Fedora or Ubuntu. No need to overthink it. They are the two biggest distros in popularity by far (except Arch, which probably beats Fedora), so you have access to maximum mindshare and previous troubleshooting.
Including Arch, these three distros are among the most polished, stable, and well-documented. Arch takes quite a bit more effort, so a beginner without much time on their hands should start with Ubuntu or Fedora.
I think the problem is the insistence on using a gaming-focused OS. Boutique distros can make certain things easier, but they often make unwitting assumptions about hardware that dont actually work for everyone.
Fedora has probably 10x or more the user base of Bazzite, so there are effectively +/- 10x the variety of of tested builds. Ubuntu/Debian is probably 10x over Fedora, so probably +/- 100x over Bazzite.
If you want to use Linux with minimal headache, the best advice is to use a mainstream distro with well-tested hardware. If you are building a custom PC you will have the least hassle with 1-2 year old hardware (or older) on Mint or Ubuntu
RE: use case
It’s really nice to be able to see the whole titles. A vertical panel cuts off most text, so you just have a bunch of icons when you minimize. if multiple windows are from the same app it’s confusing.
If you use a horizontal panel you have a bit more room, but a significant amount of text is still cut off, and the panel fills up quickly.
Even with as few as 6 windows open (lets say two browser and three file manager, and a terminal) minimizing is a mess. I find it better to just leave the window bar somewhere visible and shade it, since i can read all the text on my window at a glance. Combined with “keep above others”, you can get a really nice way to quickly refrence something infrequently while you do most of your work in another window.
A more typical workflow for me is 1-4 windows of a pdf reader, 1-3 file manager windows, 1 browser window, and 1 terminal window. It’s just easier to keep it all organized with window shading.
I find it much faster than a bunch of alt-tabbing, or playing hide and seek with the panel just to get a specific two PDF windows up side by side for a second
Thanks for the link! Heartening to know there are others that love this feature like i do
Damn. I guess it’s finally goodbye window shade or goodbye Plasma. I really wish they’d figured out a solution.
I get it though. The edge cases will never be fixed until devs know what they are, and GNOME proved this is an effective way to find out.
Bing is a better search engine than Google, but both are pale imitations of their former selves. It’s amazing how bad search has gotten in the last ~5 years
I dont agree. Life is a balance. You use proprietary software every day, everybody does. It exists in nearly every aspect of day to day life. You can never truly be free of it, but advocating for and using FOSS where possible is worthwhile anyway. Going fully blob-free would mean significantly more effort for what to me is not that much of an improvement to my life.
It’s the same reason i garden on my apartment balcony, but dont grow all my own food. I could probably just about manage it, but i’d be spending every second of my available time to keep the thing going just to reduce my already infrequent grocery trips (but not to zero since i still need soap and toothpaste).
I’m happy with the additional features, security, and transparency provided by Fedora over the OS my laptop was designed to run. I go through some level of effort to use Linux, but nothing crazy. If there was some widely available hardware with decent performance, price, and comparable features, made with ethical labor and that worked with Debian with the deblobbed kernel, i’d definitely give it a shot. Currently it’s too much work for too little gain for me.
But if it works for you, that’s awesome. I respect the commitment to your ideals.
Very sweet to remember her this way.
My cat is also named after a flower: Thistle. I hope i get to enjoy 15 years with her too.
I empathize with your sorrow, and i’m happy you got to spend the time with her that you did
An unexpected surprise. The game runs fine on Steam/Linux through proton, but it is a bit of a hassle to set up the first time.
Maybe now i will finally finish “Legendary Defender of Ascalon”, since death leveling is no longer the only method.
For anyone not familiar: this was a title given to players who got to max level (20) in the tutorial area of the first game. All quest XP combined would would get you from 1-8, or if you save up all the quests it’s almost enough to get from 19-20. The only other way to get XP was by killing monsters, and for every level above the monster you get, it gives less XP. once you are more than 5 levels over you’d get none. You cannot leave the area, since once you do there is a time jump and you can never return.
“Death leveling” was a technique where you’d let the highest level monsters (level 13 iirc) kill you repeatedly until they level up, then you kill them for XP once they are high enough to give you some. This would mean you’d have to die potentially over 100 times to get a tiny amount of XP, then you exit and enter the zone to respawn the monster and do it all again.
In the years since they’ve added a small few level 17 monsters and a low xp daily quest, so it’s still a huge grind but not as insane as before
I am using a fork of the Pixel Camera that adds in manual focus. The manual focus is extremely useful to me, but otherwise this particular fork is very buggy.
I also have the stock pixel camera app with network permission revoked for when i get too frustrated with the fork crashing on me. The autofocus on the stock pixel app is super finicky, but i can usually get at least one good photo after several tries.
I have also tried opencamera and the stock GOS app. Opencamera is pretty ok, but i find the sliders are physically too small on the screen for me to be as precise as i want to be. Stock GOS app feels like a hardware demo, not made for photography.
i am not impressed with the Pixel camera hardware-wise. I also think iPhones take pretty bad photos though. I have an iPhone 15 pro (from work) and a Pixel 7 pro (GOS, mine) and i take photos with both very often. GOS is the only reason i have a Pixel over something with a good camera. To me, the Pixel looks a little worse than the iPhone at 1x, then around 3-5x zoom the Pixel looks much better, and anything above that really depends on lighting (Pixel seems to do better in meh light, iPhone gets a better shot in bright good light)
Thanks! there are a couple more wayland compositors that do have this feature, but other Plasma features are often lacking.
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Fair. i conflated two separate complaints about two different operating systems
I agree, however Windows and macOS are even worse IMO. Everything is just totally inconsistent (Windows) and the window management features are very barebones (both). Using either one feels like going back 10 years or more.
The CSD trend might have some upsides but i find it mainly just makes apps ugly and any added functionality is almost always redundant.
Kvantum really helps make Plasma more consistent, not sure if there is a similar addon for GNOME
Edited for clarity
Yeah that was the case right before it got removed, but in P5 and for the first couple point releases of P6 KDE apps were working with it
My blocker is the Window Shade button on Plasma.
It worked fine in Wayland under Plasma 5, but somewhere early in the 6 transition support was removed.
For anyone not aware it minimizes the window to its own titlebar. I find it faster and more intuitive than minimizing to a dock, and it’s easier to keep track of things when you can actually read the whole titlebar.
Wooden needles are supported, but are not mentioned in the main install guide for ethical reasons. There is a HOWTO:/Wooden_needles guide on the wiki if you need it
The Pinebook Pro is unfortunately not a very good laptop. It’s very slow, has a weird storage setup, and the hardware isnt 100% supported by any distro even now, years later. The battery also takes forever to charge and doesnt last all that long.
I get better performance on a Raspberry Pi 4 and even that is too slow for me
It was a cool idea and if the software support was there it might have become a very compelling laptop, but as it currently exists the PBP is not worth what it costs
Stability in the sense of: my computer does the thing i expect with the hardware i happen to have, every time, over many years.
I agree Debian is up there. I only mentioned Arch because of the massive userbase. I think Debian is a little more technical (for a new user with limited time and attention) than Ubuntu or Fedora, but much less so than Arch
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch are undoubtedly the big 4 Linux distros in terms of long term community, stability, and documentation