Darktable is WAY better than RawTherapee. Like, lightyears ahead.

I don’t want to talk badly about RT, but it’s just trash imo. Development of RT has pretty much stopped, while DT has a huge community and many developers. It has become the only FOSS alternative to stuff like Lightroom.

The only issue I have with DT is that:

1. There’s way too much stuff going on for a beginner, and even with some experience, most features are too hidden due to clutter.
2. Some defaults are just badly set imo. For example, why do you not want lens correction and some other (neutral) stuff applied automatically?
3. Many modules are just redundant and should never be touched. There is soo much niche and legacy stuff nobody wants or needs, like 3 different white balance modules for example.

Great news, this preset fixes both of these issues!

It “removes” many of those unnecessary modules from your UI and applies some stuff already for you, which you would anyways, like said lens correction, so you can focus on the important stuff, like adjusting colors, contrasts, and more.

This preset should be the default imo, and it makes DT simple enough to use.

Awesome!

While this release doesn’t seem to add a huge amount of new stuff on the surface, the devs focused more on usability, performance and smaller improvements, which were all much needed.

Please correct me if I’m wrong and I oversaw something huge.

I’m really excited to see how the performance will improve on my shitty laptop. While the program itself shouldn’t take too many resources to run, it always felt barely usable on that device, and on my gaming PC, it never used the GPU. I’ve often heard many complaints about how Lightroom or Rawtherapee for example run way smoother than Darktable.

What change are you the most exited about?

I’m on Bazzite, and AFAIK all drivers are already pre-installed.

I already tried using a VM with passthrough, but it didn’t work. I’ll try using my brothers’ Windows PC next.

(Read this in capslock) How did you get the Xbox controller firmware to work?

Seriously! I tried it for a whole afternoon, before I gave up and just bought a generic gamepad. This was the last time I bought a Microsoft hardware thing. Fuck u MS!

Ususally, like 99% of the time, it’s absolutely the fault of the game developers and by choice.

Pretty much any game can run on Linux nowadays. Some do even run better than on Windows, but most equally good or a tiny bit worse.

The main problem is (very invasive kernel level) anti cheat.

And sometimes, games work fine on Linux, and then the devs actively lock out Linux users for some ludicrous reasons.

You can visit protondb.com for a very nice overview of which games work and how well they do.

Out of curiosity, what are the benefits of using say bluefin over just plain fedora?

Let’s say we compare regular Fedora (Workstation) or KDE spin with Vanilla Silverblue or Kinoite (Atomic).

Fedora Atomic is the newest generation of Linux, as some people call it.

It is a bit similar to how Android works. Basically, the core operating system is “locked up”, and everything you do is done as normal user, including app installations.
Therefore, you have a “you” section, with all Flatpak apps and cat videos, and a “OS” part, which you don’t have to care about.

Of course this is still Linux, and you have full sudo permissions and can still install all software on the host system, e.g. Nvidia drivers. Upstream Fedora Atomic is good, but has some minor flaws, like users having to install said Nvidia drivers or codecs manually.

uBlue (Bazzite, Bluefin, etc.) basically take the upstream image and rebuild it with a lot of tweaks and optimizations, like having codecs (e.g. for watching videos) already included. They especially try to make everything as user friendly as possible and provide a “just works” distro.

As I said, it’s a bit similar to how you use Android: you don’t use Android, it’s only a platform for you to launch your apps. You don’t worry about codecs, updates gone wrong, or whatever. You just use it and don’t think about it. And that’s the mission. Building an extremely robust and simple OS.

I should also add that I prefer a long term support installation because I don’t reinstall very often.

You’ll never have to reinstall anything. If an update comes out, either a big release or just bug fixes, they get installed in the background and then applied onto the next boot without any interference. You don’t notice it.

And if you really want to switch to another variant, e.g. when the new Cosmic DE comes out, you can do it with just one command. With that, the “you” section is kept, and the “OS part” is swapped out.

And if you worry about being too bleeding edge, you can choose the ´gts´ variant of Bluefin, which is a more conservative branch with less surprises.

I can wholeheartly recommend you either Bazzite or Aurora / Bluefin.

