You can use appimages, more importantly if you make a directory next to the appimage with the name of the appimage + .home the appimage will also set that as its $HOME that way you can also keep the configuration files of the app separated from the host OS.

You can also sandbox appimages with aisap.

It pulls the latest chromium from googleapis.com so it can do everything.

This is already done automatically.

AM puts the .desktop files in /usr/local/share/applications

AppMan puts them in ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}applications

They also get symlinked in PATH, that is you can launch yt-dlp by typing yt-dlp on the terminal as if you had installed it with your distro package manager.

I wonder, is there a tool that lets me script installs?

I’ll want to check if application exists, and if so, update, otherwise, install. That kind of thing.

https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM

Use AppMan to install them in HOME.

Check this out: https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM

Use appman and set the install directory to ~/Apps and now you will be able to install appimages/binaries in the ~/Apps dir using a package manager that keeps them up to date and that you can move to any other distro, I have all of this:

Although more recently for binaries I’ve been using this instead, which pulls from a massive repo of static binaries, though note that dbin needs its own separate directory in HOME to install binaries (you can’t use ~/Apps that is).

I’m pretty sure sbin originally meant static binaries and not system binaries lol

posix sh + awk for manipulating data?

Gimp 3 alpha is pretty crazy, as GTK2 was very nice and usable, but already with GTK3 everything got huge, so now the buttons dont fit as well anymore.

I reported that issue to gnome a while ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9907

Hopefully they will fix it one day because it means I wont be using gimp 3 otherwise.

Yeah I have the breeze cursor on my i3wm setup, it is the only cursor I like.

Try manjaro, and hear me out here:

Manjaro is actually the only distro that I would recommend to a beginner, actual beginner in this case is someone that should not be running a single terminal command to get their system to work (which is what people are expecting to do when they tell you to use Endevour or CachyOS lol)

WIth ubuntu/debian based distros you will either have to deal with installing flatpaks/snaps, which come with their own set of issues like not following the system theme, using the wrong system font, issues accesing the internet, issues accesing the home directory (yeah steam flatpak can’t be placed in the home directory lol).

You could try adding PPAs which is not something I would recommend a beginner to do.

Also some games like BeamNG hate having irqbalance, which usually comes by default on debian based distros.

On the other hand Manjaro already ships with pamac which is their GUI store that supports everything, including Aur packages which means 0 issues having to deal with broken permissions or theming if you want to install apps that are usually not found in the official repos.

Their own official repo even includes brave-browser and fastfetch, two apps that I use that are usually very hard to find in other distros.

Nautilus also has the default bookmarks for Videos, Documents, etc hard coded and the only way to change their location/remove them is by editing config files.

Koss KSC75, I’ve been using them for almost 10 years now.

Windows 11

There were no arch repo ddos, there were cases where the AUR went down because pamac was searching Aur packages as users were typing package names on it and turns out there were way too many users going into the Aur. It is actually quite sad how much disinformation there is about manjaro that even the manjarno snorlax repo recently corrected a bunch of critism it had about manjaro before being taken down lol.

Also Manjaro only ships pamac with KDE in both versions, no idea if gnome includes their store in their packages. Manjaro also includes already functional and useful versions of window managers like i3 that are already setup, if it wasn’t for it I would have never discovered how useful i3 is because setting i3 from the beginning is very difficult.

Manjaro usually ships two versions depending on the DE you choose, one is minimal which doesn’t even include flatpaks and the other is full which what sounds like you had.

Also you don’t have to be typing pacman -Syu if you use the GUI tools like pamac to update the system, and if you still want to use the terminal instead of type yay which does a pacman -Syu and also updates your aur packages.

Avoid Ubuntu and Manjaro: despite being marketed as “beginner friendly distros”, and despite often running perfectly fine, these two have major issues in management, packaging policies or philosophy that might make your life as a beginner difficult.

That makes no sense. Manjaro is actually one of the few distros where a beginner won’t need to touch the terminal ever. You won’t have to deal with adding PPAs or removing snaps like in several debian/ubuntu based distros.