I don’t remember how exactly this happened, but killswitch option in Linux ProtonVPN client somehow got broken in a way that I couldn’t connect to internet at all because killswitch was activated and couldn’t disable killswitch at the same time, I had to create another user and remove previous one. It also bombarded me with some errors regarding “kdewallet” that I don’t understand. Worth noting, I’ve been using this client with killswitch on many Gnome distros before and never had this issue anywhere else.

FWIW, the thing with killswitch it not due to Bazzite, nor KDE. There’s a f*ck load of user reports all over the internet with different systems that have experienced the same thing; e.g. this one by a GNOME user on Pop!_OS. As for your criticism on kdewallet, I was also bothered by it the last few times I engaged with KDE Plasma. I suppose I was doing something wrong. Regardless, it was an unpleasant experience.

I will agree with you that Desktop Linux leaves a lot to be desired from a security perspective. But, I’m not sure if these are its biggest problems.

Not all distros ship SELinux and the ones that do, don’t actually configure it securely.

Is SELinux employed on Desktop Linux the very same way we find on Android? Unfortunately, no. So, there’s definitely a ton of mileage to be had here. But, there’s literally nothing that stops you from making a fortress out of it. So, the ones that are intimately familiar with SELinux will leverage it to perfectly suit their needs. Which, is the only truly sensible way one should use SELinux to lock their system. Being dictated by the defaults set by the distro is only a counterproductive exercise of comparing/contrasting threat models.

New users are expected to keep copying and pasting commands from their browsers to their terminal which compromises some Linux security defenses.

They’re absolutely not expected to do so. What makes you even think that’s the case?

KDE, GNOME and Sway are the only functional Desktop Environments/Window Managers that support Wayland all, while the Other DEs are not even close to shipping with Wayland.

This is your best point. I agree that other DEs should haste in supporting Wayland. Though, at least I find solace in GNOME and KDE Plasma being the most used DEs/WMs to begin with. Hence, even if only those two would support Wayland, we would still have allowed over half of Linux’ users to choose Wayland.

Most if not all of the Linux Distros in 2025 ship with Grub bootloader, which suffers from a lot of problems, instead of using the bootloaders that does not support BIOS and will improve the reliability of booting and provide a more stable experience.

Sorry, I’m not familiar with this problem/issue. Would you please be so kind to explain why I (or anyone else, for that matter) should worry about this? Like, what “problems” are we talking about? How is (allegedly) GRUB not reliable or stable compared to the others?

Btw, just curious, what are your thoughts on secureblue?

I’ve heard it has poor long term stability.

Relatively speaking, sure. But I’d argue this is by design. Basically, every ‘modern’ distro is trying to solve the problem that come with updates on an ‘open’/‘free’ operating system. The solution they come up with essentially dictates a huge part of the identity of the distro. As I’ve noted elsewhere, these include the following:

• Some choose to outright freeze packages and only come with security updates
• Others have (almost) excessive testing to prevent breakage
• Yet others employ rollbacks to ensure that the (eventual/inevitable) breakage can easily be deflected
• Finally, there are distros that fall on a spectrum in regards to their more radical state management in hopes of minimizing breakage
• (Though, I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other methods…)
• And, of course, we find combinations of the above employed on the very same distro/system

And, of course, we shouldn’t forget to mention Arch’s approach; lay the responsibility on the user 😅. So, Arch ‘breaking’/‘borking’ after an update is a user error. Which other distro can tout such an impressive entry in their documentation for system maintenance?

To be fair, this makes total sense. The user can basically build their system from scratch. So…, why wouldn’t they be capable to come up with their solution to the above problem? Besides, the ArchWiki continues to be a guiding light whatever solution they’d like to adopt: be it ‘freezing’ the kernel, or using better tested software, perhaps setting up Snapper for rollbacks etc…

Is there a distro that’s like Arch for installation but more stable?

Gentoo

Glad you’re so appreciative and worked through it! I gladly share, discuss, and respond.

Thank you for being you!

I’ll have to read up on palette filters. :) I do semi-regularly use ffmpeg, but palette filters are not something I have heard or used before.

Please allow me to point you towards the relevant parts within its documentation; palettegen and paletteuse.

Together, they constitute -from what I can gather- the absolute minimal required to create a .gif with desirable qualities. As such, they will make their appearances within the following two commands that closely mirror the examples found in the documentation:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf palettegen palette.png

This generates a representative palette with 255 colors maximum from the video. Note that AFAIU the set of colors this can draw from is the same as the one used for gifs. Which will likely come into play when we try to understand why this works in the first place.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i palette.png -lavfi paletteuse output.gif

This starts with converting the colors found in the original .mp4 to their closest counterparts found within the palette. Then, with converted colors, it’s turned into a .gif. Note that AFAIU we’ve effectively eliminated the algorithm that would otherwise kick in to convert the .mp4’s wide arrange of colors into the ones compatible with gif.

To be clear, I don’t claim to understand why this actually works 😅. But, combined, the above two commands do yield desirable gifs. Like, for example, the one found below.

Note that we can achieve the same with just a single command. For that, consider the command found below.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" output.gif

I assume in this case it’s a downsampling into fewer colors, evading the issues of almost-same-colors?

That would also be my conjecture.

Especially given the last square/check pattern makes me thing of codecs splitting into square blocks and then encoding those. It could make sense that this division leads to different results for one reason or another, which then produces a check pattern without it being there before.

Makes sense.

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Thank you so much for your patience in teaching me something new! Much, much appreciated!

