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Spiral Linux: Debian with Flatpak, Backports, presets and no-CLI Tooling
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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SpiralLinux is my Son; I love it so dearly. I install it on anything first, since it has some of the drivers my devices need the most. It makes Debian fun instead of a chore.
Debians UX really sucks.
Great base, used and administered it. It tought me how to upgrade Linux Mint when their way too late updater is broken or nonexistent.
APT on Debian is also hella stable. 11->12 just worked.
Fedoras DNF is just garbage. 39->40 just didnt work, even though their change is way smaller.
And nala makes apt look nice too.
Does the UX suck? Genuine question. Debian is where I moved after I outgrew mint and I've never had a problem with it or felt like it was cludgy
It is VERY manual. It is simply universal, and doesnt adapt to dedicated uses at all.
They build great core tech, but no adaption to use cases.
This means that all users need to do that themselves, which results in a million different ways on how to automatically update, etc.
At the same time their desktop setups are completely bloated with debian GUI apps, where arguably modern Flatpaks are better and touch the system even less.
I suppose that's true. I also don't install the predefined GUI options. I always install my GUI manually after disabling recommended packages. Recommended packages are my biggest Debian gripe. They're great for users that don't know what they're doing but for power users I find it kinda bloated. I should probably try flatpak again but last time I did it was just annoying and in the way and gave up.
I fixed up a bunch of youth center machines.
ps?)I guess they are still running today. I was a bit newer to Linux back then.
I personally like to start with a debloated install and then install gnome on top rather than the other way round. Honestly to point 4 it slightly baffles me that people use vbox on Linux, KVM with libvirt/virt-manager is so much more powerful while still allowing for fairly straightforward basic setups without introducing 3rd party modules. Seems like a no brainer to me but apparently it isn't.
Cool that they're still running though. I've never setup a Linux system that I then had to turn over. They're all systems I maintain, I'm not entirely sure what my plan would be for a maintenance free machine that I expected other people to use.
VBox has really easy Windows integration. To this day I have not managed to have a shared folder and especially clipboard with any guest, let alone Windows.
This may be easily possible, but not just a few clicks
Shared folders are easy with Linux guests, you just set it up in virt-manager and then mount it in Linux. With windows it's possible and I have done it but you need to install the virtiofs driver alongside winfsp and then make sure the virtiofs service is running. So the setup is definitely a bit obtuse. I haven't done clipboard sharing deliberately as I don't love the idea of that being synced but I should at least try it so I know what setup is like. The file sharing isn't hard once you learn how to set it up but figuring it out the first time is a challenge for windows guests.
I will see if this is documented and maybe try to improve it.
Docs are important!
Debian doesn't have a dedicated UX
What are you referring too?
Do you mean UI? Because the UX of Debian is "here's a menu to pick all your things on install. Get used to picking all your things all the time because this distro is a baked potato"
Personally I love that UX and its what draws me to systems like Debian and Arch because no one knows what I like better than I do, so why should I be using someone else's vision of what a good UX is
What do you like about it? I'm still deciding where I'm going to land post-Windows.
It requires the least amount of troubleshooting on my end. It has drivers I know connect to my Bluetooth headphones and it’s has a Calamares installer that I find intuitive. It comes with Flatpak (Linux’s app-store equivalent) enabled. It has snapshots, which store previous versions of your OS*; if something updates poorly, you always have something to switch back to.
It’s not without foibles. Every distro has some wonky-ness to it. But the problems in Spiral fixable and less obnoxious, I think, because it has so little branding.
It’s not like some distros that brag about being “CUTTING edge” or “UNBREAKABLE” while hard-crashing after an update. That’s expected. I’m not expecting perfection, and Spiral steps out of the way (to let Debian take all the blame lol). Thankfully Debian has a very long and stable history and I rarely have that problem.
Just one man’s long ramble. All anecdotal, so my final suggestion would be to test a variety, and don’t listen to weirdos on the Internet.
*kernel; whatever I’m still learning too
Hey, thanks! I'll spin up a VM tonight. Debian has always been appealing for its stable base, but I tried pure Debian, and it was not much fun to set up.