It was two decades ago, when someone gave us the CDs of Fedora. It was so very different than Windows XP. I came back to Linux when my school library had Ubuntu on their computer. I'm gonna ask someone to gift me Steam Deck upon graduating from college.
If I remember correctly, you can define the modifier key in KDE. Not sure though, you might have to test it out.
That would be the fastest way. Apart from that, it’s very much possible by binding every possible action to different keypresses. That would be long and stenuous.
However, it should be said that these will only apply within KDE applications. If you’re using third-party stuff, like Firefox, GIMP, VLC etc., they won’t apply.
If you really want to go hard on rebinding all kinds of keys for any application, you can also do things like these:
As cool as both of these are, and as much as I would still generally recommend picking KDE for these kind of customization possibilities, I wouldn’t recommend overdoing either. You won’t be able to use other PCs anymore…
I actually went through and customized all the Plasma keybindings to be more like Mac a couple days ago. It works pretty well, but yeah unfortunately only in KDE applications. And there’s still some stuff you can’t change such as the “extend selection to start/end of word” shortcuts always being set to ctrl+shift+left/right even if you set the “move to start/end of word” keys to option+left/right.
Laptop and Workstation run Fedora. Servers run Proxmox.
Can’t say that there is anything new and exciting. Big change for me has been that I have accepted flatpacks. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t care about being a purist, don’t care about customizing and theming everything. I just want to use my computer.
Arch + XFCE on my desktop. Have been for a while now, and everytime i try something else, I always come back to it. For my laptop, I’ve been using Gnome + extensions (Arch as well. That way I don’t gotta switch gears and remember two different sets of commands) before i had to take it in for repairs. Was pretty good because of the mousepad gestures IMO.
I’m about ready to hop back in and daily drive Linux again after the nightmare that was attempting debian w/KDE plasma and Wayland. I have a Nvidia GPU on my laptop and for some reason I did not have luck at all after moderate success daily driving opensuse tumbleweed and kubuntu for a while.
I’m admittedly looking to onboard myself to the gnome workflow and leave the comfort of the windows style desktop environment experience. Gnome seems a bit more polished and stable than KDE plasma but it’s interface isn’t intuitive to me yet.
Ideally I’ll be using Debian or Arch when the time comes for me to dive back into desktop Linux.
KDE fixed a lot of Wayland bugs over the last months and especially with the upcoming launch of Plasma 6.0, so I’d give it a try again now or in half a year.
Nvidia also constantly fixes the problems with their Wayland support so it’s only getting better. Debian doesn’t have recent enough packages to have a good KDE Wayland experience.
Gnome Wayland doesn’t support features like vrr/adaptive sync or tearing, so it isn’t a good gaming experience. Otherwise it’s great.
Yeah I imagine the struggles I had with Debian had something to do with enabling proprietary drivers and firmware and leveraging those. Before getting those drivers, the default nouveau drivers were awful, the performance was comically bad.
I’m also not a Linux power user though, so for sure any or all of the above could be meatware issues.
If you’re going to be using a DE and mostly do stuff through the GUI instead of terminal/command-line then make sure you can go admin mode (Root/Sudo).
Besides small annoyances I had with KDE Plasma 5’s UX the main reason I didn’t like it was that often enough I would have to use admin privileges but I couldn’t do it through the GUI File Manager (Dolphin) so I frequently had to use the terminal.
It should be possible to have admin privileges in Dolphin but I was a noob and didn’t know how (and still don’t even now).
If you end up facing that issue then either be a bit smarter than me and look up how to do that or use Nemo, another file manager, which is more or less the same thing as Dolphin except when I ended up using it on Linux Mint a while back it let me use it as Root as a feature out of the box.
And for the record I don’t like Linux Mint, apt package manager sucks (package managers are basically app stores where you get all your stuff), but at least it was super easy to install and Nemo was a good file manager.
If you don’t mind tinkering and have a secondary device with an internet connection in case you break something then I would recommend Arch Linux. Or you could try it in a Virtual Machine I guess.
Pacman (Arch’s package manager) is a hundred times better than Apt, and then there’s the AUR on top.
Also while I’ve never used it I hear a lot of good things about EndeavorOS, Arch Linux but supposedly easier
Workspace Matrix: provides a customizable n x m workspace grid, and a customizable pop-up that shows live preview of all workspaces and their windows (incl. e.g. video playing).
In combination, these two features allow me very quick overview of everything I have open, presented in an ordered fashion, allowing quick, keyboard-driven application change.
I’m not aware that the exact features of Workspace Matrix are reproduced by anything in any other DE.
Oh, true, you don’t get previews of the windows inside. However, that shouldn’t be very hard to implement, so you might have luck if you ask for it to be in Plasma 6.
I don’t know how helpful it is to split stuff out like that. Especially grouping so many things under “default applications and daemons”, which is most of what a desktop distro is. Also depends largely on a PC vs server setup.
should list an init system as its own bullet, which others have mentioned.
“one or more shells” doesn’t mean that much. Yes, every distro includes one but the only difference between a terminal and any other application is that a terminal needs to be able to escalate to root privileges. You can think of it as just another default (but special) application. A lot of stuff that people think about when they think of Linux distros is just various clever mechanisms for supporting the terminal shell. Like the PATH environment variable. If you are using actual desktop applications other than a terminal, there isn’t any interaction with the terminal shell application.
There’s also fwupd, for updating firmware (your hardware is gonna be running out of date/buggy/insecure code if you don’t have this).
The dbus daemon falls under the “daemons” bullet but it’s pretty important, like wayland/x11 it’s another IPC mechanism you need for programs to work correctly.
There’s also the sound system. PipeWire is the modern one that implements the interfaces of various other sound systems so existing applications work with it. pipewire.org (PipeWire also has its own IPC protocol like dbus/wayland/x11).
flatpak, snap, distrobox, toolbox, docker, podman, etc. for running sandboxed PC/server applications. I assume there are some programs that are flatpak-only these days.
gsettings/dconf for Windows-registry like config that many programs use.
There’s also plugging in an implementation of the glibc Name Service Switch, which allows libc to use a mechanism other than /etc/passwd and related files for user accounts, internet service names, DNS resolution, etc. . systemd can provide NSS implementations using its own user account mechanism.
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.