No, thx, I’ll check it out.

Thx for sharing your experience! I think I will try WAU tomorrow. In the meantime I have read, it has block/allow lists, too.

At my institution GPO/intune is not allowed; we have on-premis ActiveDirectory, and my access is restricted to the clients I need to manage.

So far, I could preinstall almost all apps with the --silent flag. I assume that this also means, that they will update gracefully as SYSTEM user managed by WAU. Having the updates only applied when any normal AD user without admin rights logs on, is not an issue, as long as it works.

There is only one specific app to install user certificates; this can stay a manual task after first logon, because it requires user credentials anyway. (:

I inherited a lot of Ubuntu servers at the university, too. But I am not directly responsible which makes life easier; I am just managing it.

Interestingly, they agreed to monthly updates with possible restarts and they are fine with it, because I keep the servers healthy. And: We even plan to move from VMWare hypervisor to Proxmox VE as well, but we can do it in stages without big downtimes.

There is one CentOS server carefully isolated which cannot be updated anymore. Moving it to Rocky would introduce a big downtime and redoing a lot of custom config. Luckily the user-facing server of that cluster is running a current Rocky Linux.

The things, I established so far, are running stable Debian. Nice to see Proxmox VE being based on Debian. (:

It is interesting that you are in a similar boat, but with a different outcome. I hope that your colleguas will reconsider some day.

This lets Gentoo look like a beginner/user-friendly distro next to NixOS.

The fact that my OS should not be a project anymore made me switch to Debian instead to NixOS. But I need to try an immutable distro some time.

This is the most accurate chart I have seen so far; I can relate to all of them except NixOS, because I have tested it only briefly in a container.

I first settled on Ubuntu and than moved from that along the chart and I am know in the Debian phase for my main distro after ~10 years with Gentoo.

For others I recommend Fedora or Debian depending on their needs and skill. Arch has no place for me anymore. I can live with Ubuntu on servers, if someone else had it already installed, but I would never use it on a desktop. But Debian is a default on servers/VMs for me, too. And: I can see, why people choose rocky on servers. I am partly responsible for some rocky servers and they seem to behave nicely.

Cool, I need to check whether I can upgrade to it without breaking compatibility of existing dependencies with my symfony project code.

I am close to #1, but I have a 16:10 not 16:9 monitor. My laptop lid is always closed. I am a 100% one monitor person.

I am considering an ultrawide at home, but I fear that I will get problems at work if I cannot have the same there. I am not sure, if the linear window manager I am using makes sense with an ultrawide. And third issue: My existing monitor is still good and and awesome features which seem to be rare on other except gaming monitors: auto brightness and presense sensor. At work I can live without these two things, because the desk space has alsways the same brightness.

There is tooling in Debian to use systemd-boot, it even integrates into the upgrade process so that your boot menu always points to the current version of the kernel.

It is not default; you would need to bootstrap Debian yourself instead of using the installer, but it works. Bootstrapping opens additional possibilities like choosing btrfs on LUKS and suspend to disk. My previous Gentoo experience was very helpful.

I was a passioned Gentoo user for many years and I also only met 1 other IRL Gentoo user. Ok, there were more once at a Linux conference where a bunch of Gentoo users had a desk showing off Gentoo compiling @system for a BSD system.

Even the binary repository was not enough for me to not go back to Debian after ~10 years Gentoo usage. It was a fun hobby and a great learning experience.

Please don’t be angry with me, but the package manager is called portage; emerge is just one commandline tool to interact with it.

Despite what Alan has written I want the ability to disable snaps in Ubuntu entirely. Are there any options?

Kind of, yes, but you can teach it to write less. I instructed it, to answer only Yes or No with a brief explanation, if there is not much need to add sonething in my context.

That doesn’t mean the answers get better though. ^^

Have you read the btrfs or zfs man pages? They are very well written. You just have to want to understand it. If you don’t, let it handle your tech-buddy or admin, or have them quickly look over the command that is about to be confirmed with pressing ENTER.

Better go one step back to Debian instead.

Yes, but be sure to exclude certain services on servers and monitor the remaining pending upgrades.

Who has to work until 17:00 on a Friday except shift workers?

The feature-set of the PaperWM extension built-in would be nice. But only because it ensures that it will always work. (:

But I don’t mind if it stays an extension; the development seems so stable now. I am enjoying this linear window managemant after years again. How could I live without it?

I think, I will borrow the idea, but I likely will use more a log-style date format in the persistent history file like this: [2026-01-09 12:34:56] command

I had it when I was still using Gentoo.

Maybe it can help getting software to work that would otherwise only work with older Windows version, eg: software for scientific equipment.