All three are pretty much the exact same under the hood (Fedora Atomic). They are from the uBlue-Project and focus A LOT on user friendliness, hardware enablement and a “boring” (just works) experience.

Bazzite is more meant for gaming, and Aurora and Bluefin are more for general use, but you can of course use them totally interchangeably. You can even try out one, and if you don’t like it as much, you can rebase to another variant with just one command.

The cool thing about them is that the Nvidia drivers are already baked into the image if you choose the Nvidia option on the download page.

This means, that you probably won’t encounter any breakages, and even if you do, you don’t have to fix them on your own. If your setup breaks, every one else’s will break too, because the non-user-facing part of the OS is the same everywhere, and the devs will fix it very rapidly. In the meantime, you can just select the image from yesterday, where everything still worked, and continue with your stuff for the next few hours :)

I’ve never encountered such a chill distro in my Linux journey yet!

The least annoying launcher for your web browser

I use and love both. KDE (Bazzite) on my desktop gaming PC, and Gnome (Bluefin) on my laptop for casual stuff, mostly YouTube.

KDE is a bit better for gaming since it has HDR and VRR and is the standard DE on the Steam Deck. I tried Gnome too just a few days ago, but it felt inferior in regards of gaming and content creation.

Gnome on the other hand has a place reserved on my laptop aswell as in my heart. Especially the ultra smooth and well thought out touch gestures and minimalist UI makes it perfect for laptop usage.

For me personally, I prefer Gnome over KDE. KDE is a bit more capable, but it overwhelms me sometimes. Gnome has a better concept and workflow for me. You either love or hate it, I do the first.

My desktop is a full AMD system that I set up specifically for Linux compatibility, and the laptop is also one of the best compatible ones out there (Dell XPS) with firmware updates included.

Theoretically, the system should be less buggy than other ones, because due to Fedora Atomic, there is less configuration drift and easier fixing for devs due to reproducibility.

I believe that’s due to package drift.

Every system starts with the same packages, but due to upgrading or adding/ removing stuff, you slowly drift away from the starting point, which makes it truly “your own”. But this also introduces bugs that aren’t reproducible.

I especially noticed it with KDE. Every time I installed a new distro or configuration, it worked fine, but after a few months, the bugs and crashes got more and more.

Since I installed Fedora Atomic (the “immutable” variant, e.g. Silverblue), everything just works. It’s extremely comfortable and just exists, so I can run my apps. When you upgrade the system, you don’t just download one package and install it, you apply it to the whole OS and then basically have the same install as all the thousands of other users out there, which makes it reproducible.

Maybe that’s something for you? You can check out Aurora, Bazzite or uBlue in general.

The problem with package based distros (everything non-immutable) is, that a distro is very complex.

Even if you manage to “swap out” the package repositories, you usually still have a lot of remaining stuff in the background and many things tweaked by the maintainers. It’s a huge mess.

In theory, you could absolutely do that, but to be honest, why bother? You already always should have a backup of all your personal data, so why not reinstall it cleanly?

Speaking of image based distros (“immutable”), the cool thing about most is that that you can easily swap out the underlying OS with just one command.

For example, you can always rebase from Fedora Silverblue to Kinoite to Bazzite to something with Hyprland and then back to vanilla Silverblue, without any traces.

So, for example, if the guy who makes your custom image on Github stops maintaining it, you can simply switch to something else in just seconds.

Maybe this is something relevant for you :)

Yeah, +1 from my side for Fedora Atomic, especially uBlue.

For this use case, I can absolutely recommend using Aurora (KDE) or Bluefin (Gnome), especially with the gts branch.

uBlue offers different branches, namely:

• latest: in sync with the current Fedora repos, all the newest stuff official Fedora also ships, including kernel
• stable this is the default by now. You have to wait two weeks more for feature and kernel updates, but they are better tested. If something would have broken, others would have noticed and already fixed it.
• gts: this one is what I recommend for this use case. With that, you’ll get the last release.

At the moment, F41 hit Bazzite/ Aurora latest already three weeks ago when it landed, on stable, I got it a few days ago, and on gts, you have to wait another 5 months until F42 is released, and then you’ll update to F41.

gts is perfect for those who don’t need the very latest features, and want something more chill with fewer surprises.

