For years, I’ve gotten by with a desktop at home running Arch and a work laptop running Kubuntu. Now I want a laptop that’s not owned by my job, so that I can use a computer outside the house and not have my workplace own the IP rights of whatever I do on it. My workload is basically just going to be emacs and web browsing, so basically any distro can do it.

I’ve already got the laptop (HP Elitebook 840 G5, secondhand), but now it’s time for the distro. I don’t plan to use this laptop often, since it’ll mostly be when I travel a few times a year. I don’t want Arch, because I don’t want to install 6 months of software updates the night before a vacation and then hope that everything works.

Thus, I’m looking at Fedora Silverblue, since that can apply updates atomically on the system, and I can always roll back. I’m wondering if anyone else has good recommendations for a distro to serve my needs.

    • @ShikadiEnglish
      2•11 months ago

      What do you do for a volume icon/volume control?

      • imnotneoEnglish
        2•11 months ago

        slightly unrelated but I use i3 and use volume hardware keymaps. would be nice to have a tray alsa source switcher etc. don’t know if one exists. for the stupid work meetings

        • @ShikadiEnglish
          2•11 months ago

          I also use i3 and volume key maps, the tray icon I use is just called volumeicon and it can be used to switch sources. I think it has optional dependencies to do it though

      • @Nuuskis9@feddit.nlEnglish
        2•11 months ago

        For volume control, I use Wireplumber:

        • To raise the volume bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec wpctl set-volume @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SINK@ 1%+
        • To lower the volume bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec wpctl set-volume @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SINK@ 1%-
        • To mute/unmute the volume bindsym XF86AudioMute exec wpctl set-mute @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SINK@ toggle
        • To mute/unmute the microphone bindsym XF86AudioMicMute exec wpctl set-mute @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SOURCE@ toggle

        For icon I have configured the swaybar. I don’t use notifications, thus they’re simple to set for bindsym (above) if needed.

        • @ShikadiEnglish
          1•11 months ago

          Thanks! By configure the sway bar, do you mean that it has a way to display the volume? I couldn’t find that last time I tried to get things configured and ended up just going back to i3

          • @Nuuskis9@feddit.nlEnglish
            2•11 months ago

            I have 4 icons displaying the current amount of volume with white background and for mute I use red background. It was super easy to set in the config file even I don’t speak C++.