I know that and you know that, but have you seen the sort of thing Trump and those who have his ear think is a good idea?

I don’t think they’d just ban using all open source software, it’d be something ridiculous like asserting that all FOSS licenses are null and void and those projects are now the intellectual property of the US. Likely propped up by the classic “security” justification.

I’m less worried about any specific targeting of Linux than I am about some random tech bro whispering in Trump’s ear and suddenly he bans Open Source or something similarly unenforceable and insane.

Except it also went up? Looks like only apple dropped.

NixOS is amazing, but it’s also got a crazy learning curve. Once you grok it though, it really changes the way you configure your computer.

Fedora is always my favorite big name distro, they’re constantly pushing the envelope and adopting new features that need some stability and exposure to mature.

Yeah the whole article including the headline – “terrifying”?? – is 98% slop. Depressing.

Uhh, switching terminals is nothing like distro-hopping, that’s a ridiculous analogy. You might need to configure the new terminal, but that’s it, and there’s no cost or conflict.

I love foot. The only caveat is that it’s only for Wayland (no X support).

While pretty much any distro can do this, I will warn you that it’s not the greatest idea. GNOME and KDE are both massive software suites and you’ll have a lot of redundant programs, e.g. two GUI file managers, and sometimes you’ll get unexpected behavior. There are also some look and feel issues that might crop up with apps getting style hints from two places. Again, it’s nothing super major, and it’s been a while since I’ve done this so maybe it’s improved, but any time I’ve tried I end up rolling back or reinstalling with only one big DE.

It’s much less of an issue to have one big DE and then potentially several other more modular window managers, as those have much less opinionated payloads. I’ve got sway and hypr installed alongside GNOME.

I’ve been enjoying Tauon, it does the things I want

Deluge is another good client – I’m not sure why but its defaults gave me much better download speeds than transmission or qbittorrent

No thanks

deleted by creator

Yeah I also found that decision to be really disappointing. Before you could just use Signal for all your messaging and it would smartly use its own protocol if you both had accounts. Now it’s relegated to dedicated Signal users, which yeah I’ve got like 4 contacts left.

Terminal -> foot Text editor -> neovim, or more recently I’ve been trying Helix.

Those are the biggest two. I also recommend mpv over VLC.

In FOSS, community & volunteer made software, yes, there is onus on you as the user to do a bare minimum of effort. You have to meet the developers and the software where it is.

I very literally said “GUIs are better but harder to implement.” The second half of that sentence is not trivial.

If you want to customize and tweak things in the guts of a program (like OP does for this discussion), you can actually do it with FOSS applications. But expecting developers to expose every configurable option with a GUI would massively slow down the pace of development. Making them available in config files is a nice compromise between doing all that work and not exposing the option at all, in which case you’d need to actually patch the executable or otherwise modify the source code.

I’m not discouraging people from working on GUIs. I’m just pointing out the fact that if an app doesn’t expose a setting you want to change, your options are a) complain that the dev hasn’t implemented that, b) change it yourself which would be hugely easier if you looked the documentation, or c) find another app. Saying “the onus isn’t on me” doesn’t work when you don’t pay for the software and the person who wrote it is a volunteer, it just makes you an entitled asshole.

Okay if finding the file is the problem I assume you’re just allergic to documentation, which, yeah, would make configuring things pretty annoying.

Hypothetically yes it would be great if all settings were easily discoverable and all users could easily make all their software work exactly how they want. In practice you’re asking for a huge amount of development by unpaid volunteers whose time could be (and is) going to, for example, the actual features or configuration options that you’re trying to set in the first place.

Most apps with GUIs do expose most settings that “laypeople” would use, anyway. OP is literally asking to be able to run custom scripts from context menus, I’d love to see your suggestion for implementing a clean and user-friendly GUI for that.

Well, sometimes it’s gonna be. What if there’s a field that can take an arbitrary string? You would rather input that string into a styled form input with some buttons to click than use a text editor for a second?

Editing a config file takes a few seconds. Implementing a GUI takes hours of unpaid labor, and depending on the case the UX in the end might be almost identical.

First of all, many games can very easily be built and packaged for Linux, devs just don’t target it as often because it’s a fraction of the market share.

But as for Windows-only games… It used to be because functions games were trying to access simply didn’t exist in Linux. Wine is a translation layer that could help with that, but it was both underfunded and had a general focus on all windows apps, not just games.

However these days, thanks in no small part to Valve bankrolling the Proton project – a gaming-specific branch of Wine that has also contributed plenty of improvements back to Wine itself – virtually any game you care to play will run on Linux. At this point, if a game doesn’t run, it’s because the publisher or developer is choosing to not let it run – likely because of specific anti-cheat software. In the case of Easy Anti-Cheat games like Fortnite and Apex Legends, EAC runs fine on Linux, but the devs chose explicitly to turn off Linux support.

Try Jellyfin!