defiantoptimist wrote: ↑Mon Oct 30, 2023 3:00 pmThe last time I was into it, Gnome was the big thing, but I’m guessing it’s gotten a bit bloated. That seemed to be the direction it was going when I dropped out of it and KDE was Xfce but a bit nicer.
oh yea, gnome is totally bloated like, to a ridiculous degree. I try running stock ubuntu and even my GTX 1060 is like "haha if you say so" it's like, that bad
defiantoptimist wrote: ↑Mon Oct 30, 2023 3:00 pmNow I know I’m out of the loop on Linux stuff. The last time I was into it, Gnome was the big thing, but I’m guessing it’s gotten a bit bloated. That seemed to be the direction it was going when I dropped out of it and KDE was Xfce but a bit nicer.
Gnome went in a... very strange direction with version 3. Many people hated it, but the reaction from the devs was a "screw you we're doing what we want" and it resulted in forks like Mate and Cinnamon. Gnome is now more akin to a weirder, somewhat more spiteful version of modern macOS. I gave it an honest try and all I felt was confused and anxious. Some people like the way it works, so uh... good for them
KDE on the other hand, they started taking notes from Windows and figured out what worked best and what could be improved to make a very solid (albeit kinda heavy) DE, now called Plasma. This is why I recommend it to newbies, you can effortlessly translate 95% of existing Windows 10 skills to it.
Xfce is virtually unchanged from how it was back in the late 2000s.
Shout out to Xfce's mascot being a cute little mousie
Shoutout to XFCE still being no-nonsense and straightforward! I use it for my daily driver's desktop environment, from my first Arch box back in the 2010s to my current Manjaro workstation, and it is nice having something so straightforward and reliable to turn to when everything else always is in such a state of flux.
Admittedly, I may not be the best candidate for rolling release systems, but I feel like the pendulum swings too far the other way with debian-based systems too. I like a long-term kernel and libc environment with access to more current userland software. Manjaro provides something of a happy medium, but its logo also looks like fucking Homestuck and that bugs the crap out of me.
I also virtualize Windows in a PCI passthrough setup for certain gaming needs, though my previous system was fairly old and struggled a lot with memory bandwidth due to the concessions I had to make setting it up, badly enough that my 1070 never used more than half its total processing power. Nowadays though, that's no problem whatsoever, even if I had to make some other weird concessions to get my system to work in (mostly) perfect harmony.
I use NixOS, with KDE Plasma being my desktop. Haven't had real major issues with it or anything! Glad to see this thread!
I haven’t been using Linux for a looooong time, but I used to love it very much. Had my PC with Linux during my whole PhD, so much better to work, so many useful tools… As I’m mostly playing and drawing with my computer, I’m using Windows, but I’m getting really tired with Windows 11 bullshit and Microsoft force feeding us Copilot (which is, fortunately, forbidden in Europe at the moment thanks to the Digital Services Act).
Might get so bored with Windows 11 at some point that I’ll get back to Linux.
Recently got in the mood to fire up a Live USB on hardware for the first time in years.
Earlier today, I decided to put Fedora KDE on a spare drive, both this choice of distro being outside of my almost-wholly Debian-based experience, as well as the choice of desktop being outside my usual experience with "lighter" ones like MATE and (gasps from the security crowd) Trinity. Rufus'd the ISO then F9'd into the boot selector, and with a mighty roar of tiny-yet-dense command-line text, it booted. Thing worked like a charm on my Win10 laptop I got in 2020, with Wi-Fi, audio, mousepad, webcam, Wacom drawing tablet, and game controller all responding out of the box. So I just vibed on the thing a bit, with the built-in music player open to a C64 radio channel that was already bookmarked on first launch, as I checked some stuff out, visited some sites, played with the theme settings, installed small programs like cowsay, etc.
And then I booted back into Win10, satisfied with my experience. Not sure if I'm gonna make Linux a lifestyle yet again anytime soon, but it's been on the mind lately, and even after sidelining it for so long, it still does seem like something I could make use of for myself.
KDE is nice!!!! Yea that linux lifestyle is more likely for us now like, we can mostly work in linux but there's a bunch of weird quirks and unfortunately art is still out of the question x(
proton works great though!!!
Proud to say I'm about to make the jump, been meaning to for a while but the hassle of cleaning and backing up my bootdrive was greater than dealing with a slowly deteriorating windows install. WAS
Anyway any of y'all wanna induct me into your cult share your favorite distro before I settle on Mint? 
Mint is a good starting distro! We should give it a whirl again sometime. We use Debian with KDE but I would not recommend it until you become like a tier 4 Linux user, because Debian doesn't really make it easy for you (and that's fine because it's not really meant for that)