If you’re not into tiling, install openbox and a panel of your choosing. You will quickly find that you don’t need a DE at all.

The maintenance is too high.

acquired knowledge spotted

I will let you on a little secret.

The best “support” you can get is support from upstreams directly (I’m involved in both sides of that equation). But upstreams will often only “support” you when you 1. run the latest stable version 2. the upstream source code wasn’t patched willy-nilly by the packager (your distro).

So the best desktop linux experience comes with using rolling distro that gives you such packages, with Arch being the most prominent example.

The acquired knowledge that argues stability and tells you otherwise is a meme.

Monthly Reminder: High or low, all Linux usage stats are fake.

Ask yourself:

• Where do these stats come from?
• What do they actually measure?
• How can the total number of all Desktop Linux users or devices be known to anyone?

​
The fact of the matter is, none of these stats actually measure the number of users. Most of them are just totally flawed guestimates based on what is often limited web analytics data collected by them.

In fact, not even the developers of a single distribution can guess the number of people/devices using/running that specific distribution. A distribution like Debian for example has mirrors, and mirrors to some mirrors, and maybe even mirrors to some mirrors to some mirrors. So if Debian developers can’t possibly know the number of Debian users, do you think OP’s site knows the total number of Desktop Linux users?

And let’s not get into the fact that the limited data they collect itself is not even reliable. View desktop site on your Android phone’s browser. Congratulations! Now you’re a desktop Linux user. No special user-agent spoofing add-on needed. You’re even running X11. Good choice not following the Wayland fad too soon.

High or low, all Linux usage stats are fake.

I appreciate the attempt at comedy. But I have no problem with Alpine (other than the snail oldmalloc performance). I even contributed a port fix or two.

The more interesting part that should have been read from my comment was that Chimera DOES NOT use GCC. Not to mention that it ships non-GNU coreutils that are usable by desktop users. While Alpine has it’s GNU coreutils package overriding busybox because that’s what most users would want. So that’s another GNU component any non-meme non-turbo-minimalist desktop user would be using on Alpine.

Alpine uses GCC at least.

OpenBoozy/OpenBooza
BundleGreen

The freeze-the-world “stable distro” concept is an outdated meme, especially when it comes to desktop usage.

In server usage, at least there is the idea of not breaking things by avoiding major version upgrades of used services/daemons. But even then, freezing the used services alone, while letting other system components have what may amount to thousands of fixes for some of them (and yes, a few bugs), is probably better, at least conceptually. But it’s admittedly not a well supported setup, unless you’re willing to basically maintain a distro yourself.

And no, the “stable” distro maintainer is not going to magically backport all the “important” changes, unless backport means applying an almost full diff from a later version of the source package.

(I actually mention this because I remember Debian doing this a long time ago with what I think was ffmpeg. lol.)

Many desktop users know this.
Upstream developers definitely know this, and occasionally write about it even.

(I was a Debian user many moons ago. That was before systemd came to existence, or PulseAudio became default in any distro. Went from stable to testing to sid. Testing was the worst, even stability wise. Sid was the best for desktop usage. Then a sid freeze came because a stable release cycle was near. Went to a rolling-release distro and never looked back.)

The Rust hype at least makes sense.

In technical context, yes. I’m a Rustacean myself.
In business/marketing context, …

It’s not you who needs it.
It’s for buzzword chasers and cost cutters.

Rust (=> fast and hip)
Shared (=> outsourced)
AI generated (=> robot devs)

Get it?

A reminder that the Servo project has resumed active development since the start of 2023, and is making good progress every month.

If you’re looking for a serious in-progress effort to create a new open, safe, performant, independent, and fully-featured web engine, that’s the one you should be keeping an eye on.

It won’t be easy trying to catch up to continuously evolving and changing web standards, but that’s the only effort with a chance.

Not to minimize their work, which is actually amazing!

you wouldn’t know because…

Still based on GNOME.

you don’t have a single clue about what they are actually doing.

What alternative would you suggest?

A, rolling release first, distro (e.g. Arch or Void) with no DE installed.
But you’re probably not ready for that.
For me, a terminal and Firefox are the only GUI apps really needed. mpv too if it counts.
But I’m someone who has been running Arch+AwesomeWM for ~15 years ago (been using Arch for even longer). So I probably can’t meaningfully put myself in new users’ shoes.

Is your browser Firefox?
What kind of storage devices do you have? NVMe?
Did you check with tools like iotop to see if something is going on IO wise?

You assumed that the problem is caused by the CPU being utilized at 100%.
This may not be the case.

A lot of us don’t run a DE at all. I myself use Awesome WM.
For non-tilers, Openbox with some toolbar would be the ideal setup.

I mention this because we (non-DE users) would have no experience with some funky stuff like a possible KDE indexer running in the background killing IO performance and thrashing buffered/cached memory.

Also, some of us run firefox with eatmydata because we hate fsync 🤨

Neither KDE nor Gnome is peak Desktop Linux experience.
Ubuntu and its flavors is not peak distro experience either.

If you want to try Desktop Linux for real, you will need to dip your toes a little bit deeper.

P.S. Since it wasn’t mentioned already, look up cgroups.

Back when I had a humble laptop (pre-Rust), using nice and co. didn’t help much. Custom schedulers come with their own stability and worst-case-scenario baggage. cgroups should give you supported and well-tested tunable kernel-level resource usage control.

This hasn’t been my experience when no swapping is involved (not a concern for me anymore with 32GiB physical RAM with 28GiB zram).

And I’ve been Rusting since v1.0, and Linuxing for even longer.

And my setup is boring (and stable), using Arch’s LTS kernel which is built with CONFIG_HZ=300. Long gone are the days of running linux-ck.

Although I do use craneleft backend now day to day, so compiles don’t take too long anyway.

DNS blockers became a thing in part because /etc/hosts can’t do stuff like glob subdomain blocking, no?

e.g.

*.bla.tld 127.0.0.1