I wish you the best of luck at/with whatever you end up doing! May your system be protected from bit rot, config drift and/or problems caused by hidden state!

My apologies fam for not being able to help out much (if at all) 😅. FWIW, for related~ish reasons, I intend to explore the waters of NixOS within a couple of weeks. What are your plans?

Apologies for the late response. And this is probs not what you'd like to hear. But I've heard some industry veterans refer to this as an inevitability of the 'old' model. I believe a radical approach is required to prevent this from happening the next time. Wish ya good luck fam!

I've installed it through secureblue's ujust script. I think this has been the smoothest experience I've had with it on Fedora Atomic.

Previously, I relied on the wireguard profiles I downloaded from ProtonVPN and which I loaded through NetworkManager. While it definitely worked, it was a hassle to redo it every now and then. Furthermore, switching on the go to something else I hadn't loaded already was never an experience I enjoyed doing.

Though, for completeness' sake, ProtonVPN^[Note that, IIRC, IVPN and Mullvad don't fare better in this regard.] hasn't fixed its IP leakage on Linux. And, to my knowledge, the workaround is only available with access to the wireguard profiles. And thus, the cumbersome method actually offers a very tangible merit over the comfortable one.

Finally, while I don't endorse the use of NordVPN, it's the only other VPN that's installable as a sysext. Note that systemd system extensions are still experimental, though. Even if they've (read: N=1) been reliable to use for me.

First of all, thank you for that response!

Do you think I am using this thread and this thread alone as my only source of information on these distros?

No, I don't think that. I'd even challenge that notion as your query didn't start with a simple "What's best?" but instead asked for a comparison between three distros that were (somehow) selected by you. Please feel free to enlighten me on what made you even consider the premise of your above question. Though, as this is not that important to begin with, it's also perfectly fine to ignore that 👍.

I feel as though this thread has delved into the essence of the matter perfectly well. That matter being, of course, people’s opinions on the three distros I laid out.

If you lay it out like that, then; yeah, surely. However, it seems we fundamentally differ on what the essence of the matter is. And, perhaps I'm at fault for thinking this is a beneficial exercise to begin with. Regardless, I feel I at least owe you an explanation that goes over where I'm coming from:

Fundamentally, literally none of your original three distros serve you well for the purposes of "I’m starting to want to delve into my OS more to see what I can customize". Each one is pretty opinionated (by default^[Garuda is exempted from this through its KDE Lite offering.]) and -heck- both Bazzite and Nobara come with (highly) specialized tools required for system maintenance. This is because they've identified that there's a very serious disconnect between the freedom they'd like to allow their users and the (otherwise almost insurmountable) complexity this adds to how upgrades are managed. Bazzite trusts Fedora Atomic's tooling for this, while Nobara has created their own.

Being (highly) opinionated isn't necessarily bad. But it's undeniably easier to tweak/tinker/configure a more minimal system. Hence, you're better served by a lean install (with sane defaults). Thankfully, community members either recognized this and tried to sway you towards other options. With success*. Or, you were able to discern distros that better serve you from the communities' input. However it may be, both CachyOS and Solus are definitely better in that regard. Though, crucially, if the community strictly kept to discussing the original three distros and didn't go out of their way to venture into unexplored waters, then you wouldn't have arrived where you are right now.

Anyhow, all of the above could as well be disregarded the very moment you (hypothetically) state that your idea of customization is limited to the avenues KDE Plasma offers. Because, the original three are perfectly suited for that. So, your ideas on what tweaking/tinkering/customization entails is fundamentally linked to the distro that's most fit for the job.

And thus, I would distill the essence of the matter to be a clear idea on what kind of balance between "stability" and "customization" is envisioned as desirable by you. And, while at it, proper delineations of what is and isn't understood as stability and customization. Is the requirement of stability only satisfied if you can easily rollback to a proper working state? Or, is borking on a random update simply unforgivable? On the other hand, do you really want to compile your own kernel and install it? Or were you merely interested in KDE's knobs? Etc. etc.

and start an in-depth discussion

Not necessarily, answering "Or…, like could you perhaps be more clear on what it is you’d like to tinker/tweak/customize in the first place?" would probably have been sufficient.

something I can crack open and break while tweaking - for the learning experience

There's so much we could go over in the paragraph the above text is found, but I'll instead limit myself to just the above text. I find myself in a conundrum when you present that the above was implied and that (somehow) you came to consider Bazzite. While Bazzite is a lot more customizable than people give it credit for, I would not describe any part of the experience as "cracking it open". So, when met with an oxymoron as such, I literally have to ask for a clarification.

Fedora has lost my favor due to being a fixed release distro.

You've stated somewhere that you "Love the idea of rolling releases". So, if Solus passes as a rolling release distro ^[To be clear, technically, it absolutely does.], but has less uptodate packages than Fedora's previous release^[So I'm not even comparing it to Fedora 42 or Fedora Rawhide (i.e. its rolling release branch).]. Then, what is it intrinsically that makes it favorable as a rolling release? And I haven't even delved into why Fedora's release cadence is referred to as semi-rolling or how the latest updates to packages like GNOME arrive earlier in Fedora compared to even Arch. Btw, this is not meant as one big advertisement for Fedora. Instead, I want to point out the many many nuances that exist within the Linux landscape.

