elementaryOS compatibility?

MNT Reform
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hiiii, i’m looking forward to switching to an MNT reform next as someone who’s fed up enough with the apple ecosystem to wanna go into linux lol. i’m especially excited about the prospect of supporting a genderqueer-owned, anti-LLM business!

to go with my genderqueer-made computer, i wanna go with a genderqueer-made, anti-LLM OS, that, of course, being elementaryOS. how compatible would it be with a reform next? from what i’ve heard, elementaryOS has only just begun to support ARM

would i also be able to ask minute to install elementaryOS onto the reform next before they ship it out, or otherwise add distro options to the future shop page? idk if you’d have to talk to danielle for the latter but it’d be pretty cool if you did!

thanks for answering! <3

2 Likes
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According to Wikipedia, Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu which in turn is based on Debian. To support a new OS you need to be able to rebuild its kernel with the MNT hardware specific patches. The way Debian and Ubuntu build the kernel is not for the faint of heart. I don’t know how Elementary OS builds its kernel. Can you find that out?

Additionally, it would be good if you had the package reform-tools built for Elementary OS. Since reform-tools is in Ubuntu maybe the package is already part of the Elementary OS repository as well? If not, it’s probably easy to add it?

I’m most familiar with Debian but since Elementary OS seems to be a derivative maybe I can help you. Feel free to ask me anything.

3

what do you mean by “building the kernel”? i found the github repo which mentions a “build system” but i assume you mean something different

as per the latest OS release notes, elementaryOS uses the ubuntu LTS hardware enablement kernel

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Ah, mkosi… This seems to be a very thin layer on top of ubuntu indeed. The github repo you find is to build system images. If they indeed just copypaste the ubuntu kernel, then the task becomes to build a ubuntu kernel with the MNT patches and then adding that to their build script as an additional repository.

If you want this to happen, you can contribute your elementary OS expertise. :slight_smile:

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…yeah i think i’ll just stick with debian then, thanks (i’m not a coder by any means)

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hey building from source isn’t as scary as it might sound at first. building a kernel is certainly a big thing, but it’s really just a lot of ticking boxes, editing some configs, and then trying it, copying the error, looking it up, fixing that, rinse and repeat. you can probably port it given a weekend or two if you really want ElementaryOS

see Stephano’s guide for porting Arch Linux for an idea of how long and involved the process is, and then trim that by probably 25% since Arch is very very involved.

i totally understand it can seem like a lot, but it might be less than you’re expecting, so don’t write it off just yet

alternatively if you check that out then decide that’s not for you, you can try a few different desktop environments (what your desktop is like) on Debian

1: KDE Plasma, since it has a bit of that apple philosophy of “things should just work”. it’s a lot of extra storage so people tend to call it a bit bloated because it comes with some things you probably don’t need, but it works well, and it’s got a bit of modularity with extensions. i haven’t used it as much as the other two by a long shot.

2: Cinnamon from the Linux Mint project is another great option, it’s like older windows, and a bit more simple, but still plenty modifiable, and really modular. little like KDE but with a trimmed down package set, and it has some simple little quality of life features i love, namely the ability to set custom folder colours in the file browser for at a glance sorting, that and extensions are really nice and simple, and basically all of it is a setting somewhere, and easy to access. i have the most experience with this one as i’ve been daily driving it on my main PC for years.

3: GNOME is another option, but from what i’ve experienced it’s more locked down and slightly worse documented once you go below the surface level. you can see that i’ve had difficulties with it over things that should be rather easy to tweak.

edit: pro tip, bibata modern classic is a really nice looking custom mouse cursor

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i appreciate the reassurance, but i feel i should make it clear where i’m coming from:

i’ve never really had to interact with the terminal that much in all my years of computing. the most i’ve done is run sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine to open “unsigned” software, mostly plugins for my DAW. i’ve never had to use a CLI for anything so i have a severe lack of experience on that part

not to mention i don’t really have the capacity to think in code, because to me it feels like a bunch of heavily fragmented sentences. even basic stuff like HTML and CSS, which i doubt are even considered programming languages, feels daunting to me. there’s also some perfectionism in there as well

i’m sure i’ll get better with time and experience, but when i get around to having the laptop in my grasp, i’d rather not touch the terminal at first if i don’t have to

2 Likes
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fair, well if nothing else trying a few DEs is worth it to find the right one. best of luck!