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.

What exactly is the point of stable release? I don’t need everything pinned to specific versions—I’m not running a major corporate web service that needs a 99.9999% uptime guarantee—and Internet security is a moving target that requires constant updates.

Security and bug fixes—especially bug fixes, in my experience—are a good enough reason to go rolling-release even if you don’t usually need bleeding-edge features in your software.

Take your time with the install process. It’s possible that you may breeze through it. It’s also possible that you may discover that, say, there’s something wrong with the EFI implementation of the system you’re installing to that you need to do some research to resolve. I’ve had both experiences.

Once installed, Gentoo is pretty much rock-solid, and almost any issue you have can be fixed if you’re willing to put the effort in. Portage is a remarkably capable piece of software and it’s worth learning about its more esoteric abilities, like automatic user patch application.

Do take the time to set up a binary package host. This will allow you to install precompiled versions of packages where you’ve kept the default USE flags. Do everything you possibly can to avoid changing the flags on webkit-gtk, because it is quite possibly the worst monster compile in the tree at the moment and will take hours even on a capable eight-core processor. (Seriously, it takes an order of magnitude more time than compiling the kernel does.)

Install the gentoolkit package—equery is a very useful command. If you find config file management with etc-update difficult to deal with, install and configure cfg-update—it’s more friendly.

If you’re not gung-ho about Free Software, setting ACCEPT_LICENSE="* -@EULA" (which used to be the default up until a few years ago) in make.conf may make your life easier. Currently, the default is to accept only explicitly certified Free Software licenses (@FREE); the version I’ve given accepts everything except corporate EULAs. It’s really a matter of taste and convenience.

Lastly, it’s often worthwhile to run major system upgrades overnight (make sure you --pretend first to sort out any potential issues). If you do want to run updates while you’re at the computer, reduce the value of -j and other relevant compiler and linker options to leave a core free—it’ll slow down the compile a bit, but it’ll also vastly improve your experience in using the computer.

(I’ve been a happy Gentoo user for ~20 years.)

You get whatever drivers you checked off in the config. That might be only what you need for your machine, or you can build some extras, into the kernel or as modules (I’ve done make modules_install separate from updating the kernel more than once, because I needed support for a new peripheral). In order to boot the machine you only need a minimal set of drivers: CPU, video, keyboard (+ port), and hard drive. Anything else you can fix later if you need to.

My experience in moving a system with a custom kernel from an Athlon64 to a Phenom II more than a decade ago was that the CPU, video, and keyboard were either the same for both or easy to figure out (CPU might have been a bit more difficult if I’d been switching between AMD and Intel, but not much), but I ended up building pretty much every possible hard drive controller driver directly into the kernel until I figured out which one the new board was using. The new system booted without issue, but I had to futz around a bit to get ALSA and other nonessentials back on track.

Gentoo—depends on your CFLAGS, specifically -march. You may have to change it to a more generic setting and rebuild the system set, plus build additional drivers into your kernel if you have a custom one, before you can safely proceed with the move.

In other words, you can get away without reinstalling, but it’s a bit more involved because you may need to undo some customization first.

(Observing Gentoo user is puzzled by the notion of a package manager that can’t handle downgrades correctly without third-party assistance.)