That’s the fine details of personal situation and preference. I think we have a disagreement on perspective, and I’m glad you pointed out that specific detail, so that others reading our discussion can make a well informed decision.

I still disagree, but not because of a technical level, from my perspective, it’s still roughly the same, we just see “most recent hardware” as being applicable to different people.

And I hope you can feel that you can agree with the idea that it’s a social disagreement and not a technical one.

But isn’t this the beauty of Linux? There is an option for everyone. Like you very well put it: you do you.

Yep. I fucking hate current gnome but I’m glad it exists for someone who is into it, and that they are marching to the beat of their own drum. I just don’t want to hear it. I literally made a post on this.

I am curious to find out more about Bunsen Labs.

I’d say that if you’re using such up to date hardware that you need the latest kernels and drivers, you probably don’t need the handholding of mint, so you might want to prefer fedora or arch or smth, and not Mint/Ubuntu.

You do you but…

god I hate Mate. The fucking config preferences never worked properly across “profiles/saves/whatever” for me.

I like LXQT most. I tried out basically every DE under the sun in a VM (and KDE and Gnome on bare metal. Gnome as part of Nyarch to rescue my wife’s old tower and to see wtf it was like. It crashed and fucked up. Not sure if it was due to Ny or arch, but obv not a good fit)

Yes, even Sugar. Please do not try Sugar.

Bias : I use debian for my own machine.

I have two machines on Mint I am responsible for; one craptop with LMDE and one tower for my Mrs with Ubuntu Mint.

I hate fucking about with the tower more than the craptop. The laptop is just as easy to use and was just as easy to install and everything. The only thing I needed to do was to replace cinnamon with XFCE in an attempt to make it run faster since the craptop has like 2gb ram.

I’d recommend LMDE over Ubuntu Mint. There isn’t much point to ubuntu mint anymore to be honest

you can have KDE on LMDE. Cinnamon’s default login manager has an icon to change the DE you’re going to log into.

But I WANT it to be part of the system config. There is no point to what I want to maybe use this for if I have to do it per user.

thanks? I haven’t read it all, but just to note, I’m looking for LXQT and not LXDE, but maybe I just need to replace the one line that says LXDE with LXQT then I can try something that whittles away everything else you have there.

I want to try out Guix in a way that’s easy. I have very little time, but when I have time that I am mentally well enough to do something technical , but not confident enough to do something important, I fuck around with different OSes in VMs.

Guix has been a bastard to play with. I can get an XFCE/Ratpoison env set up. Rebuilding Guix over wifi is such a fucking massive pain that my only sense of balance is that I keep hammering their services for gigabytes , so they’re suffering as much as me.

So, if I want to try using LXQT, the entire fucking thing doesn’t compile, and what’s worse, it downloads fucking EVERYTHING before trying to build properly, then crashing out, or , finishing building everything again and then having LXQT not launch on login. I just get a black screen.

I get that I should learn how to setup x whatever to make it run properly and understand what it is I’m doing. But like, I can learn a few things at a time, and I learn by doing and iterating. My feelings on the documentation is that GNUdocs are written by people who make a fuckload of assumptions on existing user knowledge, and even their ability to understand paradigms with no indicators. What I mean by this, is that it is akin to a map with no key or legend. There are different sections highlighted in different colours , but not explanation to what those colours are. And there is text that says “avoid the hinterlands, as they have hostile bandits. go for the blinterlands, they have fine ales and buxom wenches” BUT NOTHING TELLS ME WHICH COLOUR REFERS TO EITHER PLACE.

Compare and contrast the Mozilla documentation on web standards :

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/rm-invocation.html

The Mozilla docs show examples of the things in action, the GNU ones (the bad ones, anyway) don’t have concrete examples or things to avoid. Just abstractions only.

Changing or installing different DEs was really easy on Fedora;

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/switching-desktop-environments/

sudo dnf install @kde-desktop-environment

Trying to do the same for a repeatable config.scm , WHICH IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT OF GUIX, is a nightmare.

Here’s the focused in part of the info :

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Desktop-Services.html

I remove xfce-desktop-service-type and add in lxqt-desktop-service-type , then run sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm , after waiting for somewhere between 45 mins to an hour, the rebuild ends and I get a non-working option to select LXQT in login and have no fucking idea wtf to do. Fucking great.

