“We may have been on the losing side, still not convinced it was the wrong one.” --Captain Malcolm Reynolds

Added bonus is that it runs MegaMek natively

This is always a fun thing to read in the wild. Keep on stompin’, MechWarrior! O7 (salute)

Gentoo might have been quite a leap! :p I wanna try it some day as a challenge but it’s def intimidating.

I run Tumbleweed on my main rig and love how crazy stable it is for being cutting edge. Endeavour OS is also cool for this. Both great communities too.

But agree with you on Mint. It’s just a really nice smooth experience. So far it’s on my “little media laptop I won’t update much, need to be reliable, and will probably hand to family on occasion”, and I can trust it’s just gonna work.

Okay but at the end of the day it’s not like you’re Tony Stark making Jericho missiles.

Linux, encryption, the Internet, heck, computers, are so generalized as a technology that the burden of sin lies with whomever would pervert these tools against their fellow man.

I’ve heard of Palantir, now Anduril… What’s next, Saruman Ltd.? Uruk-Hai-corp? Poor Tolkien doesn’t deserve his mythology being co-opted by war profiteers. :(

All the Deus Ex games go for ridiculously cheap and are such a great fun-per-dollar ratio IMHO.

Yes, even Invisible War, if one embraces its weird consoley quirks. XD (bias: I enjoyed it on my OG Xbox back in the day. Universal ammo is so stupid though.)

Still gotta play Mankind Divided. I hope they finish the series one day. They absolutely nailed it with the iconic aesthetic, and Adam Jensen is just so freaking cool. :)

After a while I finally picked up Parkitect. I’ve been having a blast with OpenRTC2 lately, and everyone says if you like Rollercoaster Tycoon, Parkitect really follows that idea.

Still burning through the old school games, but I’m excited to play this one! Especially with workshop support.

Haha so many times I’ve heard stuff playing that sounds catchy in like random sandwich shops, and hunt down where I can get a clear detection on it.

It’s actually pretty impressive what the average smartphone mic can pick up … For better and worse. =\

But I’ve found some favorite songs that way. It beats the old days of trying really hard to discern some words in the lyrics and hoping a search engine would help!

It even works for the music library!? Jellyfin is crazy rad.

by calling MS support.

Which hopefully wasn’t a 1-800 number flashing obnoxiously on the screen. 😂

In an alternate timeline Fireworks MX went open source and people might use one or the other but everyone’s happy. Lol

if they changed the workflow to be like Photoshop, it would leave those of us who know how to use Gimp but not Photoshop high and dry

That’s a VERY good point. I think a good example would be how Blender has evolved in the last decade or so.

It started out very “in-house” and unconventional, but it had very specific UX principles in mind rather than just aping “ThE iNdUsTrY”. Coming from learning 3D MAX to OG pre-3.5 Blender was really difficult. Right-click select?!

But like Blender, I feel like GIMP could benefit from having easily adjustable settings that could line up with what a particular user finds intuitive. Certain layer behavior seems to be the big one here. The settings are there, they’re just awkwardly small buttons or buried in menus.

(Adding the universal transform tool was a VERY nice jump in the right direction.)

Blender’s UI / UX overhaul caused a bit of screeching, but overall was instrumental in balancing accessibility with familiarity to existing users. It made those options very accessible and modular.

For instance, I always use left-click-select, but I use the “Blender way” for everything else. If someone’s coming from Maya? There’s the “industry standard keymap” for them.

Sorry for the ramble. LOL

I mean, a FOSS aligned company is profitable! 🔼

B-but it’s also Purism with all those customer horror stories and sketchy behavior. 🔽

I’m confused, okay!? 🔃

That’s really cool! I put my wife on Pop_OS recently and it’s been a little bumpy, but she’s also got a bit of a specialty laptop. Glad it’s been smooth for you :).

I really like your aesthetic, btw, how the wallpaper fits with your launch bar. Really pleasant!

Wish I had some advice for you, but heck, thanks for starting the thread because (after sifting highly opinionated goofposts) I’m learning a lot too. :)

I still wonder what that’s like. Somebody must still occasionally get a notification that SOMEWHERE somebody paid for their WinRAR license and is like “WOAH WE GOT ANOTHER ONE!”

