Don’t worry; we’ll find an artist so bland that we’ll get zero points even if we’re the only participant. The audience will fall asleep and wake up a week later with no recollection of the event. The victory will be awarded to Sweden on principle.

I run Garuda because it’s a more convenient Arch with most relevant things preinstalled. I wanted a rolling release distro because in my experience traditional distros are stable until you have to do a version upgrade, at which point everything breaks and you’re better off just nuking the root partition and reinstalling from scratch. Rolling release distros have minor breakage all the time but don’t have those situations where you have to fix everything at the same time with a barely working emergency shell.

The AUR is kinda nice as well. It certainly beats having to manually configure/make obscure software myself.

For the desktop I use KDE. I like the traditional desktop approach and I like being able to customize my environment. Also, I disagree with just about every decision the Gnome team has made since GTK3 so sticking to Qt programs where possible suits me fine. I prefer Wayland over X11; it works perfectly fine for me and has shiny new features X11 will never have.

I also have to admit I’m happy with systemd as an init system. I do have hangups over the massive scope creep of the project but the init component is pleasant to work with.

Given that after a long spell of using almost exclusively Windows I came back to desktop Linux only after windows 11 was announced, I’m quite happy with how well everything works. Sure, it’s not without issues but neither is Windows (or macOS for that matter).

I also have Linux running on my home server but that’s just a fire-and-forget CoreNAS installation that I tell to self-update every couple months. It does what it has to with no hassle.

Given the usual quality of BIOS/UEFI option descriptions it’s remarkably close to being sensible. I would’ve expected something like “enables limiting CPUID maximum value”.

Yeah, the 13 feels a lot more solid. The 16 pays a certain price for its enhanced configurability. Honestly, though, a full-size touchpad module would go a long way to fixing that. The two spacers next to the keyboard look fine (if the keyboard is centered) but the touchpad spacers look less great.

I have a Framework 16. Is it as well-built, efficient, or quiet as a MacBook Pro? Nope. But if something breaks I can easily replace it, and I can upgrade it without having to throw everything away. Also, hot-swappable ports. That’s nice too.

It’s all about trade-offs in the end.

Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.

That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.

I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can’t easily facilitate that then it’s not quite RTM for my use case.

Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.

Mind you, the real winner is of course Android. It has a consistent, easy to learn interface and a wide range of applications that integrate nicely.

And we don’t need to speculate; it has already won and is the true face of Linux for the masses. Plenty of young people don’t even own traditional computers anymore and do everything on their smartphone or tablets.

And that’s why this entire discussion is really just a form of fan wank; we don’t need to find a unified UI for Linux because it has already been found and has a massive market share. You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.

Everything else can be as complicated, janky, or exotic as it wants because it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, if you want one simple DE for everyone it should probably be XFCE. Dead simple to use, feels vaguely familiar to Windows users, not overly complicated.

KDE is heavily customizable, Gnome is very opinionated, and tiling WMs don’t adhere to orthodox UI patterns. Those are all suboptimal if you want something usable by the absolute widest range of users.

That’s why I dropped them when my mid-2013 MBP got a bit long in the tooth. Mac OS X, I mean OS X, I mean macOS is a nice enough OS but it’s not worth the extortionate prices for hardware that’s locked down even by ultralight laptop standards. Not even the impressive energy efficiency can save the value proposition for me.

Sometimes I wish Apple hadn’t turned all of their notebook lines into MacBook Air variants. The unibody MBP line was amazing.