As I mentioned in another comment, it’s still a commercial offering, that happens to have a free tier. Would we be okay with a YouTube link in the same spot?
Honestly, it doesn’t bother me that much. It’s more that you can see a more and more corporate-y trend in Canonical’s decision making, which I personally don’t really care for. If I used Ubuntu with the default shell I’d probably just override the MOTD and go on with my life.
This. Any unsollicited communication that’s meant to make you investigate or buy a commercial product is an advertisement. That’s all. Is it less intrusive than the TikTok ad in Windows start menu, I think it may be, but it’s still an advertisement, by definition.
The main differences between distros boil down to:
init system
default configurations and applications
release cycle
package manager
Most end users don’t mess around too much with their init system and software configuration. With the rise of mainstream distros and application developers opting to ship desktop applications as snaps/flatpak/appimages, the last two points have less importance than ever.
IMHO, considering this, most of the discussions surrounding distros is relatively silly. After using Linux for almost 20 years at this point, I think I can safely say I could be productive on most popular distributions, with minor adjustments to my workflow.
For a new user? Just pick one of the main distros, that supports the software you need, and roll with it for a while. It won’t make much of a difference. Distro hopping doesn’t make one learn much outside using a different package manager.
Iosevka is so great. Not everyone likes the narrow look. I’ve tried other fonts a couple of times since I stumbled on it a good handfuls of years ago, but I always come back.
And it works fine with multiple monitors at different scaling ratios, or does it scale them all the same? That’s the actual part that didn’t work correctly for me, back then.
Whatever works for you haha. Admittedly, I’m the kind of guy that’s running a 34" ultra wide + two 22" monitors on top, and is looking at replacing them with a single 42-43" 4k monitor right now just to have the equivalent of a bezelless 2x2 grid of 21" monitors lol. And they’re all budget/business monitors. So I may not be a reference on display quality… I’m obsessed with having tons of things on screen at once. The ADHD object permanence issues (“out of sight, out of mind” is my default state) might have something to do with it…
I’ll have to check it out again then, if display scaling got better since.
I’m curious. What do you prefer, some larger res with resolution scaling? How’s the scaling situation on DEs/WMs nowadays? Last I tried it, it was pretty abysmal. Admittedly it was years ago, but it used to be that mixed scaling wasn’t possible, so if my laptop was higher DPI and needed scaling, I’d need to run any external monitor with display scaling as well. I’ve avoided high DPI/display scaling on purpose for a while at this point because of it, and tend to prioritize usable pixel real estate.