With the help of your observations, I can confidently say that the different dither methods don’t play much of a role after filtering with a better palette has already been done. So palette-filtering -if we can refer to it as such- is the actual MVP in resolving this issue.

animated webp may also be an option

Hehe :P , I’ll take note of this and perhaps resort to it the next time. The whole palette-filtering stuff seemed like some occult incantations that somehow worked. But I would much rather use a different (sane) format instead.

Again, I would like to stress that I’ve very much enjoyed this interaction! While it’s been (mostly) totally unrelated to the original post, this has actually been one of the most informative interactions found within its comments. Therefore, thank you!

Curiously, the cream of the crop in terms of security-focused Linux (i.e. Kicksecure and secureblue) leverage systemd to their benefit.

UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.

Thank you so much for this! Hopefully I’m not bothering you with this*.

Did you scale the source with ffmpeg?

I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I did. The invoked command was the following:

❯ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.gif

Do you have a visual pattern in your console background?

I don’t think I do. It doesn’t look like it at least. To be clear, even on my laptop I notice the visual pattern visible in the gif. But that’s totally absent when I’m working within Emacs. Or at least, it looks as if it’s just a singular solid color.

The second best to render a small enough size that it does not get resized in the browser.

Hmm…, makes sense. Not a huge fan, though 😅. Hopefully I can solve it through other means instead.

I assume you scaled it up

Yup. For the sake of readability*. But the upscaling (or rather zooming in*) was done natively within Emacs.

Alright, so I went to do some digging and the pattern only starts to show up in the gif. Perhaps as a result of the smaller color palette*. Regardless, I tried to see if it is solved by simply generating a ‘better’ palette and using it as a filter of sorts. Furthermore, in case that wasn’t enough, I also tried playing with different dither algorithms:

Does any one of the above gifs do better?

So do I, btw. 😜

Yup, Doom Emacs is definitely pretty lit. If it wasn’t clear already, the gif in the post has been made with it.

FWIW, I actually started using Emacs through Spacemacs. And, honestly, I don’t know if either one of the two has technical merit over the other. However, at some point, when I was working with (slightly) larger files, I just clearly started to notice input lag. Mind you, my laptop is starting to show his age, but input lag isn’t something I was used to experience otherwise. As such, out of frustration, I pivoted to Doom and the rest has been history 😅.

Oh lol 😜 😂. Regardless, your input has been much appreciated! Thank you 😊!

No problem, fam.

I have tried to reproduce it in Geany, but have failed so far 😅. Perhaps it’s on me, but I’m (at least) inclined to look elsewhere until this has been resolved. Hopefully it’s on me and someone can point me in the right direction.

Anyhow, thank you anyways!

Very interesting. I suppose that’s an artifact of the ffmpeg hacking used to convert the screencast to a gif. Would you happen to know what I could do to prevent that from happening in the future?

Btw, FWIW, I seem to only notice this myself when I’m on the phone. Does the picture above also happen to be from your phone?

I’ve also heard great things about it. Thanks for your endorsement! Unfortunately, correctly installing Zed on my distro might be more trouble than worth it at the moment. Hopefully the issue(s) will be resolved (very) soon. I would love to test it out and see it for myself.

Thanks for mentioning an editor I would otherwise have missed!

Uhmmm…, I just installed it. First impressions were pretty good. For some reason, I assumed it would work as well as Kate (and Kdevelop) have. However, I wasn’t able to replicate the folding functionality within the Markdown file.

Would you happen to know what I’m doing wrong? Your help is much appreciated!

Kate has been cool so far. Thank you for (yet) another endorsement!

However, I’ve been hearing conflicting narratives on Geany’s folding capabilities. I’ve yet to test it out (as there’s a long list I have to go over), but would you like to chime in with your thoughts on this matter? To be more precise, I desire to fold (at least) Markdown headings with it (as seen in the gif). Thanks in advance!

I am starting to attest this. I’ve tested a couple of text editors since yesterday and -surprisingly- only Kate (and KDevelop) have (so far) been able to pull this off.

Fam, I believe your post is all over the place. Please consider to clarify the following:

• What is it that you actually desire?
  • Easy installation through a script? Or perhaps through a Kickstart file? Or any of the dozens of other tools used to deploy a fleet of systems?
  • Declarative system management? While perhaps not as powerful as NixOS, the industry has been working with tools like Ansible for over a decade.

Basically it feels insane that it’s the way most linux users and servers in the world operate.

Frankly, I somewhat agree. But I believe most people operate within paradigms like “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” and/or “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”. Isn’t “the path of least resistance” what we default to anyways? And if we additionally weigh in sunk cost fallacy, it is no surprise that people are more often than not wed to their ways… Or, at least act upon it.

If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don’t more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

I believe NixOS suffers from the following:

• For the longest time, it really was just niche. Like, NixOS has only fairly recently started to garner a decent audience. Boiling Steam’s chart, while it shouldn’t be used to gauge the user base of each distro, it does help us in finding trendings within a distro. And for NixOS, it clearly shows how it has slowly but surely grown a significant presence from 2020 onwards. Contrast that to Debian or Fedora that have always had a significant presence (or, at least for over a decade).
• The onboarding experience is absolute horrid. To flake or not? To lix or nixcpp? And I haven’t even mentioned how its documentation is just dog water. Or how over the last year its organization has shown clear growing pains.

Anyhow, I’m glad to hear you jumped ship to NixOS! Wish me luck when I enter its hostile waters (with the intent to conquer it) this summer 😉!

Thanks for another endorsement of Kate!

By the recommendation of others, I’ve actually installed and tried out Kate in the mean time.

So far, so good. 🙂