Aurora Chrysalis

//People change and he has stated that he regrets his actions//

First step to change is acknowledging what they did was wrong. And then let the actions speak. While I could find an article on his personal blog on March 2014 about how he is going to commit himself for equality, he didn’t mention anything about acknowledging what he did was wrong. I could not find him say he directly regrets for his action that he did in 2008 by donating to an anti-marriage-equality proposition.

If you could provide me a link where he does so, I’d immediately change my mind.

While I was trying to find evidence of his regret about this, I also found that he’s an advisor on Palantir, which is a giant red flag.

//Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, made some comments on Twitter that many took to be pro Trump//

Of course, he exactly sounded like being pro-trump. While I pretty much agree with most of the anti-big tech stuff I’ve read on Proton’s blog, I can’t wrap my head around the cognitive-dissonance people have about his outright support for Trump/Republicans. And instead of apologizing for being wrong about his statement that “Republicans stand up for the little tech”, when it was in fact not the case, he doubled down on it. Heck, I even agree with him about his details on how democrats like Chuck Schumer try to block the anti-trust bill, but even the bill he cited that got 16-6 votes for in support of, all the 6 that voted against it were Republicans. And he wouldn’t respond to these comments after a point.

He’s been ruthlessly moderating Proton subreddit eversince after the backlash and he made Proton stop posting on Mastodon, citing there were not many people in it, when in fact it had more followers there than on Bluesky.

Again, until you can show me that Yen has apologized for his statement, it would make him seem pro-Trump, when even an idiot can see that Republicans/Trump don’t care about the little tech or little businesses.

//Mozilla took payouts from Google for years, yet they are still a respected privacy company//

Yeah, ideally, you don’t want to rely completely on big-tech, but as long as it doesn’t affect user’s privacy, I don’t see why not. And Google is also probably doing in its own interest of not being ousted for being a monopoly in the browser space.

//Wait long enough and the leaders of any foss project will disappoint//

Yeah, there have been a few. I was kinda excited about checking out hyprland, but oh boy, not after I learned about the developer.

//I will not log in with a Mozilla browser on Android.//

Same. It lacks proper sandboxing or site isolation is what I’ve heard. I only use it for casual browsing.

If you have a lot of options around that work just well enough, it would be especially more than easy to look into the personality of the developer too. Also, on top of being a homophobic ass, the Brave team also injected affiliate links into the URL at one point. I don’t know why anyone would ever trust them again.

There’s Vanadium and there’s Ironfox on mobile. Works decently fine. Even if it happens to be that Brave has some performance benefit, which I doubt is significant if at all it exists, I’d rather take a performance hit than use Brave.

I avoid Brave cause of their history of shady practices like injecting affiliate links in the URL and crypto bloat. If I may suggest, you may still manually add your login sites to the cookie whitelist in Librewolf(‘Manage Exceptions’ under ‘Cookies & Site Data’) and simply continue using it.

Update 2:

Unfortunately, even with secureboot disabled, I kept getting freezes. Got 3 freezes and I felt done with this. Replaced Bazzite with Nobara again.

Nvidia driver worked for a while. But, after I temporarily switched back to another atomic distro I’m dual booting on a completely separate drive(which requires secure boot for nvidia driver to work and it did work), Nobara stopped loading nvidia driver despite clearing all secure boot keys and installing the default one in UEFI/BIOS and turning off SecureBoot.

Apparently, the efi also has to be modified again. I didn’t bother doing it and reinstalled Nobara again since that will reset the efi anyway. Now, the driver is working again. I swear to any seemingly non-existent higher power that I’ll never use any distro that requires secure boot. Lol. I’m gonna reinstall Arch on my second drive now.

That said, I’d probably recommend Bazzite to anyone not having Nvidia GPU and it’s a pretty impressive project. It even comes with Wallpaper Engine baked in. My friend and I were having a hard time making it work on their system. We were trying some solutions we found on github and some C++ file didn’t have a particular header or something. Took a while to get it work and it was kinda messy later on too with the plasma shell crashing cause of it. Having additions like this would surely make life easier for regular users who would not want to deal with that mess.

Update:

Okay, I keep getting the same freeze again with the proprietary nvidia driver too. My suspicion is now heavily on Secureboot being enabled. Some Arch people kept warning me about this back in the day.

I’m going to use Bazzite without it and probably rebase again to open driver if there is no more freezes.

Thanks. The downloader gives me an option to rebase, which I find easier to use. It shows me an option to download from ostree-unverified-registry, but I chose to do it from ostree-image-signed:docker instead. Don’t know why the signed image is not shown on the downloader by default. That said, after switching to nvidia from nvidia-open, the driver version still remains the same. Let’s see if I get freezes again in the upcoming days.

