A lightweight distro won’t help you since gaming and zoom will still consume the same amount of resources.
Whatever your distro/DE needs to run itself isn’t even a drop in the ocean compared to your browser for example.
I hate moving windows around.
All windows open maximized without window decorations. Meta+WSAD moves the active window to the upper/lower/left/right half of the screen.
Meta+PgDown minimizes, Meta+PgUp maximizes. Meta+Q tiles windows horizontally, Meta+E vertically. Meta+X closes the window, Meta+Spacebar shows the desktop, Meta alone shows the workspace overview.
Fuck hunting for window borders, clicking and dragging. And fuck configuring all this in a text file.
No. I need the functionality of a full desktop environment.
And KDE’s workspace overview is awesome. One keypress and I see all open windows, all workspaces and a global search field that switches to a program when it already has an open window and opens a new window if not.
And a tiling WM on top of KDE would be pointless to me since the behavior of a tiling WM can be configured through the GUI in KDE without installing anything extra.
I’m not familiar with sway or hyprland, but KDE automatically finds and configures any modern scanner and printer in the network, makes all programs use the same theme, saves my passwords and certificates, auto-mounts attached drives, auto-starts programs and services, handles which program opens which file type, has a nice workspace overview, lets me configure the firewall, grub, bootsplash screen, VPN, network settings, monitors, keyboard layout, etc… all with sane defaults out of the box, localized to my language, and easy GUI configuration.
For what it’s worth, a large number of the things you listed are actually portable into Sway, i3wm, and a lot of other tiling wms just by way of running the KDE settings daemons - I do the same kinds of things (network printer, theming, auto-mount, auto-start, XDG config, firewall, vpn, network settings, monitors, keyboard layout) just by having i3wm start up xfce-settings-daemon.
I’m not familiar enough with KDE to make promises about grub and splash, but I would imagine those would also work exactly the same as well. In fact, a little bit of searching and it looks like if you’re on Wayland you could even just replace KWin (the KDE window manager) with Sway in the startup files and be 95% of the way there. Might just need to configure a system bar or something to that effect.
Yeah I also use KDE on my desktop, though I have my laptop running QTile because the tile hotkeys are much more convinient than navigating with the trackpad.
Sure, but that’s not the only benefit to having full control over the entire tiling interface. I enjoy building out the features and visuals I want in python. It’s fun to have that level of control.
Boot from a live distro so you can modify your boot disk. Use the disk utility to create partitions. Copy the data to the relevant partitions ensuring to maintain file ownership and permissions. Modify /etc/fstab to mount the partitions at the designated locations in the filesystem.
I don’t bother putting anything but /home on its own dedicated partition, but if you ask 10 people this question you’ll get 12 opinions, so just do what feels right.
Note: Create your partitions from your empty space. You may need to resize your existing partition to do this. But don’t practice on your main drive.
This is a simple job, in that the steps are few, but it’s something that causes catastrophic data loss if you get it wrong.
I’d recommend buying a cheap second drive, doesn’t have to be big or even good. Partition it, mount it, make sure you can make the partitions automatically mount, teach yourself to copy data around, umount it and remount, make sure you got it right.
Just… these are all very simple things. I wouldn’t hesitate to repartition my own drives. But if you fuck it up you fuck it up good. Make sure you know the operations you’re taking first. Measure twice, cut once, all that jazz.
I have almost the same laptop (PS63 8M, without any nVidia dGPU).
One of the issues I had to solve was the touchpad spamming interrupts after waking up from sleep. It would keep one core at 100% indefinitely, keeping CPU frequency (and temps) quite high and burning through the battery.
This behavior seems fixed on modern kernels since I’ve installed Fedora recently and didn’t have to do this workaround, but you can still check if this still applies to you.
You might also check if you can disable the dGPU in the BIOS (can’t check since I don’t have one), and/or play with power profiles either through Gnome or tlp (lower power profiles will make your laptop very sluggish though).
Maybe check if both your fans are running. I had to replace one of mine that was starting to fail a year ago.
