Have you tried COSMIC yet? Maybe PopOS is worth a shot.
Some packages are a bit old at the moment but they have a release coming in April / May that will bring them right up to date.
Perhaps LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is worth a look as well.
Both options are similar in that they take a very stable distro base and layer on a quite up-to-date desktop.
They also feature clear direction and a predicable release schedule.
Mint or Fedora require no more command line than Windows does.
I never liked KDE. I used it before there was GNOME but I used GNOME 2 for years and Cinnamon or XFCE after that.
I probably tried KDE4 once and KDE5 a couple times. Not for me. But I have used KDE a lot since Plasma 6. I have to agree with you. They are doing a great job. It is probably the best environment for Wayland.
I also use COSMIC a bit and Niri is my favourite environment. But I do seem to be using Plasma 6 a lot. It is sitting in front of me now.
Flatpak wins because we need one “Linux-wide” solution—one universal package format—and it was the first.
Distrobox can make any package format work on any distro if that is what you want.
My favourite package manager is APK v3 but the distros that use it do not have big repositories. So I end up using an APK host with Pacman / Yay running in a Distrobox.
This idiot has been writing articles over there for decades. He has always been pro Linux which is nice. Unfortunately, he has also always been an idiot.
I am fortunate enough that the speed of the package manager itself would make a bigger difference.
But connecting to a slow mirror can be a killer so, If that was a frequent problem for me, it would absolutely factor into my decision.
I guess the other factor is how often you are updating. For a rolling distro, it would be essential.
On Debian Stable, I would care a lot less. Just let it update overnight once in a while.
I could see MATE going Wayland only before XFCE does. They are a “traditional” desktop but not committed to old tech in general. Their whole system has already been ported to Wayland when used with a compositor like Wayfire or LabWC. As a small project, they may not want to maintain both longer term.
Lots of MATE users on other UNIX systems though. Not just BSD but Solaris and such. So, who knows.
XFCE is building libraries to make supporting both longer term easier. So, they should support X11 for a long time. We will see what happens if GTK5 is Wayland only.
Trinity Desktop is probably stuck on X11.
And most X11 window managers will remain X11 window managers forever. The only reason Sway exists is because i3 is not moving. There is Wayland Maker instead of WimdowMsker and DWL instead of DWM. This list goes on. What non-DE x11 window manager is porting to Wayland? I cannot think of one.
But Plasma is not ditching X for a year or more. And many distros will ship the X version far longer. The freaking out seems more like a political statement than a pragmatic requirement at this point.
If Debian Forky ships Plasma with X11 support in 2027 (and I bet it does), the first version of Debian Stable to ship Wayland-only Plasma will be Debian 15 in 2029/2030. Many, maybe most, never-Waylanders will have migrated to Wayland by then.
And quite a dishonest readme at that. All the “not natively supported” entries for things designed to work with XDG desktop portals are hilarious.
This is obviously more of a political statement than anything else. I would not expect much from it.
I will bet the full dollar that Trinity never gets ported to Wayland.
They would have to port it to a version of Qt that supports Wayland. If they were ever going to do that, they would have done it by now.
MATE (GNOME2) ported from GTK2 to GTK3 so most of MATE works on Wayland today. You can use all the bits with a different Wayland compositor. And I think they are making their own.
But Trinity maintains their own fork of Qt3. Bringing that up to Qt6 or adding Wayland to Qt3 would be a big project. I do not see either happening.
There are few Wayland only apps today. But as the percentage of Linux desktop users on Wayland goes over 80 percent, that will change.
And today, GUI toolkits and desktop environments have to limit features to those that will work in both environments. But not for long.
My guess is that it will be totally impractical to use an X11 only desktop 3 years from now. 5 for sure. In fact, I bet few people will even have Xwayland installed 5 years from now. To run what? Xfig? Netscape?
But certainly it will still be possible to run an X server. Xorg itself will still probably run fine. It already uses KMS and DRI from the kernel and those may not change much. And I am sure at least a few zealots will still be pushing XLibre a decade from now. And Wayback will almost certainly let you run an X11 desktop for many, many years to come for those “legacy use cases” you talk about. Like running CDE for a couple of hours.
Probably the most interesting development has been Phoenix. They have floated the idea of having an X11 first environment (eg. using an X11 window manager) that can run Wayland apps too. If that actually happens, I am sure it will find some fans. If you have spent 15 years fine-tuning your FVWM or Xmonad config, you won’t want to give it up.
It will be interesting to see where the BSD world goes with all of this. I think FreeBSD will go Wayland. But NetBSD and OpenBSD could be x11 holdouts. But the Wayland-only app problem will impact everyone. Time will tell.
Wayland has improved a lot in the last few years. And yes, there are and have been differences in hardware.
I think the biggest difference is likely to be software though. Primarily in two ways.
First, a lot of people are using older software. Not to pick on Debian but it is a good example. A Debian Stable user may be using NVIDIA drivers that are literally years older than what an Arch user is using. Paired with Wayland compositors and XDG portals that are older as well. So when they talk about Wayland (even today), they are really describing the experience from years ago. Alma Linux probably falls on this camp.