After CachyOS was brought to my attention, and I researched it a little bit, it seemed to fit my desires pretty well. It’s optimized for speed, which is perfect for games, and it’s rolling release so I still get to feel like an uber haxx0r.

But, I think I’ll stick with CachyOS for now, I’m excited to use Arch btw.

I agree that CachyOS is one of the better fits. And if you're not interested to check out Arch, EndeavourOS or openSUSE Tumbleweed(/Slowroll), then I can't even think of another rolling release worth considering for you.

I love that it’s a small team.

I don't know why this would be preferred over a big team 🤔. Mind helping me understand this?

Btw, to be clear, Solus, as a project, is currently not very healthy. While it could compete with Fedora and openSUSE in the past, the last couple of years haven't been very kind to it. I'd propose the idea that the departure of its founder (i.e. Ikey Doherty) from the project has left it (relatively) visionless. And the turbulent times that followed made nurturing its community a great challenge. One, I'd argue, they weren't able to handle gracefully. Regardless, it's undoubtedly a shell of its former glory. This is also reflected by how relatively bare-bones its repository is. Or how absent it is within the discourse. Hopefully it will be able to bounce back after goodies from Doherty's latest project (i.e. AerynOS) trinkle down to benefit Solus. But, until then, it would be very irresponsible of me if I didn't discourage you from daily-driving it...

Upgrading between major versions is not a trivial task. Did you adhere to the instructions/tutorials found on this page?

Thank you! Great answer!

For some reason, perhaps because I'm an absolute shill/sucker for free services, I always forget about mailbox.org. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and talking about its features!

Though, if I understand correctly, we basically don't have a privacy-respecting email provider that offers auto-forward and auto-reply functionality in its free plan/tier:

• Proton Mail requires a paid plan for auto-forwarding/replying and its free plan doesn't support IMAP. BUT?!, crucially, IIUC, the issue can already be circumvented with a custom domain that sits in front of Proton Mail. Which, isn't entirely free, but 1$ for the domain ain't bad.
• Tuta Mail doesn't even offer the functionality AFAIK nor does it support IMAP. Furthermore, I don't know if the custom domain trick works for this one.
• Finally, mailbox.org doesn't even have a free plan. Though, at 1 euro/month, it's at least very competitively priced.

Glad you're so appreciative and worked through it! I gladly share, discuss, and respond.

Thank you for being you!

I'll have to read up on palette filters. :) I do semi-regularly use ffmpeg, but palette filters are not something I have heard or used before.

Please allow me to point you towards the relevant parts within its documentation; palettegen and paletteuse.

Together, they constitute -from what I can gather- the absolute minimal required to create a .gif with desirable qualities. As such, they will make their appearances within the following two commands that closely mirror the examples found in the documentation:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf palettegen palette.png

This generates a representative palette with 255 colors maximum from the video. Note that AFAIU the set of colors this can draw from is the same as the one used for gifs. Which will likely come into play when we try to understand why this works in the first place.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i palette.png -lavfi paletteuse output.gif

This starts with converting the colors found in the original .mp4 to their closest counterparts found within the palette. Then, with converted colors, it's turned into a .gif. Note that AFAIU we've effectively eliminated the algorithm that would otherwise kick in to convert the .mp4's wide arrange of colors into the ones compatible with gif.

To be clear, I don't claim to understand why this actually works 😅. But, combined, the above two commands do yield desirable gifs. Like, for example, the one found below.

Note that we can achieve the same with just a single command. For that, consider the command found below.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" output.gif

I assume in this case it's a downsampling into fewer colors, evading the issues of almost-same-colors?

That would also be my conjecture.

Especially given the last square/check pattern makes me thing of codecs splitting into square blocks and then encoding those. It could make sense that this division leads to different results for one reason or another, which then produces a check pattern without it being there before.

Makes sense.

Could you elaborate on the reform?

For some reason, I was under the impression that laptops in the MNT Reform series were the only laptops that were manufactured using open (source) hardware only. Or, if there were others, that it must have been doing something so special that they deserved to be put on a pedestal. But, currently, I don't feel confident enough to state why it would be superior over say the Olimex TERES-I or Pinebook Pro.

I hear the hype yet to me it looks like a severely overpriced tv box with some low-grade peripherials strapped to it in the least space efficient way possible.

We definitely pay a premium, but I don't know exactly why. Especially when the aforementioned Olimex TERES-I and Pinebook Pro are almost an order of magnitude cheaper.

Did they got rockchip to release sources instead of blobs or something?

From what I understood, Rockchip offers (at least some of) its SoCs as open source hardware. So, what MNT Reform did for the SoC is order them as open source hardware and include/publicize/provide all the schematics (etc).

What is the praise actually for?

FWIW, the open source hardware aspect is what I was intrigued by*.

No worries, fam! And thank you for clarifying! Based on your answer, I'll assume that Konsole should suit you more than well for the time being. The moment you're starting to 'live' inside a terminal is when looking elsewhere for something more advanced and/or powerful starts to make a lot more sense.

I’ll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!

Aight. Glad to hear that you're interested! Have a good one, fam 😉.

Aight. Anyhow, this has been a lovely conversation fam! Thanks for your contributions!

Ah xD, no problem fam! Please keep us updated :P .