I used to use Linux exclusively, but I eventually gave in to the appeal of Windows. I’m just too into gaming, even with all the advancements Steam and Proton are bringing into Linux. The main difference I’ve had is which OS type hosts which OS type.
It’s not a specific one, it’s about not having to worry about which one are in the ProtonDB list and how it actually performs and can be configured. I just lose less out of having Linux in a VM for what I use it for, and have less surprises running the games on the system they are marketing and testing for.
KDE nerds: Is there a way to get a normal app launch indicator (cursor with a loading icon/hourglass) instead of either nothing or the little hopping icons that don’t animate right?
I don’t know about an hourglass specifically, but there are some options. Should be in system settings, applications, launch feedback and/or busy cursor.
I think you mean different. I find the bouncing very normal after all these years. The spinning wheel and hourglass is there but they are used to indicate system waits, rather than launches.
Of course you can shut the bouncing launch off if you dont like it.
No. Some people wanted to change it to that for Plasma 6, but on Xorg there’s apparently no way to make that happen, as the cursor is always decided on by the window you’re hovering over…
Oh, I see, thank you! Never noticed the cursor changing back when I put it over another window in XFCE, but I also never looked for that. I really just want that brief feedback, especially when I’m using a touchpad.
I’m using Kubuntu as my main OS and it has been very stable for me. You can remove snapd and install the deb Firefox repository. You should look up tutorials on how to do it, I did it and nothing broke
I for one hope to move from kubuntu to debian with KDE, I assume that won’t have snap shit or systemd shit, but I might be painfully mistaken right there, I haven’t checked it out yet.
Debian does use systemd, but what’s so bad about it? I’m just curious, I’m using Arch with KDE, and that also uses systemd. Never had any issues with it. Debian doesn’t use snap by default though.
I have been enjoying OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling distro unlike the Ubuntu and Debian derivatives, but the updates hardly ever cause problems and it’s very easy to roll them back if they do. It also gives you a choice between X11 and Wayland, and Wayland is working well for me on Intel graphics.
I jumped into Tumbleweed recently and have really been liking it. Last time I used Linux with a desktop environment I was using Gnome and KDE was a lot unglier. Things have definitely changed.
KDE Neon gets the latest package updates regarding KDE first but it is not official in any sense, as listed on their website. In fact, Neon is just a package archive built on top of Ubuntu that offers more up to date KDE stuff.
I have used the distro as a daily driver in the past. It uses it’s own pkgcon package management system.
I came back to KDE after a long absence because I never liked it back in the day (I found it ugly and bloated). I was really surprised by how good it has become. It’s now my favourite desktop environment on Linux, and I’m looking forward to version 6. So to any other oldies still avoiding KDE because of how it used to be, it’s worth another look.
I second your experience. It was not so impressive back then and 2indo2s was much nicer, but not anymore. I’m feeling it, this year Linux will be on top!
Here I am thinking there’s some obscure Linux project using a name that’s somehow a sequel to Windows, like a Windows 2, but also a play on the 2__4me meme.
Oh, this is good news for me. I remember trying KDE years ago and feeling that it was just way too heavy. My goto is usually Cinnamon, but the lack of Wayland support has made me hesitant to go all in with out on my gaming PC. Def gonna give KDE a try, thanks!
Cinnamon was where I had ended up too. So now I have a couple of Linux Mint/Cinnamon machines and a Tumbleweed/KDE machine. It surprised me that I like KDE more.
So basically ever since I first tried Windows 7 I held it as the “Gold standard” for desktop OS’s. Half my tweaks to Windows 10 were trying to get it as close to Win7 as I possibly could.
When I finally start experimenting with Linux early this year KDE quickly got me to reconsider my “Gold standard” and finally switch my main machine fully to Linux.
No regrets and certainly ain’t switching back even if Microsoft gave me updated Windows 7 with every extra feature I wanted back then.
I hate to say this, because I know how cringe it is, but… Windows 7 actually removed a lot of features that made Windows fun. And yeah, I’m talking about ricing and I’m unironically saying ricing is valid.
