I switched from KDE 3.5 (whenever that was current).

Terrifyingly, I think someone is still maintaining KDE 3.5 proper for OpenSUSE. Then there’s TDE, which is widely available. (But you probably mean 15-20 years ago.)

Not the same distro, but on my system, the relevant file is located at /etc/default/grub. Find the line that says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, uncomment it if necessary, and add your kernel parameter to it (mine has GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_enforce_resources=lax", for historical reasons). Then run grub-mkconfig with appropriate arguments to regenerate your grub configuration.

Per the contents of my /usr/portage/distfiles, the original undivided package is ~500MB, making it the largest single package I’ve got on my system. Splitting it seems like a very good idea . . . but Gentoo generally prefers not to alter upstream tarballs, so I’m likely stuck.

If you’re getting a grub command line, then it’s finding the grub efi payload itself now, but can’t locate the kernel (or possibly the initram or something that’s supposed to be in it). Check your grub.cfg and try to confirm that it’s looking for the correct partition on the correct drive.

One possibility is that it has a degenerate UEFI implementation that will only recognize the efi “payload” if it’s in the fallback location—I had this problem with an older HP laptop. You can force grub-install to place the needed file in this location by passing the --removable switch (you may also need to pass --efi-directory=[dir]), or you can manually copy the file to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi on your EFI partition if it was already installed elsewhere.

If you dare, you can try temporarily killing the system’s swap (using the swapoff command) and see what happens. With no swap, the standard OOM reaper should trigger within a couple of minutes at most if it’s needed, and it should write an entry to the system log indicating which process it killed.

Note that the process killed is not necessarily the one causing the problem. I haven’t had the OOM trigger on me in many years (I normally run without swap), but the last time it did, it killed my main browser instance (which was holding a large but not increasing amount of memory at the time) rather than the gcc instance that was causing the memory pressure.

Hmmm. Random guess: does your machine have another audio output, possibly via HDMI, that you’re not using? This could be ALSA selecting the wrong device as a default, which would then propagate up through the stack.

Used to be that KDE would let you run other window managers than the default kwin. If that capability still exists, you might just be able to borrow Cosmic’s WM and implant it in your KDE session.

98% of everything should Just Work, although some software may drag in heavyweight dependencies. I’ve used TDE’s versions of konqueror and konsole from inside fluxbox and other lightweight setups, called up thunar from within TDE, etc. At most, you might have some theming issues. The only thing that would be 100% incompatible would be trying to run a wayland-only program from inside an X environment.

Most display managers should be able to handle different window management sessions without issue. If you’re looking at an X environment and really want to start from the WM level, I’d recommend sticking with something like fluxbox, fvwm-crystal, or even enlightenment (which is somewhere between a WM and a very lightweight DE). Avoid anything described as “minimalist”, unless you like the idea of running around adding other software like dmenu and feh to get basic functionality (and like reading documentation).

I vote for “slopesque”, even if it has more letters. It doesn’t hurt that the most common English word that uses the -esque ending is “grotesque”, which this whole phenomenon is.

The TDE version of kcharselect should do much the same stuff with fewer deps, if a suitable package exists for your distro.

My advice to my mom would be not to use flatpaks, because I know she wouldn’t be able to deal with the issues on her own.

Had to look into this recently for similar reasons. My conclusion was that once you have macros involved, you can’t use anything but an actual copy of Excel. I’ll be spinning up a qemu VM with Windows to support Excel and the full version of Visual Studio when I get that far.

Not quite. Those are trackers: lists of bugs. If you open one, you’ll see a list of individual package bugs that are blocking these ones—up to a couple of dozen unresolved in some cases. Still, it isn’t that long a list, and a lot of the packages are minor or obscure.

Gentoo also offers it as an option. If you’re very bored and curious about what doesn’t work under specific versions of musl, you can peruse the Gentoo compatibility tracker bugs..

To my knowledge, no one is actively working on Wayland support in TDE at the moment. That could change if it becomes vital for the project’s survival, or someone whose particular itch it is joins the development team. The TQT toolkit would probably have to be ported first.

So for the time being, Trinity is X11-only, and I’d expect it to remain X11-supporting for a long, long time.

It’s one of those things you either use constantly or not at all. Activating the feature intentionally and having it fail is irritating, but activating it unintentionally because you didn’t know it was there could have serious consequences. I mean, I can even come up with cases where the wrong information being C&P’d accidentally into the wrong Web form could result in someone ending up dead.

Given the difference in stakes, “off by default” makes sense for this feature. I wouldn’t call it a dumpster fire, though—more like a relic of a more innocent time.

A standalone utility for decoding QR codes that will work on a desktop. All I want is to be able to put a picture of the code in and get whatever text it was concealing in a little text box where I can read it, and C&P it if it’s useful to do so. If something like this exists, I’ve never been able to find it, although there are seemingly dozens of programs for generating QR codes.

I’d just roll back the problem package to the last acceptable version until I have the time to address whatever the issue is (or block the new version of just that package if I have advance notification). That way, I get the fixes for everything else without breaking my workflow. If a rolling-release distro has a package manager that doesn’t allow that, I’d contend that said package manager is broken.

. . . until something in the stack requires a significant kernel upgrade, and then you’re stuck.