I’m tired of this discussion, so I’ll just leave it as: I guess it’s an “everyone but me” issue then.
Removing one DE, and then installing another DE, is not a problem. It is easy. It is fine. I have never had any problems in any Linux distro I have used, nor in FreeBSD.
Using MULTIPLE DE’s that rely on the same frameworks, THAT is where the problems lie.
But if GNOME dropped some files somewhere, and you yeet GNOME, then install XFCE, are you saying XFCE is going to go out of its way to track down all those GNOME files? Of course not. It’ll look at it’s own stuff, and wherever they overlap, it will either overwrite what GNOME had put there (you don’t care, you removed GNOME, remember?), or you just change that.
Incidentally, this will become even less of an issue with libadwaita etcetera. But in the context of REPLACING desktop environments, the issues of having multiple environments simultaneous do not apply.
A lot of distos release DEs with configurations that deploy with the installer, which may not be installed if you download a DE from a package manager. Not only native config files, but sometimes even whole directory paths will be unique to an installer deployment.
So: yes, you can generally install a new DE on top of an existing installation through a package manager, but often it will be “missing” a bit of the specific customizations and tweaks the maintainer worked hard to express in their ISO.
I have also installed a second DE on an OS and had a very broken experience, but with a fresh install the DE worked wonderfully. Sometime the package manager can’t fix everything.
That being said, it can be fun having multiple DEs installed on a single OS because typically you can select whichever one you want to load up from the login screen (depending on your mood that day, perhaps ).
I contacted support about the “Dead battery on powered off laptop, won’t turn on without being plugged in, battery missing in OS” issue.
The resolution was the BIOS reset procedure (popping the coin cell, disconnecting main battery, waiting 5 minutes, etc). Support asked me to install Windows afterwards to test if it happens again.
Framework, you gotta fix support responses like that. If a powered off laptop has a battery drain issue where it won’t power on after a week of being idle, and requires a BIOS reset to fix it… it isn’t an OS issue. Your Linux support needs to improve. You don’t have to directly support Linux per-say, but don’t give answers to Linux users that include “installing Windows”. That’s a Dell-style response and won’t distinguish you in the market.
My recollection is the minor version represented the target release month: stable releases are xx.04 and targeted for April, interim releases are xx.10 and targeted for October.
I don’t know how clearly they hew to that now, but I think that’s where those numbers came from…
Close. Yes the convention is YY.MM.patchlevel with releases in April and October every year but it is not as if one or the other is stable. They do mark the April release every other year as LTS (long term support) however so 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, etc are LTS releases which are maintained for 10 years (5 years in general but additional 5 through paid support). All interim releases are stable but only maintained for 9 months.
Your post is almost spot on. It is free for personal use for up to 3 machines or if you are an Ubuntu member for up to 50 machines. Everything else you said sounds correct. Though interim releases can sometimes have new features added which some users find a bit less stable at times. I myself tend to stick to the LTE releases for best stability with my installs.
ESM is also available to personal users on up to three machines and Ubuntu members on 50 machines.
I wonder how well the 12th gen Intel Framework Laptop would work with RHEL 8[.6] OOTB. I see other brands have their 12th gen Intel laptops already on the list.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the downstream of Fedora. I am not sure that RHEL 8’s kernel and library versions are new enough to run Framework Laptop. The RHEL 9 beta is already public: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 beta | Red Hat Developer
I have been using UNIX and variants for just under 45 years. I would love to return to FreeBSD, but I am practical person. xxxBSD is a great OS, if you need a server. I have spent countless hours learning the tricks to to try and make Free/Open/Net … BSD work on laptops. It is not worth it IMO.
I chose Ubuntu based in stability, quality and support. Exciting? Nope.
But I need a stable dev environment and none of my work is dependent upon newer kernel features; all I need is up to date Go and Python.
I experimented with a manually installed XFCE build of Debian, but I traded it in for this cave-man method:
Install Ubuntu (to get 100% of the standard tools)
Install xubuntu-desktop (to get a working XFCE that auto updates)
Login to the XFCE environment 95% of the time
Build new code and pretend it is UNIX
My point is that with cheap disk storage, I can afford to have extra packages installed - and sometimes they are useful. But at runtime, I run lean and light with XFCE.
I am happy that Ubuntu is fully supported - that is what I need.
You might be happy to know that, as of 7.2, the process with OpenBSD is extremely easy, at least with the 11th gen version of the framework. Back in 7.1 you did need to sysupgrade to -current snapshots to get a good experience because of some missing drivers for the included wifi card, but that is no longer the case. So “things that doesn’t work” is now “fingerprint reader” and “bluetooth”, pretty much. (And BT not working on OpenBSD is sort of axiomatic… )
That said, battery life is still comparatively poor to when I have my Arch drive in it, so it’s still a case of “install OpenBSD if what you specifically want is an OpenBSD laptop”. But the process is:
Install OpenBSD 7.2 (saying yes to xenodm)
Install your DE/WM of choice or use the included ones
FreeBSD should also be pretty much the same, but I haven’t tried it since 13.1 was in beta. At the time there were issues where you needed to build specific inteldrm from ports to get functional graphics, everything else worked out-of-the-box. I think but have not verified that the correct inteldrm package is now the standard package.
From what I’ve seen, the magic is that Framework actually spent engineer time helping *BSD devs in sorting out issues. Which cannot be said for any other manufacturer I’ve heard of. And, of course, I have no idea of the status for supporting the 12th gen version, and things like updating BIOS will not work while you have a *BSD installed.
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