What do you mean “have to?” These companies are making money hand over fist, not paying a large portion of their employees a livable wage, and choose to spy on us for extra profit.

Arch is absolutely easy to break. But it’s also easy to not break.

I’ve been using it for years, only reinstall when I get a new computer (could image, but meh) or when I’m changing desktop environments. This last time when I switched to KDE, I installed Cachy. It’s fine, but it’s a bit less control that I’d rather have. So when I switch back to Cosmic, Lab WC, or XFCE I’ll go back to Arch.

And to be clear, the loss of control isn’t entirely loss of control. It’s defaults that I don’t like, built up by someone else. It puts me into subtractive mode to remove and replace, whereas with Arch proper it’s more fully additive, installing and configuring what I want on a very very streamlined base.

Yeah, I have almost no apps on my phone now. Breezy Weather, Firefox Focus, Comaps, Stratum for MFA, Signal, and a few other things. I rarely use any of it, except I check Breezy Weather once a day (better than anything I’ve found on the web). Signal seems to finally be removing the phone requirement, and I could move MFA to my password manager. I rarely turn on mobile data, and I get 6-8 days battery on my Pixel 9a running Graphene.

But, it’s really nice to have if I get lost when I’m in town. I can go from ruining my day, which being autistic, tends to snowball into a week or so, to pulling out my phone and getting everything back on track.

That said, I used to constantly have my face in a reddit app, have YNAB and all my banking apps, and rely on it for just about everything. I don’t need all that. I take my receipts home, I bank from my laptop, I bought a DAP for my music, Pocketbook for reading, etc.

That said, I’d like to move music back to it once I get a phone with an SD card that will run an OS I’m happy with. I’m optimistic for the Motorola phone with Graphene support. And I’d like to use it to control MPD or Navidrome at home, start getting some Home Assistant stuff running with it for control, and spin up an open source alternative to YNAB that I can run an app for.

It took me years to get to this point where I feel like I can start using it for actually useful stuff, and not be tempted to have it take over my life. Of course, now RAM and disk are too expensive for me to build the little hyperconverged cluster I want to run those services.

Yup, I jumped around a lot early on, but Debian was home. It’s hard to break if you follow the Debian way, and it’s definitely stable. I still use it for server and lab stuff, because I can write a doc and come back in 18 months and is still largely reproducible.

I’ve used a LOT of distros over the years, and Arch is home now (technically Cachy at the moment), but Debian is probably my second favorite. Fedora is 3rd, for user friendly polish.

It’s better than the OSS days, at least. And I dare say Pipewire is better in most situations than Alsa, can’t really speak for Jack. It’s really trying to be that unifying, centralizing force that allows us to move past the Frankenstein mess. But, well…

I believe the search term you’re looking for is ‘multi-seat’.

I was thinking the same with my 7840u. Could try something a bit more cutting edge than Mint, though I will admit I have no idea how up to date they keep the kernel these days. Though if they live boot, they’re removing the SSD and likely qtile from the equation, so it’s a bit tricky to isolate.

Yes, but CachyOS might not be, and while it does a bit to make things substantially easier for your friend, you’ll have a lot of familiarity with it as an Arch user.

Source: An Arch user for 15 years who just installed CachyOS when I wanted to switch from Cosmic to KDE.

In my experience, it’s usually power users or basic users with very specific application requirements, who have trouble moving between operating systems. There’s usually a FOSS alternative to those applications, but often requires reworking a workflow or upskilling more than they want to. But they’re still basic users so it’s more a speed bump than a road block.

So yeah, most people can switch to MacOS without an issue, and the vast majority of those can switch to a distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and quickly feel comfortable.

Power users get stuck in this situation where they’ve learned how to do advanced things in Windows, have things tweaked to support more complex and peculiar workflows, but often don’t understand the actual concepts behind them. And even if they do understand the concepts, they still have to learn the alternatives in a new OS, and rebuild their workflows. Now, there’s a lot more ability to learn behind the scenes about the why and how with Linux and BSD, so I’d argue they’d be better off to just suck it up and get started, and they’ll be better off before long.

