Unfortunately, based on what I saw on the Proton website, if I want to use it on linux it looks like the only way is to get it on Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora using the console.

For official support, yes. Thankfully, ProtonVPN is also available as a flatpak. As such, any distro that allows installing (unverified) flatpaks through its GUI software store suffices. Though, not all distros are created equally in this respect. Focusing on Kubuntu and Linux Mint specifically:

• Kubuntu requires the use of CLI to set this up.
• Linux Mint, on the other hand, supports it by default. Though, by default, unverified flatpaks are hidden. Thankfully, you can change that in the preferences window of its software manager.

My pleasure fam! Btw, I’m in no place to dictate what’s right or wrong (or whatsoever). I just wanted to add their perspective on the matter*.

Article by a Red Hat engineer that also makes a ton of contributions to FOSS in their free time: Don’t change your login shell, use a modern terminal emulator

Not OP, but when I cold turkey switched to Fedora Silverblue over three years ago, I benefited a lot from this guide.

I wonder what this means for Linux Journal as a platform.

Could you elaborate on the reform?

For some reason, I was under the impression that laptops in the MNT Reform series were the only laptops that were manufactured using open (source) hardware only. Or, if there were others, that it must have been doing something so special that they deserved to be put on a pedestal. But, currently, I don’t feel confident enough to state why it would be superior over say the Olimex TERES-I or Pinebook Pro.

I hear the hype yet to me it looks like a severely overpriced tv box with some low-grade peripherials strapped to it in the least space efficient way possible.

We definitely pay a premium, but I don’t know exactly why. Especially when the aforementioned Olimex TERES-I and Pinebook Pro are almost an order of magnitude cheaper.

Did they got rockchip to release sources instead of blobs or something?

From what I understood, Rockchip offers (at least some of) its SoCs as open source hardware. So, what MNT Reform did for the SoC is order them as open source hardware and include/publicize/provide all the schematics (etc).

What is the praise actually for?

FWIW, the open source hardware aspect is what I was intrigued by*.

Step 1 ‐ install BalenaEtcher.

FWIW, perhaps you should reconsider if you should even use balenaEtcher.

I never figured out step 1. It’s not in the software store.

Unfortunately, this does happen at times. Therefore, it’s a good idea to be aware of alternatives. One such example would be Fedora Media Writer that you may install as a flatpak. Though, the most popular is probably Ventoy.

Eventually I found an APPimg file, and it installed Balena Etcher. But it wouldn’t launch after being installed.

Unfortunately, AppImages aren’t as reliable as one might expect. Assuming that your distro supports it OOTB, you’re still often required to explicitly allow it to be run as an executable. Which is a good thing for the sake of secure defaults*. Granting it is simply done by:

1. Right-clicking the AppImage you wish to execute
2. Go into “Properties”
3. Turn the switch ON that’s found to the right of “Executable as Program”

You can put multiple ISOs on it, and choose at boot.

FWIW, the aforementioned Ventoy does just that.

This sounded like really positive news, linux as an ecosystem desperately needs to revisit its init process choices, but there really doesn’t seem to be any hint of it elsewhere.

I’d also love to see something like this come into fruition. And hate the fact that everything points towards this being some LLM-hallucination. Thankfully, while not written in Rust, we have dinit to be excited/optimistic about.

There is a rye that’s written in rust and which has an init command rye init. I wonder if it’s a case of an LLM latching on to that and just making up the rest?

Excellent observation! That’s probably it.

but describing an entire nonexistent init system without some kind of directive in that direction?

Someone else, i.e. the user called “notabot”, had already made the following interesting observations:

• rye is software that actually exists and is found within the repos
• rye is written in rust
• rye has an init command; rye init

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to think that an LLM is aware of the above. But, it failed to understand what rye actually is and how its init command isn’t competing with systemd.

Yeah lol. There are definitely some oddities going on that I find hard to wrap my head around.

