As A long time Linux user I couldn’t agree more. My son, who likes to game with me, was handing down his ‘old’ nvidia cards such as a 3070, so I put up with years of nvidia’s crap. A couple of months ago I ripped out his ‘old’ 3070 and put in a new XFX brand AMD RX 7600. Works out of the box and plenty fast for HD resolutions. Why did I waste years of my life fighting with nvidia nonsense on Linux??

At the age of 67, having tried and used everything, not just booted a vm, but honestly used, I found Arch a much higher maintenance burden. System borking changes are definitely a thing - see the “needs manual intervention” messages that happen often. I know Arch users seem to revel in this and gloss over it. Thats fine for them but I no longer get any sense of personal empowerment from tedious obsessive hand holding of any operating system. To me it’s just unnecessary distracting extra work.

I’m always interested in Micheal’s comparisons but rarely see anything more than an illustration of newer libraries etc showing natural improvements. The trade off of Arch distros is the increased workload of managing a constant change & inevitable instability. Arch devs are notoriously for kicking out capricious system borking changes and the Pacman package manager is rather weak at dealing with cumulative changes. 2% or 3 % potential ephemeral improvements in speed vs hovering over the cli ‘fixing’ things seems a poor bargain to me.

Exactly. systemd has a glaring security hole that had to be kludged. As the OP I posted the article to warn non technical users of the danger but systemd defenders league are predictably blind to any possible flaw in their golden calf and cannot resist the temptation to rush to battle. yawn

If you want the convenient features of systemd without the cancerous assimilation of the entire userland then dinit is recommended. OpenRC is a mature choice. Server folk seem to recommend S6 but I dont have enough personal use of it to verify.

• expect every response trying to provide useful info here to be drowned out by systemd brigading

Read the bug in the systemd repo. meanwhile the systemd cultists will defend it to the death. Look, if you value the positive aspects of systemd but dislike the cancerous assimilation of the entire userland, dinit is a perfectly good option.

Read

Stop using it.

Any errant application can expose this glaring systemd flaw

That has not been my experience. I wonder what magical source of information you possess to accomplish all that in ten minutes lol

Switch to Devuan and have a peaceful life I guess.

Cheers!

If you think about it for even a minute this is still a glaring cve in systemd, exposed in this case, by misbehaving snapd. systemd still needed to be patched and so did snapd.

Yet another critical vulnerability in the much vaunted systemd has been exposed by a misbehaving app - in this case snapd.

Both need patching.

Yes, thank you for the extra info!

Sure, nothing to worry about, sure …

"Spain Slaps Yoti With €950,000 Fine Over Biometric Data

The age verification company kept geolocation data for five years. Users could skip the privacy policy entirely."

https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/yoti-spain-aepd-fine-biometric-data-gdpr-2026/

I’ve recently spent a lot of time doing bare metal installs of a large number of non-systemd operating systems.

GhostBSD - Its BSD, so its stable and avoids the problems of Linux but supports less hardware especially 3D GPU’s.

FreeBSD - as above but more effort to install & configure initially because its server oriented but makes a fine workstation nevertheless.

Alpine - Highly performant Linux oriented to container hosting but can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using nvidia except in nouveau driver.

Void - highly performant. more packages than Alpine. can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using anything but newest nvidia GPU’s and even then strange unsolvable glitches.

Artix - look this is Arch with a non-systemd init (your choice of 3). Being Arch it inherits the repo’s of bleeding edge packages but also inherits the heavy maintenance burden of Arch (if you know, you know). I’m just too bloody busy to baby sit an Arch install with all its nonsense.

Endeavour et al - wait for other OS’s to implement work arounds to systemd’s cancerous kowtowing to corporate America imposed surveillance laws.

Devuan - a drop in replacement for Debian. Inherits Debian’s stability and ease of maintenance but with proven mature implementation of OpenRC init system.

The is the one I use for a calm happy life. To save time you can get a distro called ‘Vendefoul Wolf Linux’ which is Spanish in origin. Its a spin of Devuan but with a choice of GUI desktops and a GUI Calamares installer (the Devuan text mode TUI installer is fine, but whatever).

My daily driver is Vendefoul Wolf (Spanish for ‘vengenance’) LxQT desktop. Light, fast simple, stable. tip: download the ‘weekly’ iso’s not the old 2025 ones.

Simplest first suggestion is open the machine and checking the air vents on the laptop for excessive dust contamination thoroughly, not just ‘blow air in’ - this may be easy or hard depending on laptop manufacturer.

Then try downgrading the nvidia driver to conservative 580 series. 595 is pretty bleeding edge.

Get back to us after that.

The inexorable assimilation of large parts of Linux userland by a huge binary constructed by a corporate sponsored developer. The rush by the lead dev to embrace surveillance law infrastructure. But yeah, no big deal right?

“The tragedy of systemd”

https://archive.org/details/lca2019-The_Tragedy_of_systemd

Motorola have announced a partnership with Graphene OS, a Canadian company. If the models Moto ships are semi affordable I would jump at that.

Decent audio experience?

You can tweak any distro but, pay attention to using Jack + PREEMPT_RT kernel + Xlibre (X11).

Avoid Wayland (especially with nvidia GPU), avoid Pipewire and avoid Gnome desktop.

I suggest starting out with Debian stable as the base. There are specialised AV Linux distros available but nothing beats knowing what you’re doing from the outset.

If you need the very latest version of a particular app not available as a distro package, Flatpak is your friend. Again, Debian ‘.debs’ and AppImage are most prevalent third party packages outside the proprietary app stores of Flathub & Snapcraft.