give it ample space and trim down on the all the snapshots afterwards.

I have a debian 12 with Unattended Upgrades as a work machine, and it works surprisingly well (I use Arch BTW) - it is probably the simplest way for you to be sure their browser stays up-to-date & keep them safe on this side

Issue with these updates is they happen “behind” and may need a reboot ; this is the only moment I found Debian to misbehave, decide to reboot & I get it when I see the machine updating some component before rebooting again

So this is the full extend of the training to give: in case of doubt, reboot.

I think gnome is perfect in that context also, the lack of Menu is just one hit on the Meta key away, which, if you trim down the install to their exact need will be accessible, confortable.

Welcome to… being a normal Linux user

Switching distro is something every user does, thinks about doing, then does it again.

It’s normal. You just discovered a new way of using your computer, and opened a ton of possibilities in front of you, from customising your current install to the death thanks to the choice in desktops and display managers to just slap an entirely different distribution on your machine. A ton of possibles.

Try them out! There’s Live USB for about every one out there, but my favorite way is to dual-boot and see fully how the install process turns out, how the software management works, how updates occurs etc.

You’ll notice a lot is the same, a lot is different, and most any feature from a distro can be slapped on another!

To give you a taste, try openSUSE Tumbleweed - not because I think you should switch to Tumbleweed over Ubuntu, but because it’s quite different in a few key points, and I believe it is interesting for you: there’s this Rollback backup feature, a beautiful and quite simple installer, a polished user interface, a different software format, and a powerful admin tool.

Have fun with your hardware. Now backup your files and go crazy! So many out there!

(I started with Ubuntu)

Ultra-specific: soundtracks for theatre plays. I’m happy with the available vst’s, but I am not a musician, I don’t play instruments - I record people or I rip stuff & work from there. That said it means multi-band comps, tube-like preamps, parametric eqs, de-essers, echo/delays etc… It’s OK really.

Maybe all this is a bit like photoshop vs gimp: I mostly only ever used Ardour since forever and I cannot compare / suffer / get my workflow irremediably blocked because it doesn’t work for me like I expect it to.

Ardour is really a powerhouse now, and with the Pipewire audio stack, switching inputs or monitoring in every which way is just a breeze.

There’s tons of Linux musicians advice out there, including on, ahem, reddit. Yeah I know.

Now that we have Steam on Asahi my macos partition gonna get shrinked to minimal functional lol.

So you own a perfect mastering device at home, now you get the ultrathin laptop to wander about. One isn’t so portable, and the other may not be able to hardware-encode AV1 files. It only matters if it can play them decently.

Also, the M chips are good, but not that good. My M2 pro is about like a 12th gen i7, not like thrice quicker in any everyday way.

Eww. I ran into similar trying to build a meson app on Asahi. Fuck that. Since the point of the Fedora-Asahi partnership is to have a max of stuff upstream, I guess it leaves you with whatever fedora is shipping - which may not be good enough for you.

Again, depends in your use case; since the horrible business of having a full ffmpeg on one machine is done, you can use any sync software between them & not care further. I use syncthing to keep my mastering device (mbp 14, Asahi) in sync with a playback machine and a backup machine.

But it is my use case: I use different, dedicated devices for dedicated tasks as to spread out wear, risks and improve redundancy in case of failure.

I ran into issues while exporting (rendering) with kdenlive, where you will notice available formats being different between the Mac version of kdenlive and the Linux one.

But to me it was a matter of compatibility, I don’t really care as long as I get useable files of sufficient quality, so I didn’t pay much attention, works-for-me style I’m afraid.

Same applies to hardware vs software encoding/decoding - the M chipset is quite powerful enough you shouldn’t have to worry about it in a pro context where encoding is something you gotta do and it’s doing it reasonably fast.

Just try it out, it doesn’t kill your mac install, and you can compare.

I use it everyday. Got it with Gnome, which is very mac-y but think ultra-zen, minimalist, early macos style. Also with the spinning cube and the wobbly windows, I just can live without these very important productivity addons.

YMMV but for my use case it just works, period - and my use case isn’t light-browsing-casual-text-editing but multitrack mixing with Ardour over Pipewire and some video editing on kdenlive. Oh and we’ve got steam games now lol, I just started Portal (unavailable on Mac haha) for 0.99!

Good thing about Asahi is that it is dualboot by nature, you won’t loose your macos partition for that pesky proprietary app (fuck u Qlab)

Try it out, you’ll love it if nothing specific arm64-related gets in your way. Software availability is great, there’s Ftapak of course for more stuff… It works and is painless to try out.

The Air macs are the best: light, thin, with awesome batteries. The only words of warning are about the reboot mid-process during install: Mac laptops tend to boot on any keystroke, lid movement anything so be sure to not touch anything & just long-press the power button 'til the appropriate screen shows up. That’s all there is to it, the only risky moment. Just (long-)press that button.

No comment on that particular service, but I just checked Murglar 2 on my phone and it half-works, not everything is available to play / download but I’m not locked out either

Edit: I updated the app and ut seems better