Yeah, at some point I would suggest replacing the unit as a whole rather than throwing parts at it constantly. For me, that point would come when the system can’t survive a season.

Jesus that’s a living creature?

Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I’ll get into later.

With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.

Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they’re meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, “tiling” the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.

Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They’re made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.

Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE’s Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it’s based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS’ Pantheon DE. Then there’s Gnome, which I goddamn hate.

For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you’ll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.

Edit to add: It’s kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you’d install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It’s not a great idea but you can.

If you’re going through multiple condensers a decade you need a new air conditioner. From a different manufacturer operating on a different continent.

I do, I have this little Lenovo piece of manufactured ewaste that was capable of running Windows 10…in a perfectly flat frictionless vacuum. It briefly ran Fedora KDE, then I tried Fedora Gnome, which seemed more tablet friendly because the UI is big dumb iPad style, doesn’t make me hate Gnome any less. I may attempt KDE again.

Movie previews make sense to see before a movie. “Here are some other movies you might like to see later.”

The one I like is “Document it yourself.”

Hey, this application exposes a Python API to the user, where’s the API reference? How do I learn how to use it?

We didn’t write it.

Well…could you?

If you want it to exist, you write it.

How am I supposed to do that?

Examine the app’s source code.

openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.

I may have phrased that in a strange double negative way.

Modern mobile platforms like Android and iOS are sinister in a way that PalmOS wasn’t. PalmOS, becasue the devices weren’t connected to the internet much if at all, didn’t have the big brother always watching and trying to come up with new ways to exploit the user as is standard today.

There was a lack of sinisterness to the PalmOS ecosystem that we’ve lost.

Probably PalmOS.

Compared to whatever the Switch 2 runs…yeah 100%.

We put the fear of death in the music industry with Pentium 2 computers running Windows 98 and 56k dial up modems. They try to pull too much shit and we WILL do without them.

I find the amount of terminal usage a given distro requires depends mostly on the DE. Gnome is allergic to features so you’ll need to bash it more than KDE or Cinnamon, for example.

There was a time that Ubuntu was the distro for the masses! Their branding featured a bunch of diverse young people in casual clothing. That’s no longer the case. I outright recommend against it now.

Elaborate?

At least it’s better than Red Hat.

Here is the federal Energy Information Administration’s website stating the federal tax on gasoline is 18.3 cents per gallon. On top of that, states will add taxes on top. My state of North Carolina currently has a 40.65 cent per gallon tax on gasoline. Which works out to be 58.95 cents per gallon in tax.

9/10ths of a cent. It’s part of the tax.

What do you think Gnome Seahorse does? What utility function does that small piece of software perform, based on its name? I’ll give you a hint: It directly competes with KDE’s Kleopatra. Did you guess GPG and other encryption key generator/manager? Because that’s what those are for. Not sure how KDE kissed “Keyring.”

I’m not sure if it’s Gnome that started it, but file managers often have a nautical theme. Gnome Nautilus, Cinnamon Nemo, KDE Dolphin…