Lettuceeatlettuce

Lettuceeatlettuce, 8 months ago

I’ve owned a Thinkpad A485 with touchscreen for years and had several Linux distros on it including Manjaro and Linux Mint which I am currently using.

Never had any issues, touchscreen always works out of the box without me having to do anything extra. In fact, with a few distros, I’ve had issues with certain wireless mice, but my touchscreen always has worked. So I’ve actually had slightly better luck with the laptop touchscreen than some external mice lol.

Now a qualifier: I rarely use the touchscreen, and when I do, it’s always just to click something or scroll on an article or file list. I don’t do any special gestures or fancy touch functions, so I can’t speak to support from that perspective.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Planning on testing for bugs, I’m super excited for this release!

Hopefully it will fix the few remaining Wayland bugs I’ve been experiencing and I can move 100% onto Wayland when Nobara upgrades to plasma 6.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago (edited 25 days ago)

Several good answers here. Both Gnome and Plasma are customizable enough you should be able to have a Gnome-y Plasma or a Plasma-y Gnome.

Echoing what has been said already: They both are built on totally different tech stacks with very different philosophies. Gnome is more simplified, a little more “MacOS-like” Plasma is more Windows-like (by default) and is designed to be deeply customized and modular.

You should play around with Gnome and Plasma plugins and themes, that might help make things better for your usage. Or check out other DEs like Cinnamon or Cosmic.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

I need to play around with Silverblue and other immutable distros. Been considering them for a family member that is interested in switching to Linux.

Glad it’s been good to you so far!

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

From what I’ve heard, it’s more common in Europe and parts of Asia. I’ve personally never seen significant Linux use of any kind in the IT environments I work in, sadly.

It’s all Microsoft product stacks, the servers, the endpoints, the cloud environment, all MS. Sometimes their Hypervisor would be VMWare, and their NAS was a Synology. But other than that, basically all Microsoft garbage.

I did work at one place that had a fair bit of Linux infrastructure. The lead network architect was a hardcore Linux/FOSS grognard. Really smart guy and was fantastic at his job, I learned a lot from him. But the only reason that company had Linux servers and a few FOSS implementations was because that guy insisted on it and managed all of it himself.

I also worked at another place where one of the older IT guys had installed a handful of SUSE thin clients at various locations for employees to clock in with. But right after I started there, management wanted me to switch them out for Windows thin clients. I pushed back but they insisted, so there went the tiny bit of Linux at that company.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Time to buy some more of those little Tux keyboard superkey stickers :)

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Lol once you taste the forbidden fruit of media freedom, everything else tastes sour.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Thanks for a great motivational speech, I already was against all corpo streaming services, but now I’m going turbo-mode on building a new Jellyfin server with all my media to stream whenever I want :)

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

My experience with Proton has been really great so far. Constant steady improvements to their services and UI/UX, I wish I had switched to them sooner.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Arch was great for teaching me about Linux. It was rough, I completely borked my system about 3-4 times in the course of about 10 months lol. But it taught me valuable lessons on how to fix a destroyed system, how to use Timeshift to rollback changes, how to patch drivers and specific system packages, etc.

Ultimately, it was the constant fiddling that got me to go away from Arch and towards Nobara for my main gaming PC. I just wanted an OS that was stable, had great gaming performance, and didn’t require me to install a bunch of obscure packages and tools like Arch needed to get certain things to work.

Nobara has been fantastic so far and is probably my go-to distro recommendation for folks who plan on gaming hard on Linux, their pre-included kernel patches and utilities like Protonup-QT are awesome for gamers.

I installed LMDE on my work IT laptop recently and overall I like it. Have had a few annoying bugs because of Debian’s old packages, but everything is ironed out now and it’s great. Something stable and basic that gets out of the way for me to do my job.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

When I first deployed Nextcloud, it was just like this. Random crashes, lockups, weird user signin issues, slow and clunky.

But one day it just started working and was super stable. I didn’t do anything, still not sure what fixed it lol.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

I just scream-laughed at this! xD

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Haha totally!

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Subbed!

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

For first time plug-n-play distros, I either go with Linux Mint or Fedora, for me they have the best results for just working.

And make sure when installing them, you always check to use proprietary drivers and codecs if it’s an option, that will save you a bunch of trouble down the line.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

So happy it’s back!

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Great resource, I’ll check them out.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Yeah, seems like there isn’t a big group of folks that are looking for this kind of solution.

I’ve thought about designing a case to my specs that could be 3D printed or maybe be built with some very basic steel sheet, but that’s more DIY than I have time for right now.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

I’ll check them, Ty!

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Interesting design, I’ll look at it, thanks!

Lettuceeatlettuce, 8 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Thanks for the link!

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

I can’t remember the exact name for the themes I used, but if your go into the Linux Mint theming section and search “Windows” you will get several results.

I don’t know if there is a Windows 7 theme specifically, you would have to look for that yourself. I also did little things like allign and resize their desktop icons the same way their Windows desktop looked. I changed the default folder colors to a tan-ish color to look similar to the Windows folder colors. My mom could tell it looked different, but it was close enough.

Making their app icons look the same and be in the same rough location as their Windows machine is probably the most important. My Mom loves the Spotify desktop app, so I made sure to install it from the software center and pin the icon into the taskbar right where she was used to seeing it.

Make sure their browser home page is set the same too, and any bookmarks they have.

Also, guide them through the new install. Have them click through all the typical tasks they do. I had my mom sit with me and showed her how Spotify opened up and looked exactly the same as it did on her Windows install. We played some music and I showed her how to adjust the little volume knob in the Mint toolbar. I had her print some documents, browse the web, look at pictures and videos she had saved on her drive, stuff like that.

That will make them feel much more comfortable with the change. There is a balance between trying to get everything to look identical, and helping your parents become comfortable with something new.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

Systemd isn’t “correct” what does that even mean? If you don’t agree with the standards and practices of the systemd project, that’s fine, but don’t act like there is some golden tablet of divine standards for system process management frameworks.

I wasn’t making an argument that systemd is perfect or that other frameworks like runit are inferrior. My argument was that I’ve been running a lot of Linux servers and desktop systems for years and I’ve never experienced the “huge stability problems and nightmare daemon management” that multiple systemd haters claim I will inevitably experience.

Maybe I’m incredibly lucky, maybe I’m not actually getting deep enough into the guts of Linux for it to matter, or maybe systemd isn’t the devil incarnate that some people make it out to be.

And also, free software is a thing. So I absolutely support and encourage alternatives like runit to exist. If you want your distros and servers to only use runit, that’s totally fine. If it makes you happy, or you have some super niche edge-case that makes systemd a bad solution, go for something else, you have my blessing, not that you need it.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.

Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I’m not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.

It’s not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.

Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.

At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.

Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.

Lettuceeatlettuce, 7 months ago

I run a bunch of Linux servers, multiple desktop instances, manage multiple IT clients, and took my first Linux certs working with Systemd management, all for years now.

But I’ll be sure to switch away from systemd when it becomes an issue…