Also, there are two applications that I use outside of flatpak - a firewall(Safing Portmaster) and another password manager, for which I have to install using the rpm installer. The password manager has no problem installing using the rpm-ostree install <name.rpm> command. However, Portmaster installs, but won’t work because of the following error which I found from journalctl.

Jul 05 16:28:23 bazzite systemd[1]: Started portmaster.service - Portmaster by Safing.
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5786]: Error: failed to exec lock: open /opt/safing/portmaster/core-lock.pid: read-only file system
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5860]: Error: please set the data directory using --data=/path/to/data/dir
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

Someone has supposedly a work in-progress script to make this work, but I don’t think I’m qualified to scrutinize if doing this brings down the security of the system in any way.

And I don’t know if many other rpm installers have the same trouble installing in atomic distros because it’s a read-only file system. For now, I’ll have to live without my favorite firewall.

I tried two distros in the past week after your recommendation - Bazzite and Nobara. Bazzite is just like you say and all’s good most of the time and I’m getting used to an atomic distro too. The only problem I seem to be having is that my GPU Freezes very often even while just browsing and I have to force-restart to recover.

journalctl shows me this error. [drm:nv_drm_gem_alloc_nvkms_memory_ioctl [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID …] Failed to allocate NVKMS memory for GEM object

I don’t know if this is because Bazzite uses a slightly older Nvidia (open) driver(570.64) and kernel(6.14.6) or because of something else.

However, I don’t have this issue on Nobara and it uses the latest 6.15.4 and Nvidia (proprietary? akmod) driver (570.153). Correlation is not probably causation, but this might be one thing to consider.

And I’ve had issues with nvidia-open drivers in the past, but surely a lot of them seem to have gone now.

Thanks for that info.

I just want to add that the drm modeset is enabled by default ever since the 560 drivers. You only need to do that for the older ones, if I’m right.

Previously, you also had to disable nouveau yourself and Nvidia driver installation used to be a headache. Things have gotten better over the ages. I’m sure this multi-monitor issue will also be fixed soon as well.

While Zen and ungoogled chromium are fine, I’d suggest to stay away from Brave for any serious purposes 'cause you never know what shady things they might be doing. Case in point, they had previously been changing regular URLs to include affiliate links on their own. They also have that crypto bloat.

Well, it’s just 4-5 lines that you’re going to have to type and it’s just a one-time thing. Surely, it’s not that intimidating.

Bazzite seems to be based on Fedora Kinoite, an atomic desktop. Now, I haven’t used atomic desktops. Although I wanted to, I ended up not doing that for the following reason.

From what I understand, you can’t easily alter the base image of the system and everything else is a flatpak. This seems fine, but if you end up having to install an application for which there is no Flatpak, how would a non-tech savvy user do that? Still have to use the terminal at that point, I’d bet.

Case in point, even the other day, I came across this application called ‘syncplay’ for which there’s no flatpak alternative and thankfully, Fedora repo had it.

I also hear that if you end up installing apps this way(Layering as it’s called?), the update times become slower. You may shed some light on this.

Also, while it may not be as good as a snapshot system of the atomic desktops, the regular Fedora nonetheless shows the last two kernel installations on every boot so you could revert back to one if an update goes wrong.

I also have to mention that I always have my important files backed up on HDD or cloud that in the worst case scenario of losing my files on any update, (which hasn’t happened so far btw), I can always restore them. In case of Steam games, it shouldn’t be a problem if you have a fast internet connection. You should download them back in no-time. That is another reason I can still live without having to use a stable atomic desktop.

A lot of people here have already given good advice. I shall add my experience, recommendation and some tips (may incidentally repeat some of them).

1. If you play some games with kernel level anti-cheat (like Rainbow Six Siege, Apex, Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, Battlefield games, Destiny 2 among others), you will have to stick to dual-boot. Check on ProtonDB for compatibility of games. I have 500+ games on Steam and pretty much everything I’ve played has worked so far.

In terms of other software you use, make sure you have alternatives that work on Linux.

• For Photoshop, there’s Krita/GIMP.
• For Video editing, there’s Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve, etc.
• For browsing and office apps, there’s LibreWolf and LibreOffice.

If you happen to have any software that you don’t have a good alternative or that only runs on Windows, then you’ll have to stick to dual booting.

2. If you do end up dual booting, DO NOT use your external HDD in NTFS to run games on linux. It will work for a while, but you’ll constantly have to ‘chkdsk’ or check disk on Windows every time your HDD is found corrupted. Also, NTFS is Windows’ proprietary filesystem. So, I’ve heard that using ntfs-fix (chkdsk equivalent on linux) might cause data loss. Not sure how far it’s true, but be cautious of using that too. But otherwise, I believe that just reading files from NTFS drive usually is not a problem.