The mid 2000s was an awesome time to be in the ricing community - between litestep, blackbox, foobar2k, rainlendar/rainmeter etc, you could actually make your experience look however you wanted.
And, litestep in particular, for me, was a gateway drug to openbox and therefore Linux - when you finally hit The Windows Wall, where, to go any further, you had to step into Linux, Ubuntu was there, and then Mint, and then…idr what.
I still have my 2007 Ubuntu installation cd that they mailed to me for free. Sure, you could just make your own installation cd rom, but, if you couldn’t, they would happily mail you one - or, as in my case, you felt motivated to evangelize, they’d send you a bunch that you could give out to people. I gave mine to friends and left some others at the local anarchist bookstore (I don’t remember the name of it but this was Washington DC just north of Chinatown).
Windows 7 was a big step backwards. You could still do a lot of ricing, but less - and it was very clear from the direction that Windows 7 went, that whatever came next would be worse.
Idk if I would say it’s looks > usability, and it’s certainly not gaudy… There are theming styles that are much more unusable and gaudy than the “riced” look.
It’s an aesthetic that idealizes a kind of barebones utility, and while it often will lean towards the look over the usability, the look itself is like a “beautiful utilitarian” - minimalistic, uncluttered, etc.
Oh shit, I remember LiteStep and spending hours and hours to just fiddle with how my desktop looked. I personally felt Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of MS OSs (except so many games etc. wouldn’t run because rightly the OS reported it was Windows NT and a lot of games shat themselves at that)
Haha, I remember buying Mandrake Linux CDs… I’m a FreeBSD user these days (for the past 20-odd years) but still run KDE. Plus they’re still trying to remain fairly *nix agnostic which is nice.
I’ve been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it’s baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There’s lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, “is this thing pleasant to use” stakes, they just never manage to get it right.
Windows 7 was…fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.
When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can’t get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.
It seems like a big company’s problem. They have a well-paid design\marketing department that can do whatever they want to create the best-selling interface for the new version of Windows, but before it’s released, no one tested it yet for anything but bugs, and who’d argue with a flock of top designers anyway? Add here the board of directors who are here to sell them ideas and who won’t use it either – I’m sure they applauded to the idea of unifying mobile and desktop experience with WinPhone&Win8, but especially Tablet-Laptop transformers they saw as the future. It sounds great on the paper, right? At that time it could’ve even sounded obvious for their business. And so it happened like it did.
Linux counters it by constant feedback and competition between easily switchable DEs, users being prepared even to jump distros; Apple has a fetish for style and experience (that’s a half of their pricetag), they build their business model about looking and feel nice, so you’d build an ecosystem of their products, you can’t even see error windows here and their garden is gated af; and ChromeOS\Android aren’t shy of looking what others do (like iPhone’s design findings) and conservatively taking what works, also having tons of vendor-created restyles\forks on their own platform as a testing ground for new ideas to make them then a standard. MS lack all of it, and their creative process is guided by external interests and ideals, it’s just an afterthought. And as they have their stable market share, they probably won’t even care. It took whole internet’s screams to return their traditional start menu in win8.1, then w10.
That’d probably stay the same until their new CEO would happen to be an art college graduate - like the current one pushed for accessebility and building special controllers because she has a child with a disability. A top-down signal. I won’t bet on it anytime soon.
What drives me crazy is how they can’t update all their configuration interface to the same standard, if you go deep enough you still fine things that are unchanged since Windows 98
To me it’s absurd how Microsoft gets beaten by a free desktop environment when windows is like their main product. They have billions of dollars. How do they manage to not do better?
The fact that Windows 11 has removed the ability to move the taskbar and has no intention of adding it back is just baffling to me. It’s a small thing but so jarring every time I try to use it that I’ve barely used my desktop in the last few months.
Yeah like they (the Windows sheeple) celebrated a CLI package manager as if it was their best invention since sliced bread. Every Linux user was like yaaawwwn… “finally”
Like, I get the self-reinforcing bubble that Linux communities exist in and all, but... nobody did that.
