I’m especially talking about smaller utility programs, like a USB stick formatter. If Gnome even has one of their own, it’ll be an empty window with a single button in the top bar that says “Format Drive.” There will be no choice or indication as to the name, the format, or perhaps even which drive to format. Turns out it will always do the removable drive that was mounted first chronologically. What the pity fuck do you mean you want to format a USB drive while your external backup HDD is attached? Who could ever want to do that? Oh and it’ll be carefully designed to be unusable if you use any theme but light Adwaita. If you want to do something specific, open the terminal and use dd.

KDE’s USB stick formatter will include several different wiping algorithms, you can key in a custom string to fill the empty drive space with with unicode support, settings for physical disks and solid state memory, the weird features of SD cards, it’ll support formats only used by Sun Solaris and OS/2, you can specify a maximum write speed, and it’s got a full set of drive encryption tools built in. All of this is perfectly themeable, but the UI elements are crammed a little too dense and not quite lined up right so it has a little bit of amateurish Windows 98 jank to it.

Cinnamon’s USB stick formatter will be somewhere in the middle. It lets you choose which drive to format, what name to call it, which of about 8 formats to put on it, whether to do a “full wipe”, and that’s about it. Made in GTK for Cinnamon’s design language, it looks straightforward but competent, like it’s from Windows 7. Does what almost all users need, almost all of the time, without getting in the way. The only snag I can think of is likely the Cinnamon menu’s fault: They provide a USB Stick Formatter, and a USB Image Writer. And it will switch places in the order it presents so you can’t memorize “for the formatter, type “USB” and hit enter, for the writer, type “USB” press down and enter.” They use the same icon so you have to stop and process the written language to get the app you want.

Is there any part of Gnome that isn’t “minimal and not distracting?” In my experience, the ideal Gnome applet is a blank window with no features, only a burger menu that only has the About info and a button that says “Do Nothing” in the top bar.

I don’t know, I played with it years ago, didn’t need it and haven’t really touched it until now.

I use Syncthing for several things, especially syncing photos between my phone and desktop.

dammit I like Syncthing. does kdeconnect do a decent job at syncing files?

To quote Brian Lunduke, because the GPL is viral and functioning systems licensed under the GPL have been published, if a future Rust-based MIT version of Linux ever comes out, we can just “Fork it, then we’ll have our own Linux.”

I don’t think there are any negative connotations to the original Steam Machine. They weren’t successful, but in a way that was okay. They weren’t widely sold, and what most of the gaming public got out of the Steam Machine project was the Steam Controller, Big Picture Mode, and the Proton compatibility layer. Most Windows gamers didn’t notice, it was a major boon to Linux gamers, and then they came out with the Steam Deck which has been a genuine success.

Mind you that’s only Bazzite, Zorin has been making large gains as well.

I’m a long-time Mint guy, my current desktop is Fedora KDE because Wayland, and I’m looking at Bazzite for my old computer/HTPC but it doesn’t support my old GTX-1080 GPU, I might get a low-tier Radeon for it (I don’t want to buy an Intel card and fuck Nvidia’s butt, that GTX-1080 was literally the only GPU available to me in 2020).

A lot of folks recommending Mint Cinnamon. I agree, that’s a great choice, one of my favorites. If for some reason there are technical problems, you might also try something with KDE, like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE. Also windows-like, even more mainstream than Cinnamon, faster to adopt new shit like Wayland.

My first contact with Linux was via amateur radio. I didn’t want to hook my radio up to my main PC in case I wired something wrong, so I got one of those newfangled Raspberry Pis, circa 2013. Raspbian Wheezy was my first distro.

Not long after, my old laptop died and I needed a new one. Bought a Dell, it came with WIndows 8.1. Holy shit what an unusable pile. I hated that OS a lot. And then the laptop outright died. I was going back to school, I needed a PC to do school work on, and I’ve had flesh wounds I was satisfied with more than Dell’s warranty support. It took them pretty much an entire semester of “We’ll fix it in three weeks or so, when the one guy who does field repairs in your state will look at it”, “it’s fixed” it breaks almost instantly, before I finally demanded they replace the entire machine. Which they did, with a different, lesser, model. I am no longer a customer of Dell.