And the other benefits of uBlue/ Atomic also apply of course, like better hardware enablement, QoL tweaks, automatic staged updates, and much more.

9.5/10, can absolutely recommend!

I recommend you Aurora. It is basically Bazzite, which you already suggested, but without gaming stuff.

Why do I recommend you that?

• The auto updates are amazing. Don’t disable them. It isn’t like on Windows, where it just randomly says “Updating, please don’t shut down your PC” midst working. They get just staged, so they are only applied passively on the next boot. You don’t notice them.
• Rollbacks: If an update introduced breaking bugs or whatever, you can just keep holding the space bar while booting, and you can select the image from yesterday. Everything is left how it was yesterday. You probably never have to use that feature anyway, the system is super reliable.
• The release schedule. This one is the most important aspect for your case. uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin, etc.) started offering different variants/ tags if the same image. There’s now a GTS variant around, which uses the last big release of Fedora, which is still kept up to date maintenance wise. So, you are always half a year behind in terms of new features, but it has been tested for half a year more than regular Fedora or the other images. When you choose the more conservative GTS variant, you’ll get way fewer surprises.

After installation, you can hop into the terminal and use the ujust rebase-helper, where you can select which image variant you want to have

• latest: synchronous with Fedora
• stable (default): features are two weeks behind
• gts: already said, last release, but still secure and more polished.

I think it is the perfect balance for you between “Debian is too stale” and “Fedora and many other distros change too often”.

Fedora Atomic, especially Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora.

Nearly unbreakable, very reliable and stable in everyday use, needs no maintenance (updates itself, etc.) and more!

Instead of using a caliper, like the others have said, you can measure the distance with your printer if you don’t have such a tool.

Just go into the “Move axis”-mode, and move your nozzle from the home position to the top layer.

Let’s say your coordinates are now X0, Y0 and Z49,3.

You can then move the object in your slicer by just changing your Z axis to -49,3.

Just make sure you:

1. Get a good first layer, without getting an elephant’s foot.
2. Don’t use too much glue. A good choice is acrylic glue, but it will alter the surface if it droops out or is too far outside.
3. Don’t mechanically stress the object too much. It won’t be as strong as before.

You won’t need any additional driver, since, as you already said, it is already included in the kernel.

However, as owner of a RX6600, I can tell you that the GPU will be quite loud sometimes. I can recommend you to check out LACT, which let’s you define fan curves, which makes it A LOT less noisy.

Your case sounds like a perfect fit for Bazzite or Aurora.

• Both come already set up ootb, with all quality of life tweaks you want and need.
• They are image based distros (“immutable”), so you mainly work in your /var/ and /home/ directory, and all the other stuff is untouched and clean.
• They are very modern, getting the same updates at the same time as upstream Fedora.
• Running Ollama is just one ujust command away, many complex things are made easier with those commands
• You probably won’t get a lot more performance I believe. At least when I switched from regular Fedora/ Silverblue to Bazzite, I didn’t notice many more FPS in games for example.

It’s a mastodon post where “Fedora” is typed as a hashtag, and then it is followed by “Linux 41…”. The title should say “Fedora Linux 41 will be released on October 29”

Bazzite Bazzite Bazzite!

I was at the same point a while ago.

Everything I touch breaks, and I also had enough of my system breaking because updating with an unstable power grid is like playing russian roulette.

I turned to Fedora Silverblue first, then rebased to uBlue. Aurora first, and then Bazzite. Silverblue feels exactly as the regular variant, Aurora is great for desktop use, and for my gaming PC, Bazzite is fucking great. It just works.

It comes with a lot of tweaks and super many small additions that just make your life easier, especially for gaming.

Updates just happen in the background when there’s nothing better to do and get applied to the next boot image. And in case something doesn’t work as expected, you can always go back in time.

You can also customise it almost/ just as much as regular distros, but it isn’t quite as easy if you want to customise A LOT (e.g. using TWMs).

I didn’t notice huge performance boosts tho, it just comes with more tools ootb, for example to make your GPU more silent when idle.

As said, Bazzite is based on Fedora, so you always get new great modern stuff, at the same time as the other Fedora users do.