The vast majority of Windows users are random people that never touch anything beyond the Start menu in their entire computing lives. What segment of the Windows userbase is out there celebrating any features, let alone command line anything? This is not a thing. At least not in numbers large enough to matter.
Sorry, I try not to get involved in these arguments. Frankly, grown adults taking sides on operating systems of all things like it's Sega vs Nintendo in a 90s playground seems very strange but I don't begrudge people finding communities wherever. It's just... you know, come on.
People who do not use the dominant system/program/etc. often feel the need to tear down everyone else in order to validate their decision instead of just letting the results and their daily happiness with the decision speak for itself.
You don’t even need to quality it. Some people just feel the need to tear down others to make themselves feel good. It’s low self-esteem, misplaced onto whatever happens to be near them.
I think we’re all vulnerable to it, too. Part of being a good neighbor is checking yourself to see if you’re being a dick about your preferences, and just letting people enjoy what they enjoy (unless that thing is harming others; you know, common sense).
Oh yeah, let me be clear: I’m sure I engage in it myself. I like to think though that I’ve mostly gotten away from it, as I did plenty of that snobbery when I was younger with music and by the time I got to college realized that was just a really tool-ish way of acting that kept people away from what I thought was awesome art
Because I am too lazy to make an actual thread on mastodon I’m going to corner you and ask you a quick question if you don’t mind! Feel free to ignore haha.
I’ve recently dipped my toes in Linux and it’s been really fun learning about all of it, but I still haven’t really settled on an OS. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or trying to predict everything, I decided to use what I have right in front of me: my steamdeck! I figured playing around on SteamOS in desktop mode is a great way to acclimate myself to Linux a little bit and figure out what I really like and such.
What are some essential programs and QOL things you would recommend? I am interested in trying to host my Plex server off of it, maybe even fiddle around with video editing since that’s what I do professionally (resolve runs on Linux so not worried there), maybe some audio tools. I just want to kind of see what it would look like as a daily driver, though I am very aware that Steam OS has limitations as one.
I’m coming from Mac and I am pretty comfortable doing terminal commands, troubleshooting tech issues, and I’m pretty privacy concerned. Hence why I’m trying to migrate a little bit away for macOS potentially haha. Any and all suggestions are welcome! Even just good website or resources for learning more would be very welcome.
As someone who needs to do initial installs on computers with 10-20, I celebrated. It is much easier to type names of the programs and the manager do anything instead of manually downloading installers. But turned out WinGet is really badly done.
As for preferences, for some this is actually Nintendo vs Sega unfortunetly. But don’t underestimate moral decitions too.
Sysadmins very commonly make a lot of use out of automating things with Powershell and various utilities that work with it.
Given that a pretty decent sized portion (I’d assume at least, no numbers to back that up sadly) of the Linux user base tends to be “cut from the same cloth” in terms of having the passion to automate (and heavily customize) their system - I would think this is why you see this sentiment repeated often.
Maybe I can just post here and get a good explanation?
I have been using PopOS for a while now and I am super happy with it, but last time it tried to switch from Gnome to KDE I ended up with a black screen after boot and had to reinstall from scratch.
Does anyone have a good writeup on how to do it properly?
Just install KDE (package name is probably something like kde-desktop) and reboot.
Next login there’s a button bottom right for changing the DE. you don’t need to uninstall gnome desktop.
What probably happened, is that you uninstalled your display manager when uninstalling gnome. This causes you to end up in tty when starting PC when there’s no app configured for the login window
I already saw many issues with PopOS, I think they aren’t really that good at Linux and that’s why it’s messed up, you probably uninstalled most of xorg tools. Try Linux Mint, is more stable and serious.
think it more comes down to all the layers they’re having to deal with: (soon: Cosmic DE) on top of Gnome changes on top of Pop!_OS changes on top of Ubuntu changes on top of Debian changes on top of System76 hardware …
working from home has loosened ms grip on corporate desktop counts. some brilliant bean counter will save them a ton of money after they write off the downtown office space and offer everyone the cost of a micrsoft seat license. I’d guess it’s around $100/seat but I’ve been out many years. The shitty companies will just pocket the savings.
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