So a few months back I asked about you guys os in c/asklemmy, so this time I wanna ask about your desktops you use on this same account.
(I use kde but plan to move to cinnamon I find kde buggy and gnome tracker3 randomly broke for no reason + themeing so yh idk if these happened to anybody)
GNOME because it’s the only good option that looks modern and has proper development. Excuses of KDE fanboys that GNOME team makes weird decisions are not accepted.
Mate, lxqt and even xfce look very old. I know they can’t have fancy effects but I think it’s weird they don’t come with a modern theme. They could make them look at least like Cinnamon. Even Windows 10 didn’t have rounded corners and looked great, with or without blur. Simplicity can look good imo.
Cinnamon is great but it’s GTK3 and a little bit older in terms of design (though it’s more sane than whatever the new trends are so it’s not bad but just not my thing).
Budgie isn’t a very big project so idk how consistent it is (it’s something I care about a lot). Though I think I never tried it myself.
But actually I don’t hate all of that projects. I just like GNOME and it works so so so well for me. My troll behavior towards other DEs is just a joke inspired by “Mii beta” YouTube channel. Btw KDE has performance, even though it’s more than feature-rich. That’s impressive.
Gnome and Cosmic. Gnome 'cause of simplicity and Cosmic because of Rust.
!I am a Rust programmer and I love this language!<
I found some negative press about cosmic which can be valid or not.
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-on-cosmic
Repeating my other reply verbatim yet again as you keep copying and pasting the same exact comment:
First, to be clear, this isn’t so much “press” as a blog entry. Second, there are only so many mentions of “rust cultists” and “my rust” I can read in a blog before losing interest.
Ohh okay thanks for that friendly reply, I wanted to show this reply that’s why I said it 3 times but ig that blog is wrong or opinionated.
Windows 10
Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.
I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.
I switched to PopOS from Windows 11 in three hours. I had been backing everything up for weeks though. Generally everything I did on Windows works out of the box on PopOS.
Aside from my bluetooth speaker not connecting automatically and needing to run a Windows VM for Corsair peripheral LEDs, I’ve not had to do a ton of customization.
It’s been well worth it. Really enjoying it so far and highly recommend.
My advice: Don’t wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you’re under pressure to figure it out all at once.
Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.
Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.
Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.
People who are brand new to linux should start with immutable kde based distros, you’ll have a much better time with fedora kinoite.
I’m down to help support infinitely, my matrix is available on my profile, feel free to message with any troubleshooting needs.
@communist @UltraGiGaGigantic I disagree, I started with Redhat and moved to Ubuntu, MUCH prefer the latter.
If Windows makes you happy keep using it. You owe a bunch of Linux nerds anything.
Yeah Linux still has plenty to work on. It’s unfortunate how limited the support is. If game and app developers could target Linux, then the cost to support and maintain would be lower than they have to do with Windows. Unfortunately, market share and power of defaults work against us.
If you can, look towards getting a steam deck. At least that is a Linux thing that is pretty decent and portable.
I game on both the deck and a desktop with pop!_os. I can say gaming on my desktop is just as good if not better than the deck for because it can leverage my desktop hardware and it’s way easier to go under the hood with proper peripherals. Linux has come a long way with gaming. Most of the shit that doesn’t run on linux are games that cost too much for too little content or they’re just gonna be battle pass/cosmetic farms that cater to whales and aren’t actually fun in any sense of the word.
If you’re gonna be a top 0.0001% competitive gamer, you’ll probably wanna stick to windows. If you don’t play FPSes competively, a linux based gaming PC is probably fine. Me? I’m a middle aged dude with kids who racks up about 20 hours a week somehow, and linux more than suits my needs.
I’ve had more success with Lutris and Wine in getting certain abandonware games (Black and White for example) to run than I ever did on Windows.
I use Windows because it just works
these days Hyprland but previously i3.
i basically live in the terminal unless i’m playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.
not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.
I’m still on i3 as it’s been convenient, but this:
this has all become very specialized over the past decade
resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it’s persistent across installations.
One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3’s config:
bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause
But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I’m in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#
CURRENT_WINDOW=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
# convoluted command to find the intersection of two searches
ZOOM_WINDOW=$(comm -12 \
<(xdotool search --name 'Meeting' | sort) \
<(xdotool search --class 'zoom' | sort))
if [[ -n "$ZOOM_WINDOW" ]]; then
# if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM_WINDOW}
xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
else
# otherwise do play/pause
playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi
and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.
[EDIT: Updated script as Zoom updated its window identities]
Another i3 user here. I slowly transitioned from KDE when switching keyboard layout stopped working as well as some other DE related things.
Ended up writing custom script for switching. Currently implemented with rofi in Perl, bc I like the syntax.
I still like having a bit nice gui, so i have wallpapers, some icons, etc. But I fell in love with terminal along with neovim : ) , soo kinda looking for that middle ground between look, performance and functionality.
Haven’t finished tweaking all the configs to my liking, but after that vanilla Arch is the direction I plan to go, since many things in my current install that I have as well as haven’t customized work a bit questionably or exist for no reason.
