Greetings! Recently, i have ditched Windows for Linux. Why? Well, This all started with a Windows Update. I was working on a Discord bot, until my PC decided to restart without my consent. What was it? A Windows Update. I was like: “no big deal, ill just wait”. Well, it was over 100+ updates. After all the updates completed, i saw the Windows 11 setup screen. Keep in mind that I was on WIndows 10 before the updates. Now at that point i really got angry. Like, I hate Windows 11. So then i went and completed the setup, and got met with ALL THE BLOATWARE REINSTALLED. So ofcourse, since i did NOT wanna use Windows 11, i backed up my data, and switched to the Secure and Free operating System, Linux. I went with arch, since i have used Ubuntu before, and it’s terrible. And since i didn’t wanna use any fancy Desktop Enviroments, such as GNOME, KDE, HyprLand, XFCE. I went with dwm. It looks very mininal and customizable.
Now that brings me to the question, What apps should i get rid of?
I know i did the same post like a few weeks ago, but for the sake of Privacy, i know Some apps contain Telemetry, and some Don’t. But still.
Xfce is fancy?
With the right amount of customization yeah it can look really fancy. I could be mistaken but I recall Elementary OS’ Pantheon came from xfce/xubuntu originally.
However I’m still partial to KDE/Plasma personally as it does 99% of what I need out of the box.
That’s the great thing about Linux though. It’s exactly as bespoke and custom as you want to make it.
Huh. Last time I used it, I didn’t fiddle much. Guess I didn’t dig enough into it up see the fancy stuff.
Sadly, KDE Plasma has not yet secured the windowing protocols, so applications can freely record your screen. Only GNOME stops this ATM. Not a deal breaker, and KDE plans on improving this. Still a security risk.
Isn’t it just wonderful how M$ can just screw you without your consent? To hell with Windows!
Welcome fellow penguin 🐧
True.
Why stop at Windows? There is so much other Microsoft crap to ditch.
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Discord would be the obvious answer, but I understand why you might want to use it, my recommendation is using a client that disables some of the tracking like Vesktop. Spotify is also a major privacy concern, it can be replaced by Spotube (and to a lesser degree by Audiotube) which removes most tracking and is three and convenient. Also I’m not sure if I would keep using chromium, especially with manifest V3
I’m using Degoogled Chromium. Regular Chromium sucks.
Ungoogled*
Webcord is another good client. It is more so designed for security and isolation, but supports theming and plugins. Vencord (more specifically Vesktop) is probably a more interesting client.
If you dislike telemetry,
Audacity => Tenacity
Firefox => LibreWolf or FireDragon (GraudaLinux default, good in telemetry respects IIRC)
You may like btop, Mission Control,
Avoid any terminals and editors that advertise as “AI” – there were some big ones recently but the community thankfully overall was like nah.
Get some decent browser extensions, ublockorigin, privacy badger, libredirect
some people like to pihole their network, opensense/pfsense/ddwrt router is nice to have
AVAHI broadcasts your services on the LAN IIRC.
Obviously vscode has telemetry, if you use that try vscodium IIRC, personally I use neither but that’s just me.
I do obviously know that avahi is bloat, but it’s a dependency of PulseAudio, preventing me from removing it
I’m pretty sure my Arches with PipeWire audio don’t have it if that’s of any use to you.
I have used PulseAudio and PipeWire for years and the last few years have preffered the latter when installing all the optional dependencies.
Then again if it ain’t broke 🤷♂️
I forgot the exact number but while installing Debian (Bookworm and Sid) this weekend I was shocked by how small the base install, with a window manager (“big” one by your standards, i.e KDE), was. Maybe 2Gb, definitely less than 4Gb. It all worked fine, I could browse the Web, print, edit rich text, watch video, etc.
I installed a ton more stuff since, e.g Steam, Inkscape, Python libraries for computer vision, etc and it’s still not even 10Gb.
So… my suggestion is the same as I shared earlier in https://lemmy.ml/post/20673461/13899831 namely do NOT install preemptively! Assuming you have a fast and stable connection I would argue stick to the bare minimum and all add as you need.
In fact… if you want to be minimalist I would suggest to do another fresh install (it’s fast, less than 1hr and you can do something else at the same time) and stick to the bare minimum right away.
TL;DR: don’t get rid of, just avoid adding from the first place.
I would love to do the same (although not the hardcore step with arch :D) but how would I game and also isn’t the support for drivers sometimes really iffy?
For getting a idea of how your games run check out protondb.com you can add your steam library to easily check your library.
For epic, gog and Amazon prime gaming you got heroic (https://heroicgameslauncher.com/) it also uses proton to play windows games.
GPU drivers are fine. AMD just works for gaming and Nvidia (depending on distro you need to install the drivers, search how to install them and dont install them from the Nvidia website) works fine if you just have a simple setup. The Nvidia drivers are improving alot by the way.
Random mouse, keyboard and other stuff is a hot or miss. Most of the time basic stuff simply works, but maybe there are no drivers/programma to set rgb or macros. (P.s. Try open rgb for rgb stuff)
You can always try with a dual boot. If you not used to Linux and like gaming maybe something like pop os
I am not a gaming person to be honest, but neither do i play any games.
Bluefin (MacOS look) or Aurora (Windows look) are great starter Linux distros. It won’t give you the typical Linux experience (mostly that you won’t really need to do much terminal stuff).
If you won’t a more typical Linux experience, I recommend Fedora Workstation (the KDE spin if you want that Windows look).
Not a big gamer, myself, but it seems like Valve has done a lot of work to make many (most?) Steam games run well under Linux.
Drivers have come a long way, and a lot of things just work, but it can definitely depend on what hardware is in your system.
As you’ve probably heard, it’s basically just NVidia with shitty drivers. They are getting better but are not included in many distros (they can usually be added through the package manager pretty easily) since they are proprietary. Intel and AMD generally work out of the box for gaming. NVidia drivers are bad enough that I sold my 2060 for an ARC a750 just because of the drivers lol.
I’m still newish to gaming on Linux but from what I’ve heard Nvidia drivers are hit or miss but much better then they used to be. AMD graphics are well supported and using a mix of Proton though Steam and Wine I haven’t really had any issues with games. I have an ROG Ally running Bazzite and a gaming PC running Vanilla OS 2, both do just fine. Additionally hosting game servers on my Debian server has been fine as well.
If you’re on the fence I’d recommend installing on a separate drive and giving it a try.
Out of curiosity, how does dwl compare to dwm today?
It may be a little too late but if you have a chance to use a feature like btrfs snapshots (+time shift) it can be a game changer.
Any time you need to do something risky to the OS you can just snapshot before like installing 1000 packages, or Nvidia driver update, you can just revert to the old working version by swapping the names on the snapshot and is subvolume.
Try to still all your desktop apps through Flatpak. Flatpak applications are sandboxes (meaning they are regulated by the system using permission toggles and variables). It is better for security/privacy, and makes transferring app data to a new OS install easy (app data is stored in
~/.var/app/)Flatpak sucks in my opinion. What if i need to install something that is not on flatpak? The AUR exists too.
Application sandboxing is just SO important. If the app isnt available as Flatpak, you could install it normally and use Bubblejail to restrict it.
What specifically don’t you like about it?
Takes long to install software, slow, requires reboot after install. That’s too much effort for me to handle!
Flatpak shouldn’t require a reboot after install. I never have needed on any distro. It takes me about the same time as regular package manager. Odd to say the least.
If you want arch without any proprietary packages or blobs you can try Parabola
Nah. Regular arch is good. (except from systemd)
Also, isn’t “Parabola” dead? Last release was in 2022.