Second, what use cases are well supported on Wayland still varies from compositor to compositor. Somebody using Plasma 6 may experience that pretty much everything just works. Somebody using Sway may find that some uses cases are still immature.
Put these together and you have a lot of NVIDIA on Debian people telling you things don’t work and a lot of AMD on Fedora people wondering what they are talking about.
Today, Wayland and Xorg are more “different” than better or worse. If you are happy with Wayland, migrating to Xorg would probably feel like a real step back and there would be all kinds of issues and deficiencies. But, for some, the reverse can still be true. Wayland still has a few gaps.
Finally, they ARE different. Which means that if you insist on trying to make Wayland work exactly like X11, it is easy to make it seem like it is not working, even if Wayland can do exactly what you need in some slightly different way.
The important thing to acknowledge though is that more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And the majority of new users start in Wayland and will never switch. So X11 is the weird one now. And while Xorg is about as good as it is ever going to be, Wayland gets better every day.
FreeBSD has made a real laptop push recently and 15.1 is supposed to offer KDE out of the box.
Depending on your hardware, it is really viable now.
/tmp should be just that (temporary).
There should not be any ill effects to completely empty /tmp
Some distros put /tmp on a ram drive that gets created fresh (and empty) with each reboot.
Almost everything you care about should be in /home so back that up. Many people keep it on a separate partition or drive to make changing distros (or reinstalling the existing one) easier.
Most of your system config is in /etc so you may want to make a copy of that too.
But the proper process on Linux is not to re-install. It should not be necessary.
On top of this, part of the reasons to use containers is that you can create and destroy them at will while leaving your host tidy and stable. I use Distrobox quite a bit for this reason.
If you install a kernel from the Arch repos, DKMS will build the kernel module for you automatically as well as the initial RAM disk and boot entries. Kernel upgrades take a little longer but you do not have to do anything manually.
It will work with custom kernels too but, if you do build your own kernel, you have to make sure a couple of options are selected.
There is so much misinformation and bad advice in this thread.
Thankfully, there are a few that correctly just say install nvidia-580xx-dkms
You can install new kernels after that. There is nothing to manually manage. They do not have to be LTS.
Hopefully we will start to see some this year or next. Maybe not Apple Silicon level but Ascalon shows a lot of promise. And something may come out of the Qualcomm Ventana acquisition.
Still waiting for the latest Spacemit to drop as well, which will at least be RVA23. Ascalon will be the first “high performance” RISC-V though.
This is not meant to fight but to reveal an alternate perspective.
I never understand why people leave these comments. That is, I do not truly understand the objection. I assume these comments are anti-Apple or anti-corporate in some way but I am really just guessing.
Here is what I think could motivate people to work on Linux support for this hardware.
1 - people have this hardware or like it and want to run Linux on it. In other words, people with the skills are serving their own interests and not driving towards some great social outcome like the question “why not riscv” would suppose. This is the “scratching your own itch” aspect of Open Source.
2 - people with the skills find this hardware interesting or are attracted to the challenge that it has been made difficult. Similar to #1 with a different motivations but still a personal one.
3 - some people are drawn to “freeing” things that are closed. The more proprietary, the more attractive it is as a target.
4 - people with the skills are thinking of their impact on the world and realize that these are extremely popular devices that are destined for the landfill after really short lives if allowed to remain fully proprietary.
If I had the skills, honestly I would find all of these compelling. The last one would provide the greatest fulfillment. There are A LOT of these devices being sold. I think Apple may be the single most popular laptop brand. The social good that comes from providing Linux support for Apple Silicon may be greater than time spent on any other hardware.
I am somebody that will ultimately benefit from all these efforts. It has been years since I have given Apple any money but quite like their hardware. I have 4 old Apple laptops, 2 iMacs, and one Mac Pro. These were all bought used or acquired for free. They are amazing Linux machines. I do not have any Apple silicon but I almost certainly will at some point. And it looks like the M1 and M2 hardware is already a great experience. In my view, old high-end gear is far better than new low-end gear. An Apple M1 laptop today is still nicer than the lower half of the Windows market. Buying a used Mac keeps two machines out of the landfill.
But, if I had the skills, the joy of just getting it to work would also be a motivator. It would be a fascinating project. And it is one that brings a lot of positive attention and even employment opportunity as we can see from where Asahi Linux contributors have ended up. Making Apple Silicon work provides a lot of what draws people to write free software.
Developing the RISC-V ecosystem would also be fulfilling. But this even helps with that. Creating a large and vibrant ARM Linux desktop community helps diversify and mature Linux in all kinds of ways that will also benefit RISC-V. One of these is just normalizing for us users the idea of running on something that is not x86. Another is increasing the size of the software ecosystem that builds and runs on RISC (either ARM or RISC-V.
And if the objection is that Apple will see greater demand for their proprietary products as a result of these efforts, I think we are greatly overestimating the current size of the community as a percentage or the overlap between “mainstream”’ Apple buyers and those of us with the patience to wait or suffer the limitations.
You can install NVIDIA-580-DKMS from the AUR. Problem solved.
It IS the early days of GNOME. MATE started with the source code of the last GNOME 2 release.