rozodru

I’ll be honest with you, I’m by no means a fan of “nu-trek”. couldn’t stand Discovery, SNW I enjoyed but then it kinda went belly up, and I only really enjoyed Picard season 3.

So I went into Starfleet Academy and I wasn’t optimistic. Utilizing plot points from Discovery made me groan. but I must say this last episode has won me over. It’s about time Star Trek does a decent homage to DS9. it’s been a long time coming.

I’d say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he’s a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he’s looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that.

That being said as a dev and gamer myself if my first linux experience was Bazzite I might get annoyed. Mint is a great first experience. when I originally tried it well over a year ago though I did have issues with my Nvidia GPU on it and gaming wasn’t super great BUT it’s been awhile since I’ve used mint so that may have changed.

Honestly I would suggest start with Mint and just drive it for a couple weeks. If he likes it but feel it’s limited for some things then that’s when he can expand out to different distros. And like I said maybe gaming on Mint has improved since I last used it. But if he’s comfortable with running distrobox and containers then Bazzite is fine.

I mean at this point you’ve pretty much hit most things with the exception of a WM but you’ve stated that i3 was too much for you so…there isn’t really anything else. you’ve done xfce, cinnamon, gnome, and kde. that’s it. Other than say LabWC but if i3 was too much than that’s not going to be much better. And I’m assuming when you say “too much” you mean editing the configuration?

you could do something like Niri or Hyprland with Quickshell/DankMaterialShell where the config is all done essentially via the DMS/GUI setup for it.

Honestly the last one would be COSMIC DE. but if you’ve used GNOME already you might not like it. COSMIC does give you the option to toggle between stacking and tiling so that’ll be different than what you’ve already used but if you liked the customization of the previous DE’s you’ve used you’re going to be disappointed with COSMIC as the customization for it right now is very limited.

The only other thing I can suggest if you’re dead set against doing manual configuration would be like installing Niri or Hyprland with Dank Material Shell where you can style it via the GUI.

if you’re playing FFXIV, especially on Linux, don’t bother with the official launcher/updater. Use XIVLauncher, hell even use that if you’re playing on Windows. Updates a hell of a lot faster plus you also get the dalamud stuff which adds a few quality of life plugin improvements.

it’s a mindless install. If you want something to just play games on, maybe stream stuff, then Bazzite makes it easy and you don’t have to think about it. IF you’re looking to potentially do MORE on bazzite like dev wok or whatever than yeah, there’s much better distros to use for that. Sure you can circumvent all this utilizing like Distrobox or whatever but honestly if you’re going that route then why are you using Bazzite? If you’re looking to make hard things easy and easy things hard just get on NixOS. and I say that as a NixOS user.

Drama within a Linux Distro/open source project? I’ve seen this episode before…

I’ll be honest with you at this point if I personally stopped using something on linux be it a distro or FOSS based purely on posts or stuff like this I’d probably be back on Windows because I’d have nothing left to use.

it was good but I recently tried it again and removed it within 30 minutes. the default Nobara repo for stuff honestly didn’t have much in it and sure that’s an easy fix to circumvent, the initial bloat with all the brave crap wasn’t a great new/first impression. Also after all this time the Nobara updater is still busted.

If you want a Fedora fork that is similar to Nobara, there are better options.

they did. last year. I’m not joking. old JNCOs were (maybe still are) selling for ungodly amounts of money to the point I called my mom up to ask her if she still kept some of my old high school clothes in the attic, specifically my JNCOs. she laughed at me “those huge raggy old pants that looked like they had tails at the bottom? no I tossed those when you moved out” I could have been rich.

Still to this day I switch DEs/WMs every so often to try and find that right “fit”. I think that’s the biggest minor issue with Linux right now. IMHO there’s not a single perfect DE. I like KDE, everything just works, BUT how workspaces/virtual desktops work with multiple monitors is an absolute pain. Yes I’m aware with the update coming this month it’ll improve slightly but all I want from it is to have each monitor have it’s own set of dedicated workspaces like every other WM has. KDE just won’t do that regardless of the fact it’s been asked for for like 20 years now.

So I constantly end up switching. Niri, Hyprland, Plasma, whatever. None of them feel perfect and they all have their deal breaker quirks that I tolerate for awhile until I just can’t and end up switching. Like for example on Niri with some games when scrolling through windows and going back to the game it doesn’t pick up the mouse immediately so you have to do a quick switch to either another window and back or another workspace and back. similar issue with Hyprland except it’s with the keyboard instead of the mouse. Sway has similar issues. Hyprland I don’t like how workspaces work with multiple monitors either.

This is just the nature of Linux overall. sometimes you just have to tolerate the minor issues for the overall better performance/features. and it doesn’t just apply to DEs/WMs. there’s rarely anything on Linux that is the total package and 100% everything you want. Take terminals for example. Alacritty is great, fast, responsive…doesn’t do images. Kitty is awesome with images, gpu stuff, fast, smooth…doesn’t work great with tmux/multiplexers cause the dev hates them. or how about editors? DOOM Emacs has all the features I could ever want…slow as shit on startup. Lazyvim is fantastic with all the plugins available…absolute pain in the ass to get working 100% on my distro NixOS. I could go on and on. none of these are absolute dealbreakers just minor annoyances that make me constantly switch things.

