try element x, it has been fine for me

It is, but it works fine even if you aren’t a gamer

What exactly is easier about the installation than my suggestion?

the fedora community is just as large as the mint community, and just as well supported.

i’m not telling you to switch, I’m saying there’s no reason to start with it if you haven’t tried linux before. Switching is a much bigger choice because you are already comfortable.

Why would a beginner who isn’t already comfortable choose mint?

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite or aurora if you don’t like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

compared to gnome, absolutely.

Feel free to message me on matrix with questions, it’s on my profile and I do free infinite troubleshooting

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# get hyprland event socket path
HIS=$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE
EVENT_SOCK="$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HIS/.socket2.sock"

# fallback / error check
if [ -z "$HIS" ] || [ ! -S "$EVENT_SOCK" ]; then
  echo "Error: cannot locate Hyprland event socket at $EVENT_SOCK" >&2
  exit 1
fi

logfile="${HOME}/hypr_focus.log"

# function to handle a line from the event stream
handle_event() {
  local line="$1"
  # check for activewindow event
  if [[ $line == activewindow* ]]; then
    # format: activewindow>>CLASS,TITLE
    # strip prefix
    local payload=${line#activewindow>>}
    # split on comma (first comma)
    local cls="${payload%%,*}"
    local title="${payload#*,}"
    local ts
    ts=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
    echo "$ts — $title (class: $cls)" >> "$logfile"
  fi
  # optionally handle activewindowv2 if you want address instead
  # if [[ $line == activewindowv2* ]]; then
  #   ...
  # fi
}

# listen to the socket
socat -u "UNIX-CONNECT:$EVENT_SOCK" - | while IFS= read -r line; do
  handle_event "$line"
done

honestly if you’re willing to do some work you can make hyprland do almost anything

**disclaimer i did not test this much

edit: forgot about the screenshot part, should be easy to add though, just add screenshotting everytime focus changes with grim or whatever

Are you deadset on gnome because this would be crazy easy on hyprland

Tbh all I care about is low dependencies and performance, dunno if that’d help

I worked hard to make it this unreadable

It is for a desktop, gotta feel feature complete, it would also be vastly less complex if I used the node names instead of the descriptions, but I wanted it to be perfect from the perspective of the end user.

I don’t like doing that because i’m working on nixos which already makes it complicated but i also have a script that fully sets up my entire system and that would add some complexity to that, plus i just have a strange aversion to making it a bash script purely because it would be the only common function in my setup that’s on a bash script

and it wouldn’t be that hard to convert it to one for future debugging anyway

you could make it cli only by replacing tofi with a cli menu

That’s tofi, the dmenu alternative I’m using, I set its height and width, the oga is a media file, that plays the same ding as a volume change so you know what sink you’re playing from now.

feel free to replace tofi with dmenu or whatever

I highly recommend mull and learning how to use vopono, it’s an incredible combination.

interesting, thank you.

It really is spotify’s killer feature for me, probably won’t switch to something that doesn’t have it.

Spotify has a feature where if it is playing on another device, you can control it with any other device logged into the account, is there any good way to replicate this with a linux desktop and an android phone?

Just use cosmic on another distro?

these are hurdles that exist for enterprise users not ones that exist for typical desktop users who want things like “why can’t i see the names of the windows on the bar”

enterprise users expect to not have things be exactly the way they want and don’t complain as much about customization needs