Random Dent

I think one of the main hurdles for Linux is having to break habits and do things differently, and occasionally just accepting that there are some things you can’t do (like playing games that have certain anti-cheat things enabled etc.) As well as the occasional “well I could probably make this work eventually, but is it worth the effort?” kind of situation.

There’s nothing especially I miss from Windows, although I’ve been mostly Linux for 15+ years now so Windows is the other, weird OS to me these days lol

Yeah there is: https://lemmy.ml/c/unixporn

Bibata Modern Ice here!

Good. As a European person using Linux in Canada, I refuse to engage with any extra nonsense on my computer just because some American states are being idiotic. Even if it’s just one extra click, I’m not doing it just because California says I should. Get fucked

I’ve been using Vim for 20 years.

I only opened it once and I haven’t been able to close it yet

TBH this is one of my favourite things about Doctor Who. In an age where sci-fi shows tend to be very intricate about their lore and people go through trailers frame-by-frame to dissect the meaning of everything, Doctor Who is extremely insistent about not giving a flying fuck at all about almost anything to do with lore and canon. It’s pretty much: there’s the Doctor, and the TARDIS that looks like an old police box and there’s usually at least one human tagging along, and that’s it. Literally everything else can be thrown out of the window without any regard at all. The moon is an egg. Nobody can even agree on how many Doctors there are. David Tennant is probably at least three Doctors, kind of. We don’t even 100% know which actor currently plays the Doctor lol. It’s absolute chaos and I kind of love it

I think the problem then becomes, there’s usually another equally big nerd who has been beefing for the past 15 years with the nerd you hired about the interpretation of some minor aspect of the lore that wasn’t fully explained, and each of them have a legion of weird followers who will immediately declare war on you and start sending death threats the instant you show preference to one side over the other, even if you do it unwittingly.

I use a yubikey on my laptop, but I use it to make it even harder to log in. It’s set to challenge-response so you have to have the key in and enter a password to unlock LUKS. Bit overkill but it was more just to see if I could do it lol

It’s like magic too, because any new weird kind of package manager I add, it’s just picks it up and starts updating it. It can even update Windows apparently.

I use an unholy blend of paru, Flatpak, Docker and AppImage apps (no Snap!) with Topgrade to update it all.

I have a .scripts folder in home with a bunch of things. Most of them are for backups, aka they just rsync a bunch of things from different places into one place on my backup drive. I also have one called get_trailers that I can run in my Radarr folder which takes the names of any movie folders in there and uses yt-dlp to search and grab the trailers from Youtube and puts them in the correct folders alongside the movie.

As a side note to the general “try a bunch and see what you like” recommendations: you could also try using a virtual machine (something like Virtualbox) that lets you run a PC inside your existing PC first. That way you can try a bunch of distros without worrying about wiping your existing setup, and it’ll get you used to the install process. If you mess it up, just delete the VM and start a new one, no harm done. Then when you find one you like and feel comfortable with the install process, you can back all your stuff up and do it for real, knowing pretty much what to expect.

I feel like Ubuntu used to be the sort of default “new user” distro, but they keep going off on these weird tangents so that doesn’t really work anymore. Then it felt like PopOS might have been the new one, but now they’re mid-way between transitioning to COSMIC so that’s not really a good fit either. I think maybe Mint is the default one now, but also Cinnamon is kind of it’s own thing so it doesn’t set a new user up well for becoming familiar with the more universally used DE’s like Gnome or Plasma.

I think Fedora and Debian are also a decent fit for new users, but that’s also not a very exciting answer so that’s probably why it doesn’t come up as much lol.

I’m not sure if CachyOS counts as a “gaming” distro or not, but I use that on my desktop/work machine. I’m pretty familiar with Arch (BTW) and I can do a manual setup from scratch if I need to (that’s what my laptop runs) but Cachy just seemed like a way to use Arch with a simple setup and a bunch of default optimizations. So tl;dr laziness I guess lol.

As a European living in Canada, it’s quite annoying to think about having to do extra stuff (even if it is very minimal) because one state in America passes a stupid law.

But also not surprising at all TBH

Nice! I did mine as an alias:

alias yt='yt-dlp --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4"'

And then just yt [URL] downloads the thing.

Yeah same here, I’m a tinkerer so Plasma is perfect for me. No shade to anyone who uses GNOME or whatever else though, I like that we have options for everyone.

Yeah I do miss Latte Dock. I’ve managed to get my docks pretty much back to where I had them using Panel Colorizer though.

For me it’s pretty important because I want my computer to feel good to use, so I’ll spend quite a lot of time making sure everything’s set up the way I like it. In terms of GNOME vs KDE, I’m definitely a KDE person. Not that I hate GNOME or think there’s anything wrong with other people using it, I just don’t get along with it personally. For me it feels like there’s too much stuff in GNOME that should be part of the core DE that relies on extensions, which tend to break with updates so there’s always something that’s not quite working.