calamares VS fish-shell

The reasons for wanting /boot to be unencrypted are varied. Maybe you want (much) faster boot time, or maybe you want to use a nice GRUB or Plymouth theme, or you use GRUB in a Multi-Boot scenario where you don't want/need to go through encryption first. Encrypting the /boot partition offers that extra .002% of security by protecting against Evil Maid attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_maid_attack), but comes with several tradeoffs which may not justify using it when it doesn't really apply to 99.998% of peoples' threat model. We can debate this here, but I feel like this has been pretty extensively covered online (e.g. https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues/1311) so feel free to do a search if you want to learn more. This guide is for people who are aware of the potential security risks, but for whom an Evil Maid attack is not something they need to worry about. Is this you? Cool! Read on...

Nitrux provides an eponymous Linux desktop distribution based on Debian. It uses the Calamares installer and includes the NX Desktop built on the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment and MauiKit Applications.

You can add your own scripts or programs to this environment to make the installation process easier. There are a few third party distro agnostic installers you could include as well such as calamares.

But making an installer is hard to do from scratch. So you may want to modify an existing one, such as the one that elementaryOS uses, or the general-purpose calamares framework, in which case your installer is bound by the terms of their license to the extent you modified or are redistributing their code.

They use the Calamares installer which is also used by a bunch of other distros. https://calamares.io/

Yes, it is the Calamares installer. It is more straightforward than the Debian Installer in terms of questions and won't get too much into technical details that may overwhelm a newcomer and/or a non-technical person. The Debian installer is a bit more overwhelming, with the benefit of being a lot more flexible than Calamares.

I decided to try KDE and reinstalled my system from scratch. I chose encrypted Btrfs volume with Swap to disk and hibernation. Hibernation didn't seem to work at first and I had errors during the boot saying something about 'openswap'. So I started googling and found this issue on github. I fixed 'keyfile_device_mount_options' in '/etc/openswap.conf' as someone suggested there and it seems to help. I don't have any errors on boot and hibernation KINDA works.

Reminds of the note at the bottom of Fish's releases. It's there because the build system cannot determine the current version for some reason. Hopefully that will go away now that they have switched to a different language / build system. The custom tarball is used by Arch Linux at the very least.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases/tag/3.7.1

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/7772#issueco...

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

A recent practical example of the former: the fish shell re-wrote incrementally from C++ to Rust, and is almost finished https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

An example of the latter: c2rust, which is a work in progress but is very impressive https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

It currently translates into unsafe Rust, but the strategy is to separate the "compile C to unsafe Rust" steps and the "compile unsafe Rust to safe Rust" steps. As I see it, as it makes the overall task simpler, allows for more user freedom, and makes the latter potentially useful even for non-transpiled code. https://immunant.com/blog/2023/03/lifting/

And this discussion from November has an update on the progress: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

We're using bash as our terminal shell for now (it is standard in many distros) but it is not the only one out there. If you want to test out zsh, fish or oh-my-zsh, you will see that there are a few differences and the features are usually the main differentiator. Try that, poke around.

They have a variety of reasons to move to rust, as outlined in their original rust discussion[1]. Mostly around finding other contributors, and adding an async/parallel mode they're comfortable with.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512