Never looked back since 7z though. :D

“I’d just like to interject for a moment…”

WHY’S-YOUR-DESKTOP-A-3D-CUBE

I WANTED TO!

I’m surprised and impressed it made it to the bin outlet!

I keep trying to keep an ear out for these fabled “IT cycles” where companies will just dump Dells and Thinkpads once in a while, but have never been privvy to one myself.

Maybe indystry caught on and switched procedure, realizing they weren’t creating enough e-waste /s lol.

(To be fair, the last place I worked donated their laptops for tax breaks, which is good I guess. But wouldn’t let me even buy one off them, so I’m salty lol.)

Plasma “get new stuff” does need an overhaul though, after a poorly-coded theme could wipe a guy’s drives. So careful what you install and always have backups, kids!

THAT BEING SAID:

I remember Win98 letting you customize wallpapers for individual folders.

I remember being a Win-ME kiddie that was thrilled with all the fun wallpaper/icon/sound/screensaver themes it came with. . .even though Windows ME lol.

Then XP was so bright and vibrant and fun I didn’t care too bad that it let you choose from THREE dazzling color schemes. I also loved that StarDock cursor freeware that gave me a bunch of obnoxious animated cursors.

Vista’s desktop applets seemed so neat except for the “massive security hole” part.

And here we are with 10 or 11: [Pulsing blue light] “We’Re sEtTiNg Up YoU’Re bLaNd DeSkToP…get hypnotized by spinny circles and forget you once had choices.”

It’s going so backwards, and they think they’re so ahead of the curve by letting you tint your theme based on wallpaper color. Pffft.

Since I switched to Plasma I’ve had SO MUCH FUN setting up my desktop however I want it. I have a laptop install that feels like “Vaporwave XP”, but my main rig is all efficient and sleek and pretty, and I get the urge to flip it all around every few months. It makes personal computing feel personal again!

Mimicking old themes is especially fun because you’re still on a security-patched system that works the way you expect, but with improved nostalgic feelings!

I really want to learn to make my own splash screens and icons and cursors some time. The fact that I easily can do this and the community could enjoy them is SO COOL.

I miss when it was commonplace for people to customize and personalize their computers. It would say a lot about them. Now most normie folk don’t even know how to change the wallpaper…

This is exactly why I always tell myself it’ll be super fun and easy to replace a Linux distro on one of my machines, and I do the fun part of balancing release style, desktop environment, all the shiny stuff…know what stops me dead in my tracks upon install?

Deciding a file system. Because it feels like such a weighty decision with far-reaching effects.

According to internet research, they’re all the right one, they’re all the wrong one, they’re all just fine, and don’t use any of them because they’ll wipe all your data. Lol

Your documentation on file system choice is either anecdotal or engineering-masters-thesis, seemingly no in-between.

I’ve just decided BTRFS with snapshots is great, and keep good enough backups that I shouldn’t have to fiddle with the fanciest deep-knowledge features to save my system.

Might be my ADHD as well. XD

Totally feel ya on Mint. I put it on my X230 just now because I wasn’t planning on booting it up too often and didn’t want a massive update causing issues down the line. Super stable, super user friendly. I always recommend it to newcomers. Lovely experience!

Haha yeah Tumbleweed is an interesting name. Suppose it’s because it’s always “rollin’ rollin’ rollin’”. Constantly in motion!

I’d caution against it on low-data capped internet plans for instance, because it updates fairly often, sometimes 1GB or more. But also plenty of people update like once a week and it’s good. I update pretty much every day. It’s kinda compulsive for me and I like to see if anything is fixed or new. :p

So that’s one cool thing it has over *buntu and friends: Newest and shiniest features, but they’ve been tested a bit more thoroughly than on something like Arch, and if it does go bad, you can boot into a “snapshot” and wait until a newer update hopefully fixes whatever borked it.

But I haven’t had to roll back in ages. :)

I like keeping on the edge of KDE6 right now because it’s improving very quickly. Same with Wayland, even though some programs are still fussy with it. (You can have X11 and Wayland both, and choose which to use upon login)