I’m with you. I’ve never really liked the look of QT, but I think I’m going to go for it anyway. It’s always felt more plasticky and artificial, compared to GTK feeling more grounded and earthy. Plus, KDE has always felt cluttered in every way they can clutter it. So I was into the boxes (I was partial to fluxbox) and XFCE back in the day. Played with Gnome 3 a bit, had a cyclical love and ultimately hate relationship with it, but got hung up on Gnome as the best option when I wanted to switch to Wayland.

I’ve been using Cosmic since January, and I like it, but I’m left wanting more out of it. I was thinking of spinning my own environment with LabWC, but… meh. It’s a lot of work, and I want something more integrated.

I’ve been using KDE in Asahi on my Macbook Air a bit, and I guess I could use it more. But I don’t really use that machine a ton, either. Mostly for it’s better speakers than my Thinkpad, and I have it connecting a VPN automatically until I can be bothered to switch from iwd/systemd to network manager on my primary.

God I wish Gnome would change it’s tune, and stop being so militantly simplistic. The idea of extensions is great, but using a rolling release distro is rough when you’re relying on a bunch of extensions to make your DE suitable. I really like their approach to UX at it’s foundation. Cosmic is showing a lot of promise, and has that configurability built in, and I do look forward to where it goes. but it’s going to have this problem where a lot of the software that looks best in it is libadwaita, which enforces drastically different UX.

Ah, now I remember why I bought the Macbook.

Evolution being just a little bit clunky is a massive improvement from the Gnome 2 and early Gnome 3 days, for what it’s worth.

Thanks, I’ll have to sit my ass at my desk so I can try it again. I wonder if there’s much delta between what you’re using and the beta I’m on from Extra. Though it does look like there are some new betas in Extra-Testing.

I’ll need to give tiling another try, I started using alpha 5 back in January and there were some pretty nasty bugs in tiling mode back then that made me think maybe a memory leak or something. After 15-20 minutes performance would get horrible until switching back to floating, though I’m fuzzy on the details.

Is there any capability to leave an open space? Honestly, I like tiling more for the orderliness above and beyond snapping than the dynamism. Aaaaaand that’s reminding me why I was looking at building out a LabWC environment, it has configurable snap zones.

I started dabbling in around 2000, getting sick of the instability of Windows, and it seeming like the next logical step of geekdom.

I tried a LOT of distros. Mandrake, Connectiva, Red Hat to Fedora Core, Slackware, Debian Woody, Crux, etc etc. I drifted in a Debian-centric circle until I finally landed on Arch. Lost my way for a bit during my IT career, supporting Windows I ended up just using that. But I’m back to Arch now as my daily, Debian for some networking projects, and a bit of Fedora from time to time when I need to spin something up quick.

Not really for the purpose of this thread, since pretty much anything can do what OP is asking, but any idea how the Juno Tab compares to the Starlabs Starlite in regards to build quality, cooling, and what not? I noticed the other day that the Starlite has been updated with an N350 CPU. Though it is up to a $765 starting price…

Once or twice a year I start thinking it would be nice to have a tablet. Then within a month I wonder wtf I want a tablet for.

This really puts some perspective on things. He’s clearly a goa’uld.

It might be because DSM-V was released in 2013.

It’s probably not a good idea to believe that. Even if they do fight for you behind closed doors, which I doubt, they will still have to bow to large governments for the sake of their shareholders. That’s the world we live in right now.

I’m on Graphene on a Pixel 8 right now, but I really don’t trust the overall direction that Google is pulling AOSP, nor the closed security chip in Pixel phones. I’m trying to decide if I want to stick with AOSP with a non-Pixel device, or give some form of non-Android Linux phone a shot. The Jolla C2 is looking intriguing, but getting one in the US isn’t the easiest thing. I’ve also considered a Shiftphone 8.1 and Fairphone 6, but I’d want to run Calyx, and the future is murky. The Shiftphone is also tricky to get in the US, as is Volla which comes with an AOSP OS without Google services.

Shift and Volla are closer than Nothing, I’d say. OnePlus, like you said in another comment, belongs nowhere near that list anymore.

But I have a feeling privacy and security minded folks are going to be moving more towards Linux phones (I know Android uses a Linux kernel) over the next few years, as Android continues to get locked down, and cater to government surveillance.

Is it still relying on Halium?

Edit: It seems it does use Halium

https://liliputing.com/flx1s-is-a-new-linux-phone-thats-mostly-a-downgrade-from-the-flx1/

I think I’ll keep looking into importing a Jolla C2.