@itsfoss
Fortunately we'll always have a choice. Even if gnome and kde both implement AI in their main design, environments like xfce, lxqt and especially window managers will not. Personally, I'd rather that AI stays out of Linux unless it's a part of an optional feature for some app. I just don't see the benefit of integrating it in the core desktop experience.
Hi all, I’ve been searching the web for a long while now and I can’t find anything. Maybe it’s just my rusty English (second language of course). I have an app called “dynamic wallpapers” that creates two wallpapers into one where one is light and the other is dark. The light one is automatically selected by my system...
Not sure what format they are in but recently ditched windows for Linux/kde and noticed KDE has some semblance of desktop wallpaper switching. I haven’t tried it out yet but maybe this helps out somehow.
Windows 10 EoL is fast approaching, so I thought I’d give Linux a try on some equipment that won’t be able to upgrade to Windows 11. I wanted to see if I will be able to recommend an option to anyone that asks me what they should do with their old PC....
I am trying to transition to Linux but there are a bunch of hurdles.
For example I installed fedora KDE spin in dual boot on my desktop. Then I installed steam as a flatpak and pointed it to my already installed game. Didn’t work because of some permissions I didn’t understand how to configure with flatseal.
Alright then noted I need to learn that shit but now I want to play a game so I uninstalled the steam flatpak and installed the steam package from the fedora repo. Checked the boxes in the packagemanager-gui (discovery) for nonfree steam and nonfree nvidia drivers, pointed to the library and it worked.
Great! Updated the games and downloaded the saves. So far so good. But after all that I had no time to play anymore because i had to look up a bunch of stuff to understand that I don’t understand enough to make it work the way I tried.
I took my laptop with me which also has fedora KDE on it. When I had a little time I thought “hey maybe I can play a bit of moonring. After all I now know how to get steam running”.
So I downloaded steam from the fedora repo, Logged in, downloaded moonring and… No save sync.
I go into settings and see that cloud save is enabled. Start a game maybe that triggers it? Nope.
It doesn’t even say that sync failed or something like that beside the start button.
Okay so off to the web search. But as that gets more fucked by the minute I just get some problem adjacent stuff.
Like: “how to install steam on fedora”. I already installed it, why isn’t the cloud working? “Maybe it is because the path for savefiles is casesensitive?”. Maybe but what am I supposed to do about it? And so on. So I closed my laptop with a bad taste in my mouth.
It is just frustrating to have to understand a bunch of shit you are not interested in just so that something works which worked before without a problem.
The world is just to complex and fast moving to understand everything and to retain everything. That’s why we are an expert society. “I invest my time to understand this stuff really good and you invest your time to understand this and in the end we exchange our labor”.
And that’s the “problem” with Linux, that you have invest time into it. And people mostly don’t have the time because they have lifes beside the PC.
Linux was hard when you had to install it from a box of floppies, download your software over a 9600 baud modem and get your documentation from a book. Back then, people that had computers knew a lot more than they do today. Most people today wouldn’t be able to get a computer running if it came with a blank hard drive and a windows installer DVD because all they know how to use is a web browser.
Most people would have no issues using a computer with Linux preinstalled, especially if it has KDE, which looks very similar to windows. Hell, some people probably wouldn’t know the difference as long as it had a Firefox and chrome shortcut on the desktop.
I’m sick of Windows, and especially what it’s become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I’ll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I’d like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I...
clean install: you make a backup, nuke the computer, install a fresh upgraded copy of the distro you want from a live usb, copy your data again to the computer....
I’ve got a desktop that got a dirty install of KDE Neon when the repositories first got put up (before there were isos). Been in-place upgrading it ever since.
My favourite DE has got to be Cinnamon, as much as I like KDE and XFCE, I prefer the simplicity of cinnamon where as in KDE has a bit too much of everything in the customization scene and XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right....
I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per “Dash2Dock Animated”, and the “Hide Top Bar” extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don’t understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it’s extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It’s better than MacOS for me.
Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they’ve thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best “Windows” could ever be, Cinnamon it is.
Third is XFce. It’s overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn’t turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn’t go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it’s lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.
I find the rest under-par. I don’t like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don’t. It’s not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It’s the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn’t blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).
MATE is nice but it’s just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.
LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.
Yeah, I am comfortable with most DE’s, I’m flexible but I prefer KDE+Wayland.
Dolphin is poorly threaded though. For example: If I drag a large file from a network share to the desktop I can not drag another one to the desktop until the first copy have completed. If I connect my VPN or just an away-from-home wifi, Dolphin freezes, probably because it can’t find the local SMB connections in the “Remotes” group.
I’m also watching COSMIC, it has a very well thought out architecture though I suspect the first version will be too simplistic in terms of features - for example vs Dolphin.
Gnome for its looks, simplicity and intuitive ways, but after Plasma 6 release, KDE seems to be up par with Gnome’s UI/UX so at the moment Plasma ia my favourite desktop.
As for WMs I tried i3, Sway, and Hyprland. Overall Hyprland is my favourite because of its special workspace mechanics, customization and options. But if looks had no value to you and you like Sway’s scratchpad mechanic then sway is for you (plus its documentation is mostly clearer, better organized and well written than Hyprland). Btw I am not comparing their tiling because there are use cases for each person and you can acomplish each others tiling mode with plugins.
