I installed Linux Mint for the first time on my personal Laptop just a few months ago, and it ran so well that I didn’t want to mess with it to try out different distros.
But today, my company’s IT department announced that they have some spare old Laptops to give away (technically because they didn’t meet the specs for Windows 11, didn’t stop the IT department from giving them out with Windows 11 pre installed though)
So now I got a few devices to play around with!! They’re a Precision 7530 and a Latitude 7390 2-in-1!
I already got ZorinOS running on the little guy because apparently Zorin is nice for Touchscreen support. For the big guy I was initially thinking that I could try Bazzite, but the installer was like “Intel UHD Graphics aren’t really recommended” so I might try something else first. Any recommendations? I mainly just want to try as many different flavors of Linux as I can haha
Yes I know gnome. Linux has been my primary OS since around 2001. It is funny because even in the video you shared, he suggests adding Gnome tweaks, which was kinda my point.
Personally, Gnomes constant movement drives me nuts, and the focus on one thing at a time is really a pain in the ass. But I do happen to have a laptop with it on it, and given the smaller screen real estate and the type of tasks I do with it, it works ok. Like you mentioned.
But for a windows user coming to linux It is all the little things, particularly the file manager and context menus. Why do I need to open an application when I should be able to right click extract to zip folder name, delete zip in one move?
Clipboard: Gnome has no clipboard. Unless you add an extension. This one drives me a little crazy because the clipboard I use is shared with my phone and tablet and has functions and actions.
And if you are fancy (like using Windows attempt at tiling) Gnome doesn’t do that either.
I get people use gnome, but I find it tries to hard to be not enough. Why isnt the terminal in the file manager window when I want to work that way for example.
GNOME has a clipboard by default–actually it has two: Ctrl-C/X and middle click send to both clipboards.
As for terminal in the file manager, by default you can right click on empty space in the file manager and “open in console”.
Well, yes cut/paste. But there is no built in clipboard that you can interact with. Can you open the clipboard and choose things from 5 items ago or yesterday for example? Looking at Gnome right now just to check, and it can only offer to add one or an extension. Funny playing with the default capture cased a clipboard emoji to go to the cut paste.
As for the console: you can open the console. But you cant have it be tied to the file manager. As in it opens a window in the file manager, and you can use both at the same time, including linking them if you want.
Seems to me that this is a good use case for an extension.
Which is what I said: gnome is useless by default, and then you start adding extensions to fix everything. Then they break on update and you realize why am I wasting time with this?
Breaking on updates is not good, I agree. I only use one extension (Tiling Window Manager), haven’t had any problem with updates and don’t find it useless by default. Would you agree that an extension-based design is OK here and the implementation needs work?
No. A functional clipboard in a gui based desktop environment is pretty much a minimal requirement.
The cant open a console inside of a the file manager I can live with, that is more a nice to have.