This left me doing all of my school work on a Raspberry Pi 1B, and then a Pi 2, for about 3 months. So I got a bit of a crash course in managing a Linux system.

Once I finally got a working laptop, Windows 8.1 felt more alien to me than Linux Mint did. It would actually have been more work to learn Windows 8.1 than Mint Cinnamon. So I became a full time Linux user.

MATE is the first of four “Screw that we’re forking GNOME” distros.

I’ve got a Lenovo tablet with an Intel Pentium processor that runs Fedora okay. Everything works, but especially remembering/detecting orientation with the keyboard attached is about as polished as stucco.

Apparently the hardware defaults to a portrait layout; it’s a 1080x1920 monitor, not a common 1920x1080, and by god and all his rapey little clergy if it CAN wake up in portrait mode, it will. Waking the thing up means turning it on, ripping it in half, waiting 3 seconds for the monitor to rotate back to the way it was when you put it to sleep, and then clicking the keyboard back on.

I cannot report anything of the sort out of a GTX-1080. Using Linux Mint, X11 and the proprietary drivers handled by Mint’s driver manager, I got reliable service in video editing, CAD and gaming. I will note, my main computer is now a Radeon system running Wayland.

It is fairly easy to upgrade between minor and even major versions of Linux Mint. I did it continuously from 17 to 20.3 on my Dell laptop.

Also, the changes especially between minor versions tend to be fairly minor. Mint follows Ubuntu’s LTS strategy, they’ll support a version with security updates for 5 years. Don’t succumb to FOMO.

I gamed on Linux with a 1080 for a few years there and it was alright, I have gone AMD though just so I don’t have to bother.

Bazzite’s growth is not because it is immutable, Bazzite’s growth is because it offers gamers a straightforward onboarding process.

I will hypothesize why:

Bazzite is the Trendy Distro Of The Month, like Peppermint or Endeavor or Nobara or a frillion others. CachyOS is apparently next. Nearly constantly, you’ll hear about some trendy new distro which is a fork of Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch that has a feature or two targeted at newcomers or gamers, and for awhile it gets heavily recommended on Reddit or Lemmy, then you stop hearing about it forever as the rest of the ecosystem adopts that feature or fixes the thing that feature was meant to be worked around, and then the cycle repeats.

Bazzite is targeted toward gamers, it emphasizes a solid onboarding experience with a configurator to choose/build your install media based on what you want to do with it, do you want a handheld or home theater experience or a keyboard and mouse desktop? Do you want it to boot to SteamOS or to a DE? Which DE? What hardware do you have? So their gimmick is to steer users through the initital config and setup process. Which as gimmicks go, that one is pretty solid.

MEANWHILE

Fedora’s Atomic editions have no gimmicks at all. You have to independently learn that immutable distros exist, independently decide you want that, and then go hunting on their website through their godforsaken marketing wank to find it.

Fedora likes their bullshit branding. You go to their website, and there are big buttons for Fedora Workstation right next to Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. “Workstation” does not mention that it’s just the Gnome version. You have to stroll further down, past server, IoT and “Core” versions, to a section that looks visually different labeled “More Fedora Options” including Atomic and Spins. You’re a new Linux user, you’ve just used the OS that came with your computer your whole life, explain to me what the difference between Core and Atomic is and why you should choose one over the other?

The Atomic versions, which is kind of a synonym for “immutable”, you click on that, and you’re presented with five options: Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sway Atomic, Fedora Budgie Atomic, and Fedora Cosmic Atomic Nowhere in its name or description does Silverblue mention that it’s the Gnome desktop one. Kinoite starts with a K and also mentions in the description it’s the KDE atomic version. Also, “kinoite” is a godawful word, they should have gone with Kyanite instead, which is a different blue crystal. Or they should have just called it KDE Atomic or Plasma Atomic. The others just put the DE’s name in the title LIKE A NORMAL PERSON, ROWAN.

Arch Linux’s whole claim to fame is Some Assembly Required. Go with something like Mint or Fedora (the latter of which is available with the KDE desktop, source: am typing this on a gaming computer running Fedora KDE) and they’re much more complete out of the box.

now thats just ignorance.

Explain the permanent state of GIMP’s UI without deliberate sabotage.

does the average Korean citizen have a PC of their own?