So I completely 100% hear you. you like GNOME, it’s your preferred DE, BUT the potential issues with Steam Frame and VR are a deal breaker. And those things work on KDE BUT you’re just not happy with how KDE works overall. I get it man. I’m not a fan of GNOME but I get it. I mean give hyprland a shot but try it out with the defaults first before you invest too much time into configuring it and then finding there’s like one or two things that just won’t work. I’ve done that before. spent hours configuring like Sway or something to my liking and then finding out one particular application just doesn’t play well with it. It’s frustrating. Good luck.

I don’t have a problem with “nu-trek” being “woke”. Star Trek has always been “woke” (I really hate that word). My issue is it just feels dumb now. all of it. it doesn’t challenge the viewer anymore.

TNG had that in spades. a problem would arise before the intro even rolled and it challenged the viewer to figure out what’s going on. That was most of the fun. Like the episodes where all the damn clues were right in front of you and it wasn’t until the end with the “ooooh of course!” moment. Primary example of this is the episode when the Enterprise kept blowing up and Data had to keep going back to try and figure out how to avoid it. Or the episode where Barclay, Picard, and Data were trapped in the Holodeck and they didn’t even know they were in the Holodeck. And there were clues all over the place like Geordi using his left hand for something when he’s right handed. I want more trek like that.

I mean pretty much any distro can achieve that even Arch based ones. For example with CachyOS you could essentially run it with say KDE and never need to open a terminal at all. Cachy includes Octopi as its GUI package manager and it works well. KDE can also potentially handle the updating for you.

you could also run say something like Bazzite or Nobara which is essentially the same. Nobara does have it’s own updater but i’ll be honest it’s kinda wonky sometimes and generally only starts off with access to its own repos.

Essentially at the end of the day the Distro doesn’t really matter in most cases. As long as it can utilize a GUI package manager or some sort of “app store” and allows easy installation of something like KDE then you’re good to go. The exceptions to this I would say would be like Gentoo or NixOS but as someone who uses NixOS…technically…it could potentially fit the bill. But that would require a bit of work to get it to that point.

Actually now that I think about it getting something like working on NixOS would be an interesting side hobby project to work on.

Photo editing: darktable
Digital Art: Krita
Illustrator type stuff: Inkscape

Pain: Gimp. although the PhotoGIMP plugin makes it bearable.

OR wait for the recent wine patch to mature a bit more and then you can literally just use Photoshop.

Hope it gets reversed soon and man honestly GW should just let them use the license. I mean hell they hand out the 40k license to anyone with a pulse at this point.

If you’re walking down stairs or an escalator you stand/walk on the right. always. If you live in a country that drives on the left side then you apply the same to stairs.

When walking on the sidewalk you pass on the right.

People who walk down the opposite side are a cancer to society.

don’t get me wrong I love what you’ve built and it IS something that is sorely needed. I just find it funny that because of this you’ve pretty much made something like Claude just completely shut up. You’ve pretty much showed off the extremely sad state of Anthropic.

It’s fairly bare bones in all honesty. It does sum up initial searches fairly well but beyond that you’re not going to get much, if anything, out of it. Asking it follow up questions regarding a search is more miss than hit.

It has provided me decent initial results when I’m searching for some random linux question/solution but clarifying or expanding on initial results is useless.

soooo if it doesn’t know something it won’t say anything and if it does know something it’ll show sources…so essentially you plug this into Claude it’s just never going to say anything to you ever again?

neat.

Hell you can use Arch without the terminal if you really wanted to. CachyOS for example uses Octopi which is one of the few Arch Package Manager GUI’s that support both Pacman and AUR. so in that case you may never really need to touch the terminal and Octopi is preinstalled with CachyOS.

Other than that Fedora KDE or Bazzite are good options. But yeah there are few Distros where you really don’t need to use the Terminal if you don’t want to.

what DE/WM are you using on Cachy?

I had a very similar problem as you but ONLY with x11 DE’s/WM’s. My machine would do the exact same thing with some games. play for a bit, then the visual and only the visual would freeze or show a black screen or simply just show the desktop but the game was still running as the audio and what have you was still working. This would also happen when alt tabbing or moving to another workspace and back. Essentially because my system had an onboard amd gpu AND a discrete Nvidia GPU gaming on x11 was a no go and I had to use wayland and it would ONLY flawlessly work on KDE. Using things like Niri or Hyprland or whatever had separate issues with mouse constraints.

Also have you tried using a different version of Proton? I know the latest GE Proton isn’t honestly Eggrolls best work as I’ve also had issues with it and have heard others having issues as well.

just run everything thru Doom Emacs. Terminal? emacs, git? emacs, ide? emacs, WM? emacs.