If you do not mind me asking…
If you want the CPC to “sink further into irrelevance”, what do you expect from another election?
CPC in charge - it sounds like you do not want that
Liberals in charge -“nobody voted for this”? Sound like you do not want that either.
So, am I to understand that you think an election would put the NDP in charge? That seems very unlikely.
What outcome are we hoping a new election will deliver?
Fair comment.
That said, it just installs in vanilla Arch at this point, which means it would work on EndeavourOS and probably CachyOS as well.
You can of course switch to another DE at any time.
So, you are really not exposing yourself to any risk. If it gets broken or abandoned, just stop using it.
Not that this means you should bother with it. But it is clearly a low risk option to try.
Mint is very boring and middle of the road, exactly as a default recommendation should be. They are also very protective of the user experience. They are unlikely to embarrass me.
Mint has a familiar UX if you are new to Linux. It is not nearly as foreign or locked down as GNOME. It is not as configurable and complex as KDE. There are good GUI tools for most common tasks.
Mint does not change too rapidly or have too many updates but the desktop and tools are kept up-to-date.
They are being very conservative with the Wayland transition. But nobody on Mint is moaning that Wayland is not ready. They are very protective about the user experience.
And there is really no desktop use case that Mint is not suitable for.
I do not use Mint but it is a very solid recommendation for “normal” users.
I think Pop!OS is back to being that too and COSMIC is Wayland only (so no future transition to manage).
It depends on the distro but generally yes. If you want to do this, choose a distro with up-to-date packages. I would recommend either EndeavourOS or CachyOS.
Why doesn’t anybody ever recommend Debian testing? It has stricter quality criteria than unstable while being almost as up-to-date.
I agree that Debian Stable is not a great fit for desktop as the packages get very old between releases.
I think you mean HashiCorp, an IBM company
What happens when you say that you do not use social media?
When anybody, anywhere in the world visits the US, the IQ goes up in both countries.
I think it is a smart play.
They are getting lots of press in the places where the people that care go.
On their website, they focus on the benefits of their platform for customers. From that perspective, the new COSMIC is just a refinement on what they were shipping before.
And this is just the beginning. COSMIC itself is still fairly basic. And the “new” Pop!OS is based on an LTS base that is already 2 years old. None of that is a problem but it is not a hand they want to overplay.
They may actually make a bigger deal about the benefits when 26.04 ships. Things will be a bit more “industry leading” by then.
Ya, it seems odd to be releasing a 24.04 in 25.12 for sure. That said, 24.04 is still the current LTS and so it is the version we would be on now if they had released earlier (even a year ago).
They plan on releasing a 26.04 LTS as well. So, Pop!OS is not lagging. It just feels strange now.
As I said in another comment, critical parts of Pop!OS 24.04 are also quite up to date including the kernel, Mesa, NVIDIA drivers, and of course COSMIC itself.
Moving forward, I expect the versions of COSMIC in 24.04 and 26.04 to be the same. If I was them, I would even consider syncing Mesa between the two. It will make support and testing so much easier and they are already shipping a newer Mesa in 24.04 anyway.
Fair enough.
But before you scare anybody off, it is worth pointing out that Pop!OS 24.04 is quite up-to-date in those areas.
Those are what is going to drive your GPU and Wayland experience and they are about the same as you get in Kubuntu 25.10
A lot of the 24.04 packages will be older for sure but it is not fair to compare COSMIC in Pop!OS to the old KDE version you would have been using on Ubuntu 24.04 (Kubuntu).
And I expect Pop!OS 24.04 LTS to see steady COSMIC updates on the road to 26.04. It would kind of shock me if they do not harmonize the desktops between those two releases.
I find it pretty solid if a bit bare bones. With the basics in place, it should improve fairly quickly.
They are planning a 26.04 LTS release. We will see what it looks like by then.
CachyOS will work on older hardware as well. There are four repositories for x86-64 v1, v2, v3, and v4. If you have newer hardware, the v3 or v4 packages will theoretically give you better performance. That is probably what you are talking about.
That said, the v1 repos will work on x86-64 machines going back to 2003. Not exactly bleeding edge.
The only thing that I have noticed is that packages are not all in sync between repos with v1 lagging behind v3. For example, I think Cachy is already on the 6.18 kernel but the v1 repos still only have 6.17. I have seen svt-av1 lag as well.
I am not a CachyOS user so apologies if any of my info is dated.
I will never say anything bad about EndeavourOS.
Thank you for the suggestion. I am ashamed to confess that a temporary PATH variable had not occurred to me.
I first ran into these issues creating package templates. Chimera has a beautiful package build system where packages get built in containers and source code gets downloaded into the container and and built against a clean environment. As you point out, creating a package that creates the symlinks as a dependency (along with the GNU utils) could be a viable approach here. Maybe even just in /usr/local. The GNU utils get installed to /usr/bin in Chimera and the container gets recycled for every new package. The distro would never accept such hacky packages but I can use them myself.
For just generally working in the distro at the command-line, your temporary path idea could work well.
Thanks again. I appreciate it!
When a Canadian goes to the US, the collective IQ of both countries goes up.
The next chance to do something will be in November.
If anything less comes out of that than a Dem House and Senate that immediately moves to impeach both the President and at least one SCOTUS judge, the entire country is a permanent write-off for me.
2 out of 3 Americans did not vote against Donald Trump. That is a high enough percentage that I wasting time trying to figure out what third to feel sorry for.
PP ought to be a shoe-in at the Leadership convention.
Traditionally, Canadians have been socially liberal and fiscally conservative and fairly “centrist” overall. That has mostly described the Liberals with the Conservatives mostly coming in to power after periods where the Liberals have been less fiscally conservative.
The NDP struggles to create a national mandate as they are perceived as too fiscally left (what gets the Liberals in trouble). The Conservatives are sometimes seen as too socially right, opening the door for the Liberals.