I don’t remember how exactly this happened, but killswitch option in Linux ProtonVPN client somehow got broken in a way that I couldn’t connect to internet at all because killswitch was activated and couldn’t disable killswitch at the same time, I had to create another user and remove previous one. It also bombarded me with some errors regarding “kdewallet” that I don’t understand. Worth noting, I’ve been using this client with killswitch on many Gnome distros before and never had this issue anywhere else.

FWIW, the thing with killswitch it not due to Bazzite, nor KDE. There’s a f*ck load of user reports all over the internet with different systems that have experienced the same thing; e.g. this one by a GNOME user on Pop!_OS. As for your criticism on kdewallet, I was also bothered by it the last few times I engaged with KDE Plasma. I suppose I was doing something wrong. Regardless, it was an unpleasant experience.

I will agree with you that Desktop Linux leaves a lot to be desired from a security perspective. But, I’m not sure if these are its biggest problems.

Not all distros ship SELinux and the ones that do, don’t actually configure it securely.

Is SELinux employed on Desktop Linux the very same way we find on Android? Unfortunately, no. So, there’s definitely a ton of mileage to be had here. But, there’s literally nothing that stops you from making a fortress out of it. So, the ones that are intimately familiar with SELinux will leverage it to perfectly suit their needs. Which, is the only truly sensible way one should use SELinux to lock their system. Being dictated by the defaults set by the distro is only a counterproductive exercise of comparing/contrasting threat models.

New users are expected to keep copying and pasting commands from their browsers to their terminal which compromises some Linux security defenses.

They’re absolutely not expected to do so. What makes you even think that’s the case?

KDE, GNOME and Sway are the only functional Desktop Environments/Window Managers that support Wayland all, while the Other DEs are not even close to shipping with Wayland.

This is your best point. I agree that other DEs should haste in supporting Wayland. Though, at least I find solace in GNOME and KDE Plasma being the most used DEs/WMs to begin with. Hence, even if only those two would support Wayland, we would still have allowed over half of Linux’ users to choose Wayland.

Most if not all of the Linux Distros in 2025 ship with Grub bootloader, which suffers from a lot of problems, instead of using the bootloaders that does not support BIOS and will improve the reliability of booting and provide a more stable experience.

Sorry, I’m not familiar with this problem/issue. Would you please be so kind to explain why I (or anyone else, for that matter) should worry about this? Like, what “problems” are we talking about? How is (allegedly) GRUB not reliable or stable compared to the others?

Btw, just curious, what are your thoughts on secureblue?

I’ve heard it has poor long term stability.

Relatively speaking, sure. But I’d argue this is by design. Basically, every ‘modern’ distro is trying to solve the problem that come with updates on an ‘open’/‘free’ operating system. The solution they come up with essentially dictates a huge part of the identity of the distro. As I’ve noted elsewhere, these include the following:

• Some choose to outright freeze packages and only come with security updates
• Others have (almost) excessive testing to prevent breakage
• Yet others employ rollbacks to ensure that the (eventual/inevitable) breakage can easily be deflected
• Finally, there are distros that fall on a spectrum in regards to their more radical state management in hopes of minimizing breakage
• (Though, I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other methods…)
• And, of course, we find combinations of the above employed on the very same distro/system

And, of course, we shouldn’t forget to mention Arch’s approach; lay the responsibility on the user 😅. So, Arch ‘breaking’/‘borking’ after an update is a user error. Which other distro can tout such an impressive entry in their documentation for system maintenance?

To be fair, this makes total sense. The user can basically build their system from scratch. So…, why wouldn’t they be capable to come up with their solution to the above problem? Besides, the ArchWiki continues to be a guiding light whatever solution they’d like to adopt: be it ‘freezing’ the kernel, or using better tested software, perhaps setting up Snapper for rollbacks etc…

Is there a distro that’s like Arch for installation but more stable?

Gentoo

Well articulated reply. Thank you!

Any place where I can follow its development?

Isn’t Bazzite built on Fedora Silverblue

Kinda.

installs the Steam Flatpak?

Actually no. Bazzite installs Steam from the RPM Fusion repo.

As for an attempt to shed light on why Fedora is absent from Steam’s numbers, see this comment. Finally, perhaps this is worth looking into to see how big Fedora’s gaming community is compared to the rest of its users.

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.

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Thank you so much for your patience in teaching me something new! Much, much appreciated!

With the help of your observations, I can confidently say that the different dither methods don’t play much of a role after filtering with a better palette has already been done. So palette-filtering -if we can refer to it as such- is the actual MVP in resolving this issue.

animated webp may also be an option

Hehe :P , I’ll take note of this and perhaps resort to it the next time. The whole palette-filtering stuff seemed like some occult incantations that somehow worked. But I would much rather use a different (sane) format instead.

Again, I would like to stress that I’ve very much enjoyed this interaction! While it’s been (mostly) totally unrelated to the original post, this has actually been one of the most informative interactions found within its comments. Therefore, thank you!

UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.

Thank you so much for this! Hopefully I’m not bothering you with this*.

Did you scale the source with ffmpeg?