Or, it makes me wait 45mins before saying the SCM needed --allow-downgrades, or for me to waste gigabytes of space downloading the entire earth using guix pull.

I really want to go for GUIX for a few reasons : sensible, systemd free reproducible builds, a repo that seems an appropriate size with appropriate support, and not going for right wing software.

I can’t fucking do that if there is no looseness and “playability” factor to learn by doing. I don’t want to, and shouldn’t fucking read a book length manual to learn everything before I can do a few things that are very basic tasks or doing the central point of your software.

It’s like 1 hour before I go to bed when I’m fucking about with it. I don’t have the brainpower to bother doing that shit, and if I did, I wouldn’t be wasting it investigating alternate operating systems.

EDIT : If anyone knows of a good source of .scm configs I can fuck about with and tips on making use of cached stuff , I would really appreciate it.

EDIT2 : BTW, I am not the biggest fan of fedora for a few reasons, but I have to give it its due props. That functionality alongside archinstall’s easy setup let me try basically every fucking UI under the sun quite easily.

ubuntu makes controversial choices. Mint is explicitly user friendly, and its debian edition is like a bike with training wheels, getting you debian with extra “niceties”.

LMDE (Linux mint debian edition) is, from my POV, the gold standard for noob distros. Ubuntu is explicitly like a tricycle but LMDE is like a bike with training wheels. You can eventually take them off for debian next time you change OS with less problems, if you want. I going from LMDE + Cinnamon to Debian + KDE shouldn’t be an issue.

It’s basically the Windows of Linux distros. I recommend Zorin to new users.

… which is basically the self declared windows and not only is it corporate, it’s also paid

To not have fuck about with it except for special occurrences

RIP to a real one

I am totally in the dark here, the last time I did anything programming related was making a batch file in windows 20 years ago.

It’s a good thing we’re looking at this from a more “why this tool not other tool” aspect then.

To de-abstractify the concepts a little:

1. There are horrible data sources from things like unit 731 or the holocaust, and most of the time, scientists reject using them for various reasons, but the ethics of using that data is murky. A similar idea enters the picture here. Yeah, DHH et al aren’t killing people, but what about when the Omarchy foundation starts being the top sponsor of White Pride Worldwide?
2. basically, nothing is permanently done. It always needs maintenance and updates, because entropy exists. Washing Machines, Guitars, homes, clothes, software, etc. Human culture too. You may have a recording, but to keep the “culture” alive, it needs to be played by someone and listened to someone. The issue with fascist open source is that the people keeping the “culture” alive are fascists, so one is participating in their perpetuation of their works, regardless of if the tools themselves are fascist or not.
3. We are, unwillingly, perpetuating in the public visibility of Omarchy by discussing it. If we install Omarchy and talk about how we’re pleased with it, etc , we are helping others get visibility of Omarchy when we are behaving as OS curators. We are not perpetuating every other operating system that exists. The public awareness of a zillion others disappears, where we could be promoting it.

To expand on the last point : Compared to human attention, human creations might as well be infinite. Curation is how we try to limit what we are exposed to, since we can’t start from A and walk our way to Z for everything.

I guess it wasn’t that long.

I look forward to your response, ephemeral associate. Stay safe and stay sane out there.

no, you’re making a salient argument. I don’t want to dump a book length (/s) idea I’ve had brewing in my head about this, so we can have a little chat. I’ll just throw the broadest strokes to you.

1. What do you do with unethical scientific advances? Eg : Data on human limits on heat/cold/sleep deprivation obtained through torture? Can you use them in ethical projects after?
2. How does a culture perpetuate? What are permanently completed projects? If an untrustworthy party is working on a project that for now seems fair, can you rely on it while its still being worked on and have faith that you can use that to go forward and build new things without getting stabbed in the back after?
3. Curation. By choosing something curated by a “bad person ^TM” you are not giving opportunities of propagation to a project maintained and created by a “good person ^TM”.

Well he’s already broken it. 🤷

Still got those millions. Funny that

Did you not get the mail about them having built in grok?

what happens when the next update is the one that puts spyware in it and hands it directly to big brother?

yeah, google have two OSes they’re already holding people captive on.

I can’t even get to a boot screen on a family member’s chromebook to see if I can replace it with a different OS to ChromeOS. Android is getting demolished as we speak too.