I get your reasoning, a lot of “re-spins” are hidden away on many distros download pages, but saying something like “I don’t like Ubuntu because it uses Gnome” is like saying “I don’t like Fords because they come with radios”.
Regarding PopOS it probably is true because it probably all GUI specific things setup for new users, anything system level wouldn’t be changed.
No one ever said learning something completely new was gonna be quick and easy. Take it piece by piece and follow tutorials. Installing Arch Linux will give you a good idea how everything fits together instead of just “click, click, click, reboot” and it’s installed. You don’t learn anything that way.
I’ve considered giving it a go again since I have a 24 core Threadripper which could easily compile everything pretty quickly, I just never got around to it.
Heh, no problem, never too late to learn. If you’re coming from Windows or OS X it’s easy to think that the WM/DE is tied to the OS but due to the way Linux is written, the entire GUI stack is separate from the base system. I use SDDM as my login manager and in the upper left-hand corner there is a drop-down to choose the DE and Windowing System.
Heh, no problem, never too late to learn. If you’re coming from Windows or OS X it’s easy to think that the WM/DE is tied to the OS but due to the way Linux is written, the entire GUI stack is separate from the base system. You can have both the old school X Windowing system and the new Wayland installed at the same time, along with many different Desktop Environments and Window Managers. I use SDDM as my login manager and in the upper left-hand corner there is a drop-down to choose the DE and Windowing System.
Apparently there’s a lot of hate for the devs/packaging team, people say updates break their systems all the time. I’ve used it on and off for a while years ago, personally and have had no issues. I put it on my parent’s computer over two years ago and they haven’t had any issues either.
Swapping out KDE/Plasma for Gnome or anything else is dead simple most of the time. The DE isn’t locked to the distro, you can have multiple DEs and windowing systems (X and Wayland) installed at once. You can select them from your login manager.
Yeah, over the years they’ve all become largely the same except for package management and the locations of some config files and system binaries (/bin,/sbin,/usr/local/sbin, etc…). Some attempt to be a one size fits all model and contain everything that you’d want, while others give you the bare minimum.
Are you me? I just posted the same thing above. I attempted to get KDE working during my freshman year of college (2004-2005) on what was either a high end P4 or Athlon X2, it would spend 10-15 hours compiling X and then break, leaving me no clue what to do but I went from using Ubuntu for about 5 months to a stage 2 Gentoo installation. I never did get it working.
You are aware that you can have multiple DEs installed at once, right? Also many distros have multiple different choices for the default DE. I haven’t used it for probably over a decade, but I’m sure Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu, still exists.
Fedora annoys me (even though I’ve been using it for like 2.5 years on my work laptop) because a lot of packages that would be in extra in something like the Ubuntu (and it’s derivatives) or Arch (and it’s derivatives) is in a separate repository that you have to add.
I remember jumping from Ubuntu (my first distro) to a Gentoo stage 2 install in 2005. I was using it on my desktop so I needed a GUI. I was using either a high end P4 or an X2 Athlon. I attempted to compile KDE and all the deps. It would compile X for about 10-20 hours… and then the compilation would break with a seemingly obscure error message.
I tried a few times and never did get a GUI built.