I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I did. The invoked command was the following:

❯ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.gif

Do you have a visual pattern in your console background?

I don’t think I do. It doesn’t look like it at least. To be clear, even on my laptop I notice the visual pattern visible in the gif. But that’s totally absent when I’m working within Emacs. Or at least, it looks as if it’s just a singular solid color.

The second best to render a small enough size that it does not get resized in the browser.

Hmm…, makes sense. Not a huge fan, though 😅. Hopefully I can solve it through other means instead.

I assume you scaled it up

Yup. For the sake of readability*. But the upscaling (or rather zooming in*) was done natively within Emacs.

Alright, so I went to do some digging and the pattern only starts to show up in the gif. Perhaps as a result of the smaller color palette*. Regardless, I tried to see if it is solved by simply generating a ‘better’ palette and using it as a filter of sorts. Furthermore, in case that wasn’t enough, I also tried playing with different dither algorithms:

Does any one of the above gifs do better?

And again as I’ve said before I don’t wanna distro hop anymore, this isn’t my first distro

Ah okay, somehow that went over my head. Apologies*. Thanks for clarifying, though!

so am focused on the long term and reliability of the thing.

it’s up to date but stable, and it’s basically taken the place that Ubuntu originally held as a jack of all trades of sorts

Noted. Thanks (again) for clarifying!

Ubuntu has been extremely hit or miss for me in regards to stability and updates (literally the system at one point nearly bricked itself when trying to upgrade and am now stuck on a specific Ubuntu version forever because of it, the updating thing seems completely borked for me, can’t upgrade it without wiping the whole thing and this isn’t the first or last time anything Ubuntu based has done this to me before, updating it is very dreadful for me because it’s a complete gamble), and as far as I know Fedora seems to be a lot more stable and polished on that front, haven’t heard anything majorly bad about it.

Pff…, there’s a lot to unpack here. Heck, I could dedicate a whole comment just on this. Unsure if you’d be interested, though 😅. Regardless, the gist would be that uncompromised stability across updates on Linux has historically been (and mostly remains to be) a hard problem to solve. This isn’t because the Linux ecosystem is incompetent, instead the onus is on the freedom we enjoy on this platform and the consequences that very freedom entails.

Anyhow, I do agree that Fedora (or at least some variant of it) does better than Ubuntu in this regard. There are high-profile Ubuntu veterans that have since migrated to ‘Fedora’ for stability and they’ve been very much enjoying themselves with the improved experience.

what legal stuff would be concerning if I may ask? Heard at one point they were gonna get rid of hardware acceleration or something because of legalities or whatever?? But then changed their minds? Idk, stuff like that worries me a bit haha.

Please feel absolutely free to ask fam. At least :P , as long as you can bear my ramblings 😂.

So…, like a lot of other^[1] independent distros, Fedora is not able to ship with everything the end user might require for smooth onboarding. Instead, for hardware acceleration and more, the end user is responsible to install it themselves if they desire full functionality. This shouldn’t be too much of a deal; some might just regard it as part of the first installation process. However, sometimes, Fedora (and the aforementioned distros) are legally bound to cease support of existing functionality. That’s where things get ugly 😅; see this thread. Note that this isn’t lost forever as changes like these just introduce more elements/bullets/articles to RPM Fusion’s Howto’s. Though, it goes without saying that Ubuntu handles this a lot more gracefully.

Thankfully, there are downstream projects of Fedora that are not -or, rather, don’t seem to be- legally bound to the same extent. As such, onboarding is handled better. Heck, some even come with exceptional system management promises (on which they deliver), that ensure your system continues to function as desired. I can share some of my first-hand experiences with these: on multiple occasions I didn’t experience any breakage or whatsoever from the supposed loss of functionality that other users were affected by. Why? Because the maintainers of the downstream project I run on my system handled it without requiring any input from me. It genuinely feels like dark sorcery at times :P .

Oh lol 😜 😂. Regardless, your input has been much appreciated! Thank you 😊!

Very interesting. I suppose that’s an artifact of the ffmpeg hacking used to convert the screencast to a gif. Would you happen to know what I could do to prevent that from happening in the future?

Btw, FWIW, I seem to only notice this myself when I’m on the phone. Does the picture above also happen to be from your phone?

I’ve also heard great things about it. Thanks for your endorsement! Unfortunately, correctly installing Zed on my distro might be more trouble than worth it at the moment. Hopefully the issue(s) will be resolved (very) soon. I would love to test it out and see it for myself.

Thanks for mentioning an editor I would otherwise have missed!

Uhmmm…, I just installed it. First impressions were pretty good. For some reason, I assumed it would work as well as Kate (and Kdevelop) have. However, I wasn’t able to replicate the folding functionality within the Markdown file.

Would you happen to know what I’m doing wrong? Your help is much appreciated!

Really appreciate the in-depth explanation, thx!

It has been my pleasure, fam! Note that my answers found below are often oversimplified and/or kept short for the sake of brevity. Please feel free to ask me in case you’d like me to elaborate on any of the topics discussed below or otherwise.

So with all of this considered, do you personally think it’s safe to go with Fedora long term?

