adarza

i almost went with aurora here. in fact it’s still on the other pc i was also testing on, sitting on a shelf unused the last several months. but after trying out pretty much everything i could get my hands on… i ended up back ‘home’, on debian. where i started ~ 30 years ago.

solus os (independent ‘semi rolling’) and ultramarine (fedora based) were two other non-debian based ones on my short list. i already have a manjaro desktop so it wasn’t on my list at all… i already knew i didn’t want it on this box.

alma and rocky are the new ‘clones’ of rhel that were spawned from the death of centos when redhat radically changed its mission in ~ 2020-21. they have most the pros and cons of running rhel itself.

it used to be that… the ‘new’ one is debian trixie-based. runs plasma but there’s also a ‘lite’ spin that uses lxqt

absolutely. my 30+ years experience says work and personal should be separate devices with no exceptions. and the ‘work’ one should be what they want on it, how they want it. if you then get malware, it’s on them–not you. if you want something different, ask and get permission first.

it would compress well for an archival backup, so that’s what i’d do for the ‘originals’.

if your long message chains look anything like mine, there’s far more quoted material overall than new text in most mails; and not all new text would be relevant to whatever is being saved… so it’d be quicker to do it the other way–copy and paste what you did want to new documents instead of trying to clean up these long compilations by deleting what you don’t.

the keycode is laser-etched onto one of the nails holding it together.

yup. works very well. been using it whenever an image fails to boot properly on my multiboot usb…

i pieced together a comparable 2tb on pcpartpicker, using the cheapest reputable choices and vendors. it was about $200-250 less for the pc (without an os) in a standard matx tower form factor.

an image viewer with the feature set and workflow of irfanview on windows.

you’re on the right track, i think, but not bazzite–that carries a lot of extra stuff that isn’t necessary here. just ordinary fedora silverblue. clean up the app grid or put dash-to-dock on it and put the few launchers they need down on that. gnome is actually a good desktop for basic users that just need to run one or a few applications. updates are somewhat frequent but should be almost entirely automatic.

i have a few users like your parents on endless os, which is similar to silverblue, just based on an in-house immutable debian instead of silverblue’s fedora base. i rarely ever hear from them, it ‘just works’. i also have it at home, it’s currently my only linux desktop there (i do most my ‘work’ at the office, home is just doom-scrolling and media for the most part these days). updates are less frequent but endless is switching to a gnome os base with the next major version. that will probably increase the frequency of updates a bit compared to their older debian base. that upgrade to v7 should be mostly invisible to the user, they’ve done a good job in the past with upgrades.

many were there first, long before microsoft bought the site. but now? yea. why tf are people still using it.

like we’re seeing with Android’s “Desktop mode”.

apple is already in on this game, as well.

every day i use windows less than the day before. i still ‘need’ it for some things, including work, but on a personal level it’s almost entirely linux lately… but it’s been a three decade journey.

afaik windows has no native capability to control brightness setting on external displays. an optional driver for the display may be available via windows update which might allow a third-party utility to control the setting directly.

from what i know about ‘gname’ is that they’re popular with scammers and other bad actors. i would steer clear of them, even if they are ‘free’.

immutable distributions use flatpaks as their source for desktop applications, it is what they recommend you use.

most (endless os does not) support layering, but they also advise against it unless you have to. even bazzite says to do and try literally every other option, even running a windows binary under emulation, before layering packages. they know their shit better than i do, so i’m not gonna layer a ton of packages and depends for dozens of applications just so i can use a clipboard or drag stuff between any them.

nor do i want added complexity of screwing around with toolbx containers. for one program to try or to run temporarily for a one-off task or very specific thing you don’t want your system cluttered with? sure. i’ve got a couple things set up right now using toolbx. for 30+ desktop applications, some of which are large or pull in a bunch of depends? hell no. it’s not the right tool.

i also do not need or want yet another package manager and binary repos in brew, and brew doesn’t have that much i’d be looking at anyway.

appimages are not really the answer either, not everything has one, some are built upon fuse v2 (no longer supported), and some are third-party builds you might not want to trust.

so, that leaves flatpaks as ‘the’ source for desktop applications–unless you are fond of terminal screens and hoop-jumping, needless added complexity, or want to go against the strong recommendations of the folks that literally make your immutable rpm-ostree based distribution.

the term ‘clipboard’ is not present anywhere in flatpak, bazzite, or fedora atomic documentation.

tl;dr: author got tripped-up over fedora’s flatpak repo and having to click once to enable flathub in kinoite.

but Bazzite is also another one that is actually specifically focused on gaming.

its sibling, aurora kde, is the one i nearly went with. in fact i still have it sitting on this pc’s twin (have two identical ones, bought before the market went to shit). the flatpak-only environment was giving me constant headaches. i ended up on debian, and it’s been an absolute dream. it’s great to be back ‘home’, i haven’t had a pure debian desktop in years.

fedora’s immutables are nice. just ‘not for me’ (right now). i’ll still suggest and install them for others, though, because for basic tasks and newcomers it’s a solid and hard-to-break choice.

that would be the fault of amazon’s genius idea of mixing inventory from multiple sellers and suppliers together.

we’ve been through similar bullshit here. we just cut out those companies and never again do we buy from them, for ourselves or our clients.