Ever since KDE made their software more modular with Plasma 5 / Frameworks 5, a Plasma session can be cut down by a lot. Personally, I don’t think it matters much because as soon as you browse the web, the RAM demands of the web browser dwarf that of even a fully decked out desktop anyway, but the options are there – perhaps for certain use cases that don’t involve web browsing.
I disabled all animations, the baloo file indexing and all services that start automatically at login.
I also installed not the full KDE Suite but just Plasma Desktop and then uninstalled all parts I don’t need.
So technically, I’m not running KDE but Plasma. From the KDE application Suite I use Dolphin, Konsole, the archiver, the image viewer, the PDF viewer and the system settings tool.
Yeah the XFCE dunking of KDE doesn’t even make sense these days - a fresh XFCE system has similar memory use to a fresh Plasma desktop with similar features.
(To be clear: the only one of those dunks I actually feel was deserved was the dunk on gnome.)
Fedora KDE spin. Should be similar to your Steam Deck desktop mode and it is most likely to land KDE 6.1 very soon, which improves the Nvidia experience a lot due to explicit sync.
I think the RPM Fusion repo for the nvidia drivers is enabled by default so that you can easily install them.
If you like the interface of the steam deck in desktop mode and you are most familiar with Ubuntu, you could try Kubuntu… which is just Ubuntu with the KDE desktop environment like what the deck has. Theres also the KDE Fedora spin. If you do want to go the Arch route you could install EndeavourOS, which is practically arch with a little bit of hand holding to get you on your feet quickly - and to help you learn the ropes.
I’ll +1 the Fedora KDE for desktop usage and Debian for server usage … this combo is where I’ve landed after over a decade in the Linux space mixed with personal and professional usage.
#Linux users, where do you get your wallpapers? Looking for something cool for my new #KDE Neon desktop. You can also share yours! But remember to add ALT or tag with #ALT4Me so others can help if you are out of spoons
Going to try installing graphics on this linux machine. It has been... a long time since I tried desktop linux. What do I use for a minimal low-latency desktop env? Is xfce still a thing?
@crawshaw Unless you crave a specific form of minimality, I'd probably stick to Gnome on wayland tbh. It's evolved into a very restrained UI/UX, probably feels fairly familiar coming from (I assume) macOS.
Reason I say this is desktop environments have a lot more required baseline complexity these days (e.g. portals for sandboxed access to stuff, fancier network management needs, ...) and from recent experience only Gnome and KDE deliver all those things fully working out of the box.
@crawshaw XFCE might, I haven't looked at it recently, but googling a couple recent desktop API things, I see recent forum threads asking how to make those things work so that e.g. screensharing in videoconference works. That's the sort of thing you end up fighting if you go outside gnome or kde, and I suspect that's not the kind of time you're after :) And I say this as a user of one of the hipster tiling WMs where I have to make all this work.
I know my way around a command line. I work in IT, but when it comes to my personal fun time more often than not I’m quite lazy. I use windows a lot because just plugging in anything or installing any game and it just working is great....
Nothing too complex, no. KDE desktop, some stuff from the AUR. LVM on LUKS.
Perhaps it’s more fair to say that Arch takes more effort to maintain than any other well known distro except Gentoo (or LFS, if one considers that well known).
I found keeping up to date on a fairly bleeding edge rolling release distro exhausting. I would, too often, come across issues with updates that required manual intervention to solve. And the AUR can be a crapshoot as far maintainers keeping them up to date and applying fixes. Nothing unmanagable, but not an enjoyable experience for me.
No hate intended on Arch though. I think it’s one of the best distros out there, and the Linux community as a whole is better off for it’s existence. But it’s not something I want as my daily driver, and I suspect from what OP wrote, it might be the same case for them.
Title. Turning off the fancy effects (which can be done with Alt+Shift+F12) improves performance slightly, but having to toggle them on and off every time I start a game is… Y’know. A thing....
Day/night or light/dark wallpapers
Hi all, I’ve been searching the web for a long while now and I can’t find anything. Maybe it’s just my rusty English (second language of course). I have an app called “dynamic wallpapers” that creates two wallpapers into one where one is light and the other is dark. The light one is automatically selected by my system...
Linux is still not ready to replace Windows
Windows 10 EoL is fast approaching, so I thought I’d give Linux a try on some equipment that won’t be able to upgrade to Windows 11. I wanted to see if I will be able to recommend an option to anyone that asks me what they should do with their old PC....
It's time to move to Linux - YouTube (youtube.com)
Building a brand new machine and leaving Windows for good
I’m sick of Windows, and especially what it’s become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I’ll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I’d like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I...
when you upgrade an OS, do you clean install or upgrade?
clean install: you make a backup, nuke the computer, install a fresh upgraded copy of the distro you want from a live usb, copy your data again to the computer....
Favourite DE
My favourite DE has got to be Cinnamon, as much as I like KDE and XFCE, I prefer the simplicity of cinnamon where as in KDE has a bit too much of everything in the customization scene and XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right....
Using any DE be like: (graph.org)
Suggestions for Linux Distribution
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/16072674...
ich⚡🦯🦙🍑iel (discuss.tchncs.de) German
As a capable but lazy user, how much would switching to Arch frustrate me?
I know my way around a command line. I work in IT, but when it comes to my personal fun time more often than not I’m quite lazy. I use windows a lot because just plugging in anything or installing any game and it just working is great....
Automatically turn off Plasma Desktop effects when launching a Steam game?
Title. Turning off the fancy effects (which can be done with Alt+Shift+F12) improves performance slightly, but having to toggle them on and off every time I start a game is… Y’know. A thing....