This Lemmy community is a pretty good resource for inspiration, and sometimes you can snag animation or icon sources from the descriptions or comments. It’s not super in depth on the how to end of it though.
You’ll want to decide on a desktop environment or window manager (or compositor). That’ll be the biggest determining factor of what things will look like. From there, you’ll want to either read the manual or arch wiki on how to customize the different aspects of it.
If you decide you want a tiling window manager, Hyprland is nice since you mentioned you wanted animations. But it’s only recommended on rolling release distros at the moment. It also might not work well with Nvidia.
What kind of “app behaviour” customizations are you wanting to do? That sounds like it would be app-specific. My main form of app customization is to find ways to change the colour scheme (to fit everything else), and also to change the keybindings (I like using vim-like key bindings whenever reasonable)
Why would you want to rely 100% on the taste of other people?
If you like GNOME, you may try Fedora Silverblue which has vanilla GNOME and little apps, all others are installed as Flatpaks.
But relying on preinstalled snaps for whatever reason doesnt make much sense. Default Desktop settings are a different thing, and I am happy you found the solution.
My kids have always been using Linux because that’s what I use on my gaming PC. When it was time for my eldest to get his own computer I tried to educate him on the differences between Linux and Windows (admittedly with my bias) and he chose Linux. I feel like wobbly windows played a big part in that.
He moans about some unsupported multiplayer games now and then and I have told him that we have a spare SSD he may use to install Windows. But so far his suffering wasn’t big enough to help me step him through that process.
Dope, thank you for posting. Been using ‘Core CTRL’ for quite awhile but Imma give this a rip. For some reason the former tool never could control the fan curve for my GPU (all the other fans in the box worked fine with it) so this might be profit.
Arch should be fine for university stuff. The main problem with Arch is not Arch itself, but all the software it tracks being very fresh. You’ll be pulling updates as they come down the line, and that may result in temporary bugs or day-to-day workflow changes - caused by the software developers themselves. I don’t think an Arch system is unusually unstable or prone to breaking, but last year they did brick everyone’s GRUB loaders by pushing an update too early (post-mortem here). It’s up to you, but if you want to err on the side of system/software stability I would go for Mint/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Debian.
I don’t have any practical experience with EndeavourOS but TMK it’s just preconfigured Arch and it uses the default repos, so that sounds good to me. Vanilla Arch is not inherently better or worse, it’s just a more minimal starting point.
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