• If you are NOT dual booting however, you won’t have to face this mess. You can backup the data on your HDD somewhere, format it in ‘ext4’ filesystem for Linux-only use (‘Exfat’ if you want to share any data with others on Windows/Mac) and restore all your files back to this HDD in ext4. Hope you have extra HDD with enough free space to move your files while you convert disks to ext4. You can also probably use cloud services for backup.

3. I’ve used Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and Fedora.

• Had faced a lot of issues with Ubuntu back in the day, and Snap Steam is a mess. So, avoid it.
• Mint is easy to use, removes snap from Ubuntu and just uses apt, has a great Desktop Environment called Cinnamon, and I’d usually recommend this to someone new, but I wanted to shift from X-11 to Wayland for security reasons and HDR support among others. If Wayland worked well with Mint, I’d still be using it today, but that was the only reason I moved away from it.
• While Arch is nice, it’s certainly not for someone new.
• That leaves us with Fedora KDE, which would be my recommendation. It has good security features like SE-Linux out of the box. The reason I suggest KDE over Gnome is so that you might have an easier transition from Windows to Linux. Once you have a hang of this, you can later use a pen drive to load other distro with other DE like Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, etc and test them out by live booting.

4. Speaking of pendrives, make sure to always have one with Ventoy installed and the distribution you’re using. This will be handy if you want to troubleshoot your system anytime. And I say Ventoy over others because it makes loading distro easier. You can just drag and drop the ISO files instead of having to burn with Balena Etcher or Rufus everytime.

• Rufus is great, but if you’re moving out of Windows, you don’t need it.
• And I have seen a lot of people have trouble with using Balena Etcher. So, avoid it.

5. • Turn off Secure Boot in BIOS. (And maybe also fast boot).

• And if your disk is on RAID instead of AHCI, you might have trouble installing. So, you might want to set your SATA configuration to AHCI mode in BIOS if you face issues.

6. If you end up choosing Fedora, you may want to follow this.

Fedora only comes with FOSS by default. So, you’ll have to install Nvidia driver and proprietary multimedia Codecs separately by including RPMFusion repo.

• You can download the free and non-free repo files from the RPM-Fusion site(Graphical Setup) and install them through the Software Center. After adding the repo, you might have to enable them in the Settings of Discover Software Center. Enable all of them except those containing the words ‘testing’, ‘Test’, ‘Source’, ‘Debug’ and ‘google chrome’.

• After that, it’s just a few lines you type in the terminal (Konsole by default) for installing driver and codecs. Make sure to update the system and restart first before doing these.

For Nvidia driver, type:

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia

For optional CUDA support, type:

sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

For Video acceleration support, type:

sudo dnf install nvidia-vaapi-driver libva-utils vdpauinfo

For Codecs, type:

sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

Steam is also included in the non-free repo. You may install it by typing:

sudo dnf install steam

7. Other than these, most applications can now be installed directly from the store as a Flatpak. You can select them in the store between Flatpaks, Fedora managed Flatpaks and Fedora Linux app for a particular one.

• For flatpak apps, you’ll see a tick next to the developer if they are verified. So, you can look out for that if necessary.
• Make sure ‘Flathub’ repo is enabled in the Settings of Discover Software Center for the Flatpak apps to appear.

NOTE: Every time the video driver updates, you will have to do a follow-on update for flatpak runtimes. You might see a bunch of ‘Application platform’ and ‘Freedesktop’ stuff which you’ll have to install. If you fail to do this, you might suddenly find flatpak applications not working properly.

8. Troubleshooting tips:

• If Steam doesn’t launch the first time, type:

__GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_RATE_HINT=3 steam

• If your system is frozen, try switching to TTY by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and going back to GUI by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F2)*. *Could be F1 in some cases.

• To check what errors you got during the recent boot,

journalctl -b 0 -p err

Apart from the driver installation and some troubleshooting, you generally won’t have to use the terminal if you’re averse to it.

9. In terms of deGoogling, I’d recommend the following:

• Buy a pixel and install Graphene OS.

Switch to

• Tuta/Proton Mail for email,

• Proton/Tresorit Drive for storage,

• Mullvad (or i, proton) VPN or (Rethink DNS for firewall) I am not sure if you can use both Rethink and VPN at the same time. I assume there is a way.

• OsmAnd for maps,

• Newpipe for youtube frontend(Grayjay on Linux),

• Bitwarden/KeepassXC for Password management,

• Aegis for TOTP

• Fdroid, Accrescent, Aurora for App store.

• Molly FOSS for Messaging.

I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.

I’ve used Mint before and I’ve little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.