Other than that, I’ve never had any overheating issues with this laptop.
Out of curiosity, why not just leave ssh access to the local network so you can only reach it by VPN in the first place? Note I might be misunderstanding what the goal of this was, so feel free to lmk if I’m off the field with my question lol
I was surprised to learn this was a thing, impressive, however;
‘the VPN app sends a request to the VPN server to open a random port’
‘the active port number will change when you disconnect and reconnect the VPN.’
This will not work OOTB with Plex for example, you would need to change the port in the app every time. It becomes difficult to serve anything statically, like a XMPP server or anything that doesn’t let you configure the port.
You also would need to be at home to check which port you’ve been assigned eg if the connection drops and you get assigned a new port, defeating the whole ‘remote access’ thing.
As others are saying, that’s not really an option unless you’re really dedicated. IF it has an unlockable bootloader you could technically get to compiling and tinkering to get everything built, but in order to get a phone all set you’d need to get the right drivers and do a whole lot of tinkering (like full time job levels of building and tinkering) kind of deal to get it built. Phone’s aren’t so plug and play like computers.
If you there’s no rom support and/or a permanently locked bootloader but you want an OS without x y and z you can always try to fire up ADB bridge and disable stuff. You could also accomplish the same by rooting, though it’s a bit of a security risk (though not as overblown as some people say IMO).
Many people have predicted the death of the small, independent window manager with the coming of Wayland. I have heard multiple times that only large projects like GNOME and KDE would be able to take on the burden of making a compositor.
Now, I do think that lots of no longer actively developed window managers could get left behind. But the idea that it will be too complicated to create a window manager now is turning out to be wrong.
First, fewer desktop environments are getting left behind than feared. XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE all seem to have Wayland plans now.
The big change is the appearance of not one but multiple compositor libraries designed to make it easier to create a window manager for Wayland. Some of them look like they might make it easier than it was under X. The approach taken by this one makes the idea of hacking around with it very inviting.
Although having to create a compositor has made things difficultly until now, I think the idea of decoupling the compositor for Wayland is going to look smart in the long run.
Being separate from Wayland, compositor devs are free to experiment and window manager authors can select the one that best maps to their goals.
I was reading up on Oasis Linux yesterday. It comes with a Wayland compositor ( SWC ) and tiling window manager ( Velox ) that are less than 20,000 lines of code combined!
It would not be practical for a light-weight distro to trim down Xorg like that. But I the compositor is separate, it can be either smaller or feature rich. SWC is XWayland compatible but obviously that is going to add more size if you need it.
Looking forward to the window manager innovation that projects like Louvre enable.
People using X window manage will just keep using them. Wayland doesn’t offer anything valuable to most users so people will just keep using the managers they like. In 10-20 years we will get some nice, new managers that naturally will support Wayland and people will switch because of the features, not because ‘X insecure, Wayland awesome’ BS.
Wayland is already a lot nicer to use over X. Better gestures, better animations, better performance, and that’s if you use Wayland today, not in a year’s time.
Like I get why people are defensive over X but it literally isn’t being developed anymore - And if it’s really worth keeping over Wayland the time to get contributors to support it is passing quickly.
I agree with your overall sentiment with the caveat that 20 years will be closer to 5. Early adopters are enjoying Wayland only benefits today. For example, the Steam Deck just launched with HDR and mainline support for Linux gamers in general will not be far behind.
Also, the list of window managers being left behind is starting to look less appealing than the list of window managers that are Wayland only. Hyperland is probably already more popular than WindowMkaer. As GNOME and KDE go Wayland only, they will continue to add features that regular users will want. I see more announcements for new Wayland compositors than I do for new X window managers.
Another factor that gets missed is that the main dev support for X comes from Red Hat. RHEL9 is already Wayland based. When RHEL8 comes off support in 5 years, Red Hat will abandon X. How long will X stay viable after that?
As the number of X users dwindle, we will see toolkits drop support for X. GTK5 for example. 5 years may be too soon for that but I cannot see it taking 20 years.
Wayland being “valuable to most users” will come faster than you think.
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