First of all, I have to make clear that I’ve been a Fedora user ever since I (cold turkey) made the switch from W10 over three years ago. And any of the ‘scandals’ that have happened since^[1] hasn’t swayed me away from it (yet). So, I’m probably biased in my views. Or, at least don’t equally value the very same things that have led detractors to look elsewhere.

With that out of the way…, you should ultimately make up your own mind. What is it that has drawn you into Fedora in the first place?

Even in a worst case scenario?

I suppose the worst case scenario would be that Fedora somehow ceased to exist and erecting a fork didn’t turn out to be a productive endeavor either. But I suppose most technologies come with some risks attached to their long-time survival. Yet, this doesn’t necessarily deter us from trying them out whenever they happen to be a good option at the very moment they’re considered.

Regardless, it is statistically unlikely you will stick to your first distro in the long run. So, I suppose you don’t have to overthink it; if it satisfies your needs at the moment, then it’s good to give it a go 😉.

And if not then what else should be considered for me?

Again, I don’t know exactly what drew you to Fedora in the first place. So, please consider to shed some light on that 😉. Afterwards, I can try to fill in my thoughts 🙂.

I also am curious about Fedora’s whole “leading edge” thing, do they push for new technologies even when it’ll cause issues or are they careful with it?

Historically-speaking, Fedora used to be pretty ruthless 🤣. One might argue that they forced their users to test the new and upcoming technologies long before they were ready. This has caused their community to feel alienated and not respected. In turn, Fedora’s user base became mostly comprised of (relative) Linux-experts (with Stockholm syndrome 😜) that could deal with these issues.

Thankfully, though, Fedora seems to have learned from their past mistakes. For the last couple of years, earth-shattering changes have not been introduced. Sure, Fedora continues to be forward-thinking and the first to introduce changes that might be considered drastic. Yet, it’s handled in a respectful way towards its users.

Unsurprisingly, this has even translated to a (relative) uptake of their user base. Heck, Fedora -at least for some- fills the very space that Ubuntu used to dominate. All in all, Fedora seems to have changed their ways for the better. As such, the concerns seem to have become (slightly) out of place; unless Fedora is legally forced, you should expect a very sane, ‘stable’ and reliable experience.

While Red Hat does a lot to enable Fedora (and the Linux ecosystem in general), Fedora remains a community distro. It just happens to receive significant backing. Which, one might argue, isn’t a lot different to how SuSE backs openSUSE. Heck, while (arguably) in a different order of magnitude, Canonical contributes to Debian and even Valve contributes to Arch.

But, to underline an important aspect to the RedHat-Fedora relationship, Fedora does not have to follow Red Hat in everything. Like how Fedora continues to default to Btrfs as its filesystem while Red Hat has deprecated Btrfs for 7 years now.

Yet, I don’t want to underscore that both Arch and Debian can probably easily keep the lights on if any contributing party would cease its support. On the other hand, if Red Hat or SuSe would stop contributing to Fedora or openSUSE respectively, then it would at least require a huge restructuring for them to have a chance at surviving the aftermath. So, in that sense, both Fedora and openSUSE are dependent on their respective big backers.

As for concerns related to Red Hat, they did like two bad things (I think) that go against the spirit of open source sortware. But these pale to their contributions. With PipeWire, systemd and Wayland; they’ve literally built the backbone of modern Linux. Boycotting them will likely result in picking some niche Linux that might be a huge pita to operate.

If you’re interested in a deep dive, then consider looking into this thread and the links found within.

Fam, I believe your post is all over the place. Please consider to clarify the following:

• What is it that you actually desire?
  • Easy installation through a script? Or perhaps through a Kickstart file? Or any of the dozens of other tools used to deploy a fleet of systems?
  • Declarative system management? While perhaps not as powerful as NixOS, the industry has been working with tools like Ansible for over a decade.

Basically it feels insane that it’s the way most linux users and servers in the world operate.

Frankly, I somewhat agree. But I believe most people operate within paradigms like “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” and/or “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”. Isn’t “the path of least resistance” what we default to anyways? And if we additionally weigh in sunk cost fallacy, it is no surprise that people are more often than not wed to their ways… Or, at least act upon it.

If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don’t more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

I believe NixOS suffers from the following:

• For the longest time, it really was just niche. Like, NixOS has only fairly recently started to garner a decent audience. Boiling Steam’s chart, while it shouldn’t be used to gauge the user base of each distro, it does help us in finding trendings within a distro. And for NixOS, it clearly shows how it has slowly but surely grown a significant presence from 2020 onwards. Contrast that to Debian or Fedora that have always had a significant presence (or, at least for over a decade).
• The onboarding experience is absolute horrid. To flake or not? To lix or nixcpp? And I haven’t even mentioned how its documentation is just dog water. Or how over the last year its organization has shown clear growing pains.

Anyhow, I’m glad to hear you jumped ship to NixOS! Wish me luck when I enter its hostile waters (with the intent to conquer it) this summer 😉!

Thanks for another endorsement of Kate!

By the recommendation of others, I’ve actually installed and tried out Kate in the mean time.

So far, so good. 🙂