I’ve not heard of “Firefox Send.” Why would I use something like this instead of scp or Nextcloud?

I’ve had this in my .zshrc for a while: alias $(date +%Y)="echo 'YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP'"

If you type the current year in your terminal, it will say “YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP” lol

Nah I definitely was giving stuff up to use Linux back in the day. Really, I’d say 2021 was when things got REALLY good.

You appear to be afraid of spaces. Everything is cramped together.

Just bc you don’t have to put a space after colons or after equals and commas and whatnot doesn’t mean you shouldn’t

Don’t be afraid of spaces.

They make it easier for you to read your code when you come back later

Not if you think of forward as “towards you.” It comes from Math. X is right, Y is up, and then when doing 3D, Z is out of the page, bc that’s easiest to draw.

I can finally learn cobol?!?!?

I don’t use Ubuntu anymore, and haven’t as my main in a long time.

My longest running distro is probably Arch, which I’ve recently switched back to after a year on Fedora and a year on NixOS

Ubuntu back in 2014. Followed by Elementary not long after

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Really depends on the games. For the vast majority, probably not. If you play competitive multiplayer games, then it’s 50/50.

Check out protondb to see if the games you play the most work well.

Also semi-depends on hardware. Old Nvidia cards may struggle. AMD is def king in the Linux world, but it’s getting better for Nvidia

But as you are probably aware, the steam deck has been pretty successful. That wouldn’t happen if Linux gaming was all bad.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

Hit or miss. Sometimes the mod tools have to use wine and don’t work. Sometimes they use wine and work. Sometimes they don’t use wine and work.

I have just done some modding of Monster Hunter Wilds, and it was about 50/50

When it works, it’s just as easy as Windows.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

WINE or a Virtual Machine

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

.NET is cross platform as of several years ago.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

It depends on the distro. Typically you just run a command in the terminal to “update all packages” or click a button in a store front.

It’s way easier than on Windows and is never forced.

Genuinely one of if not the best thing about Linux is how software management works.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Less vulnerable due to being open source. You have all the security experts in the world, including Microsoft’s, able to view and fix any vulnerabilities as soon as they appear. Thousands of people getting their eyes on it.

There’s a reason that Linux is the back bone of the internet and nearly every server runs it.

And FYI, you don’t use antivirus on Linux.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

If it works, it will always work.

Whether it works is dependent on your GPU.

Like I said, AMD is basically perfect, Nvidia can have problems, but these days that’s less and less true (I use a GTX 3080 w/ out issue).

Mostly if you have an old, less-supported nvidia card (like pre-GTX) you may have issues.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

I’ve never heard of something like that happening.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

For beginners the correct option is almost always Linux Mint

They just seem kinda hacky and overcomplicated rn.

I was on NixOS for a while, which is sort of in this camp since the system build is deterministic an immutable, and I’ve had to switch away bc it’s just annoying. Apps aren’t made for immutability in mind, and sometimes when you (read: your OS) try to force them to, the burden falls on you to maintain it, not just the package maintainer. VS Code is a prime example. Some extensions just don’t work right. It’s not Nix’s fault ofc, but that doesn’t make it less impractical to use, so after 2 years away from Arch now, I’ve had to return.

Other immutable distros face similar issues.

On top of that, specific distros have reasons I wouldn’t want to use them. I wouldn’t use Bazzite, for instance, bc it is based on Fedora, and I won’t use Fedora again. I liked Fedora when I used it, and it has things about it I like, but it has a glaring issue: anywhere it can be non-standard it is non-standard. For apps to run on Fedora there always has to have some weird location for a config file or a different way to install a program or some bug that only occurs on Fedora. Fedora be fedorain. That rules out Bazzite, Silverblue, etc. I call it the “RedHat Tax.”

I wouldn’t say I’m against an immutable distro tho; I just haven’t found one for me yet. For now, BTRFS and backups + Arch are enough

I’m running Linus

Linux without X but with S… ystemd

I would, but I can’t get through their captcha (even w/ adblockers, tracking, etc all disabled)

People who work at Apple: Completely Blank

“I will revise that part to reflect the correct approach.”

Proceeds to spit out the exact same output

Don’t leave out “nano duckduckgo” and “code brave”

And any project worth their salt will reject it for two reasons:

1. Unclear message/changes (potentially too many changes at once)
2. Not signed

Scrollables are neat. I think Niri or KDE + Karousel might be useful to me. Thanks for the tip

Yeah, I may just go back to Gnome/KDE.

I recently switched OS from NixOS to Arch which is why I wanted to give Hyprland a second try while I was messing with stuff.

I was on KDE before with not a ton of issue, but well, the tiling options on KDE are few and limited, so I wanted to go back and retry a dedicated tiler. I was on i3 and happy for a long time before switching to Wayland (which happened once I could get decent game performance), then I was on Hyprland for a while, then switched around a bit, and then settled on KDE once I discovered Polonium which I could live with.

I’m gonna give GNOME a shot for now, and just try not to tweak it too much (other than Pop Shell)

why can’t I just stop forcing myself to this PITA and just use the mouse faster?

You know that i3 has support for mouse, right? Really good support in fact.

I use the mouse all the time in tiling window managers, not exclusively keyboard shortcuts, especially for well, window management. Win + Right Click and drag to resize and Win + Left Click to move a window into place. However, unlike traditional desktops, when I move the window, it snaps to a reasonable and consistent tiling location instead of just left/right snapping, a random place it can get covered up, or tiled using some awful extraneous system like KDE’s tiling system or some of the Windows little GUI popups. I also sometimes use floating windows.

The nice thing about tilers is they can do traditional usage well whereas traditional desktops cannot do tiling well. Heck, dynamic tilers can’t even do tiling well.

I often make use of very complex layouts like this:

--------------------------------------
| Win A              | Win B         |
|                    |               |
|                    |---------------|
|--------------------| Win C | Win D |
| Win E              |---------------|
|                    | Win F         |
--------------------------------------

That many windows with different priorities and visible at once is just not possible to do in traditional desktops or even in dynamic tilers like DWM or KDE’s Bismuth plugin.

I need something that makes window organization EASY, and that is manual tilers.

I’ll have to look into the scrolling compositor. That does sound interesting.

without keeping track and managing 10 virtual desktops

Also, I don’t understand what you mean here. I’m very curious to what troubles you had with workspaces.

What is there to manage? Do you not use virtual desktops at all anymore? I use them even in traditional desktops (including Windows).

It’s just a place to put more windows when you run out of room on a screen or when doing a different task, what’s the difficulty there?

Did you always use all 10? I don’t usually need more than 2, and if I do, then I don’t usually need more than 4

Also, are you sure you want to use a tiling compositor on a gaming laptop

I can’t go back to moving windows around by hand. It’s so tedious. I can’t stand it anymore. Even on Windows which I use for work I always install FancyWM to achieve some sense of tiling. It’s just imo a superior way to use a computer.

That said, GNOME has the fantastic Pop Shell 2 which functions similar to Hyprland or i3, so that’s fine on GNOME. Honestly, I’m hopeful for COSMIC and plan to try it out once it gets out of Alpha.

The problem I have with GNOME is I always end up breaking it in a way that I can’t restore it. Some extension or GTK theme tweak or something, even when uninstalled, always seems to get it stuck in a bad state. It doesn’t like customization. KDE does, but it doesn’t have as good tiling support (there’s Polonium, which is… okay).

Perhaps I’ll try it again tho. I’ve used GNOME for several months at a time before, but I had problems when switching to Wayland a couple years ago initially (which I’m sure are fixed now).