That’s awesome, I never knew that! And someone made a similar tool for Linux as well

I watched Jurassic Park again the other day.

“It’s a Unix system, I know this!”

Nedry had a very custom window manager.

Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I just don’t love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.

I have an older nvidia card (1070) and had more of an issue than that getting the correct version of the driver installed for my card, and getting it to use the correct driver instead of the open source one that didn’t work well. It’s also possible I was doing something wrong. But yeah, it’s definitely doable, and it’s not too bad, but it’s fiddly compared to the ubuntu driver gui or something like bazzite that works out of the box with it.

Yeah, I probably wouldn’t buy a new laptop for a server, but it’s a great way to re-use what would otherwise be e-waste. I have a 20 year old laptop running as a server, currently just for FoundryVTT, but it works great. 4GB of DDR2 ram, Intel celeron dual core cpu. I stuck a new ssd in it (old hdd died) and it works great, as long as I don’t run any graphical interfaces while I have the server running. One ram stick was bad, but DDR2 cost me about $11. Total hardware cost was around $50 USD.

Thinking about just removing the lid entirely, since I don’t use it graphically (I can hook up a monitor if absolutely needed).

I have used gnome, plasma, and xfce and they are all fine. I prefer KDE personally but they’re all going to do what you need to do. It’s all down to personal aesthetic preference, and picking one won’t hinder you in any real way. KDE to me just looks super nice out of the box for my taste, and I like the customization.

I love Debian. Been using it on my laptop for over a year. Some specific drivers are a little fiddly if you have nvidia graphics but it’s not too bad, lots of good info on the debian wiki.

My 8 and 9 year old kids use xubuntu on a 2013 macbook air. They use it for writing stories, making a lot of pixel art with Piko Pixel, and some code block style programming with Lego Spike. They are learning about multi-user systems, file management, etc. I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap pc that can run Minecraft (lots of those right now since people are just trashing old win 10 machines) because the older kid wants to learn how to make Minecraft mods.

“Install this bloated spyware in exchange for a little bit of convenience” is like 80% of modern tech and I don’t know how people are just ok with that

I installed Bazzite and it felt so much like installing Windows for me (huge install image, slow process, lots of loading wheels and user friendly “pretty” screens to get set up). It didn’t feel great, but I figured I’d give it a fair chance and learn how to use a different setup than I’m used to.

I still haven’t had a chance to actually do much with it (only a couple of hours between work and other stuff) but I am really interested in the concept. After reading up more and watching some videos I now understand why the install process is so big and the reasoning behind it. This type of distro really does seem like a great option for regular users.

Only issue I’ve had so far is connecting to my RaspberryPi to control my 3d printer using the .local hostname, since flatpak apparently has a bug with mDNS. IP works fine, and I did rps-ostree install a browser, which was kind of a pain, and probably not the correct way to address the issue, but that was within the first hour or so of using it and I haven’t figured out the best way to do that type of thing yet. Really looking forward to learning more about the setup and how to customize stuff on top of it. Distrobox seems extremely powerful and sounds like it will give me everything I want.

Still have vanilla Debian on my laptop, which I absolutely love, but using it on my desktop PC was kind of a pain due to some proprietary drivers required there (nvidia).

pretty

This is the real pro tip. “Debian packages are behind” but you can just clone the repo or download the .deb and get the latest version of the tool you want. I know there can be dependency issues but I haven’t run into any with the stuff I use.