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’s not a “shitty title”, because Ubuntu Linux is the thing they actually tested.
Whether Debian or Fedora or Alpine or Void or whatever would do better or worse is not a given, and isn’t something the OP can comment on because they didn’t test it.
We can probably infer that gains of a similar amount would be seen on most mainstream distros (as they’re all pretty similar under the covers), but that’s not on the OP.
In particular, Ubuntu ships with various non-free drivers and kernel patches that will be present in some, but not all other distros.
ChromeOS is Linux, and it has pretty decent penetration.
And I know what you’re going to say: “But ChromeOS isn’t proper Linux”. But it’s a desktop OS based on Gentoo, built on the Linux kernel and, GNU coreutils and bash (although not GCC, as far as anyone can tell). It certainly has all the hallmarks of being GNU/Linux (or something very close to it).
The fact that it doesn’t really resemble any “mainstream” Linux distro is kind of the point. It’s a locked down corporate product with a minimalist front-end locked into a bunch of commercial web services, and that’s exactly the kind of device that sells volumes.
Mainstream Linux is a tough sell. It was a tough sell 15 years ago when PCs were still the king of personal computing. In the post-smartphone, post-iPad world which we’re in now, we have to accept that that’s never going to be the device your grandma uses to check her email.
Plenty of Linux distros aren’t just volunteer-based, and are instead made and supported by for-profit companies. Red Hat/Fedora is made by the big blue, IBM themselves; it doesn’t get much bigger than that. Ubuntu, SUSE, Manjaro, all for-profit commercial outfits. None of these are failures, it’s just that their products aren’t targeting the market for cheap commercial laptops. You can buy Ubuntu preloaded on a laptop from Dell or Lenovo, but they’re targeting IT professionals and data scientists and people who work with Linux servers. Or they’re targeting fleet deployments of 100s of devices in municipal organisations. There’s a good market there, it’s just a different market.
Birdtray sounds like what you’re looking for. It allows you to close Thunderbird to the system tray so that it runs in the background. Thunderbird already throws notifications to GNOME, and should continue to do so while running in the background in the way.
I’ve never understood why people run without swap. There’s basically no downside to having it. If you’re running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you’re on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you’re probably not in an “ample RAM” situation anyway.
Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?
I was referring to snapd, which is the thing that actually has the hard limit on a single repository. That’s fully open source (and there’s one major fork of it out in the wild, in the form of Ubuntu Touch’s click). The tooling for creating snap packages is also all open source.
The APIs which snapd uses to interact with its repo are also open source. While there’s no turnkey Snap Store code for cloning the existing website, it’s pretty trivial to slap those APIs on a bog standard file server if you just want to host a repo.
Not open-sourcing the website code is a dick move, but there’s nothing about the current set up that would act as an obstacle for anyone wanting to fork snap if that’s what they wanted to do. It’s just with flatpak existing, there’s not a lot of point in doing so right now.
It’s all open source so there’s no reason you couldn’t fork it and add that functionality. Although it’d probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn’t be a simple one-line change.
You can; the issue is that you can’t add two snap repositories at once.
This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it’s still important to make the distinction.
In theory I guess there’s nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody’s really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.
I’ve just googled Dell XPS M1530 and it seems like it shipped with a Core 2 Duo CPU, which is 64 bit.
For reference, the last mainstream 32 bit desktop processors were launched over 20 years ago. As a rule, if you’re trying to run a 32 bit machine in this day and age it is probably an antique, and running modern software on it would not be all that sensible even if you could.