For example, last week this article was published on the same website and attributed to the same author. In the article, the author talks about the release of Fedora 41. The thing is, however, that Fedora 41 was released last October. Heck, Fedora 42 has been released for two months now. Like, why wouldn’t they want to talk about Fedora 42 instead?

Excellent find.

I also noticed this, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt as Arch is a community-driven distro and perhaps they were trying to allude to that fact.

So I was interested to dig more into this…, but I wasn’t able to find any other source that talked about this. Furthermore, while some digging suggests that the author is a real person, the text didn’t score well on https://undetectable.ai/ . Do with that whatever you will*

FWIW, trying to install it within a distrobox container gave the following error:

error: target not found: rye-init

Which, AFAIK, suggests that the package is not found in the repo. Nor does going through https://archlinux.org/packages/ yield any results. At this point, my best best would be to spin up a VM and see if that makes a difference. But I’m not really in the mood at the moment.

Regardless, has somebody checked the package out for themselves? Or, have they seen discussions on it elsewhere?

I got a couple I really like, though for vastly different reasons:

• The MNT Reform series takes the crown for their commitment towards open source software AND open source hardware.
• The ASUS Zenbook DUO is an early entry in the direction of what I perceive as peak design. This technology will only improve from here and I hope other vendors will take cues from this one.

What’s better? KDE? Or GNOME?

This is very much just personal taste and can even change from device to device; i.e. some folk swear by GNOME on their laptops but they also happen to swear by KDE Plasma on the desktop.

At the end of the day, you’d have to test it out for yourself to see which one you like better and under what circumstances.

And, finally, avoid giving too much credence to the exaggerated caricatures that are often presented in the online discourse.

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 😊.

You can pretty easily export Org mode files to markdown (and LaTeX)!

Oh wow, thank you for offering me this learning experience!

There may be a setting you need to turn on (I forget and I’m not at my PC), but it works well and is very easy to use.

I’m on Doom Emacs, so perhaps this is enabled by default. But, at least for me, it was as easy as pressing SPC m e. This opens up the export menu. From there; one may select LaTeX, Markdown or any of the many other options to export to. The fuzzy search from M-x also allowed me to find it by typing out the functionality I was seeking.

Granted, I am not entirely content on how Emacs handled the export to Markdown. But I wouldn’t bat an eye if Emacs enables me to configure it exactly as I’d want to.

Also, I haven’t really done it, but from what I understand you can also setup emacs to be a really good LaTeX editor.

Again, I wouldn’t be surprised. It seems Emacs lends itself extremely well to whatever you throw at it 😂. No doubt; this is dndgame-material for sure*.

Well, bundling a full browser and using a mature and popular runtime are very different things in my book.

Thank you for clarifying that distinction for me!

But yeah, if you want an open source tool, JetBrains is not the tool to use.

Thank you for confirming it for me! Regardless, your recommendation has been much appreciated!

Thank you for mentioning Sublime Text! It seems to be a very competent text editor. However, unfortunately, I don’t like how it is not open source.

I think my needs for a text editor for making notes and/or writing texts are mostly fulfilled between Emacs and Kate. At least…, for my untrained eyes. Do you think Sublime Text offers merit beyond (either of) these to be considered instead?

Sorry for the late response.

I’ve tested most of what has been suggested and I can attest that Kate is indeed very good. Thanks for mentioning your endorsement as well!

However, while I really like Geany aesthetically, I wasn’t able to fold Markdown headings with it. Uhmm…, would you happen to know if this is actually featured?

JetBrains IDEs

I have used them in the past. They’re definitely pretty cool and do their job well. Unfortunately, unless I’m wrong, most of their offerings^[1] are not open source. I believe this also applies to Fleet.

My apologies for not making it clear in the post, but I do prefer open source whenever I can afford it.

Finally, there’s a lot not to like about electron, but I feel like JetBrains’ use of JVMs isn’t a lot better.

Regardless, I will note it down as I intend to test them all out anyways :P .

Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in any of the above. Thank you!