f00f/eris

I’m not a classic Linuxer (I switched in 2015) but I did once try Mandrake out of historical curiosity. From what I hear it was the recommended “beginner-friendly” distro before Ubuntu came out. And based on how hard it was to get working on a VM, I now understand why classic Linuxers talk about Ubuntu like it was this huge sea change.

I’d say they all offer different types of customization. It’s less a matter of how much you can do, and more a matter of what you want to do and how much time you’re willing to spend working on it. KDE is for people who want to customize their desktop, and want it to be easy to do so. GNOME is for people who just want something that works, but it still offers a lot of customization, it’s just not as well-supported (their philosophy is “if theming breaks an app, it’s not our fault”).

KDE doesn’t support full CSS customization on its own, but there are theming engines like Kvantum and QtCurve that address the limitations that arise from this. I’d say it’s on almost equal footing with GNOME in that regard, since both GTK4+libadwaita and Qt6+KF6 are designed for color scheme customization, but require various workarounds and obscure settings for anything more than that. If anything the workarounds are easier in KDE.

Similarly, KDE supports layout customization through widgets and graphical menus. GNOME also supports layout customization, but through extensions instead.

And then you can do all of the above and more if you use a window manager, or an LXDE/LXQt-style desktop that lets you disable or replace all its components in settings - just mix and match components like panels, file managers, display managers, polkit agents, etc. You can basically build your own DE that way, and it doesn’t get much more customizable than that. But maybe you don’t want to spend your time choosing every component of your custom DE. That’s what something like KDE is for.

Niccolo Ve did a pretty comprehensive summary of all his problems recently: https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=mhqeuO9RKKk

He’s been on a right-wing, transphobic, anti-woke downward spiral for years now.

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I’m not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.

This is nice but there are already tons of “how/why to start using Linux” websites. Not sure if we need another one.

Whenever you install or remove software, be sure to read through what’s being removed. You don’t want to accidentally uninstall something important. This is very unlikely to happen with official Debian packages, but you should be especially careful when installing packages outside of Debian’s repo, as they may not be fully compatible with your version of Debian.

In any case, I’d log in to a tty (ctrl-alt-any function key) and install whichever desktop environment you had before using apt.

Are all of the remaining LXDE programs going to be using XWayland? Or have they been ported by now?

oh it is still being updated! great.

I’m aware of FreeTube and PlasmaTube, which IIRC both require an Invidious instance. There was something called SMTube in the past, not sure if it still exists.

Nothing I’m aware of has both desktop and mobile version, but if anything there are more options for mobile YouTube clients; try NewPipe or Clipious.

Edit: SMTube does still exist. It does not require Invidious, but it does use tonvid.com.

Revolt is the most Discord-like FOSS chat app; it’s very easy to use and customizable. Rocket.chat and Mattermost do similar things and are more oriented toward organizations (the Slack/Teams Classic use case).

What makes this extra confusing to me, is that this doesn’t seem to happen to the same extent for Invidious instances. I’ve only needed to swap between two instances on Clipious, whereas on LibreTube I was hopping across their entire instance list and sometimes not finding even one working instance.

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Yes and no. X11 is the old window system for Linux (and most Unixes), but it was very much not designed with security in mind, and has become difficult to maintain to the point that the only new updates made to it are to help with Wayland backwards-compatibility. Wayland is its de facto successor, and most new Linux desktop development is based on Wayland rather than X11.

You’re basically describing the Linux Standard Base, which was abandoned back in 2015 and the way it was handled was somewhat controversial.

But there is a lot of informal standardization between Linuxes, nonetheless.

I don’t think “one unified distro”, or even an “official distro”, is possible without taking critical parts of Linux private and closed-source. As long as the freedom exists people will make their own “versions” of (GNU/)Linux.

Ah okay, that makes more sense.

It sounded like OP wanted to install Proxmox on their main PC, which would imply using it as a daily driver desktop OS, which it isn’t.

Isn’t Proxmox intended for servers whose only use is to run VMs? Why not go for a traditional desktop distro like Mint and run KVM, QEMU, or VirtualBox on it?

Anyway, I have heard something like this, but it probably depends on the anti-cheat. Some might run in kernel mode to deliberately detect VMs. Others won’t care if you use a VM.

I’ve never used AMD, but folks I know have had good experiences with both; support is about equal. You probably don’t need to go for a top-tier device, and if you’re running VMs and containers you should be just as concerned about RAM and disk space as CPU

Well, Linux is 32 years old; GNU goes back to 1984, and Unix all the way back to 1970! The history of this OS is much older than Linus Torvalds’s involvement; he “only” created and maintains the most popular kernel.

But yes, happy birthday to Linux. Many thousands have contributed to making this operating system what it is today and they all have my utmost thanks for it.