Yeah this tracks, I don’t understand why people recommend Debian so much, especially to new users. Distros that update more regularly like Mint or Fedora (for non nvidia users) are much better options.

Image display is an important feature for me. If konsole supported it, I’d just use that. If I’m on a gnome system I’ll pretty much always change the terminal because gnome terminal has a lot of issues with font rendering that I find annoying

I used to prefer Gnome before the KDE 6 update due to the rough edges in KDE. After KDE 6 came out I’ve tried it again, and it’s incredible. The team has spent a lot of time on polish for this major release and it allows KDE’s suite of more fully featured applications to shine. GNOME apps like gedit, nautilus, and gnome terminal tend to provide the minimum level of functionality, whereas KDE’s applications feel like they’re trying to work for power users. Kate goes as far as supporting the LSP for code autocompletion. KDE’s desktop is much more customizable as well, so you don’t really need extensions to get the functionality you’d be looking for in GNOME, stuff like the application launcher are built in. KDE connect is a really useful application you can install on your phone to get file transfers and notification sharing, among other things, between your phone and computer while connect to the same local network. Performance wise they seem pretty equal, even on older hardware, but KDE might have a bit of an edge in terms of RAM usage, YMMV depending on how you customize the desktop. The one thing I miss about GNOME is their “start menu” experience, I haven’t found a way to replicate that in KDE, but I haven’t looked very hard either. Overall I wouldn’t hesitate recommending KDE, plasma 6 makes me actually feel like the Linux desktop is ready for mainstream.

Because until you spend many hours getting used to it, it’s annoying as hell. I’m a longtime bash user, but if I have to do anything in PowerShell, it sucks. Bash is even less friendly to novice/casual users due to tools like awk and sed being totally obtuse. When you’re unfamiliar with the workflow, not being to see everything you’re able to do at a glance is pretty frustrating.

I don’t really think it’s any of those things in particular. I think the problem is there are quite a few programmers who use OOP, especially in Java circles, who think they’re writing good code because they can name all the design patterns they’re using. It turns out patterns like Factory, Model View Controller, Dependency Injection etc., are actually really niche, rarely useful, and generally overcomplicate an application, but there is a subset of programmers who shoehorn them everywhere. I’d expect the same would be said about functional programming if it were the dominant paradigm, but barely anyone writes large applications in functional languages and thus sane programmers don’t usually come in contact with design pattern fetishists in that space.

Mullvad (and every other decent VPN) supports WireGuard and OpenVPN configurations that will be supported on any distro through the network settings without the need for additional software. It’s also pretty likely the mullvad client will be in the software center of whatever distro you’re using

NFS is generally the way network storage appliances are accessed on Linux. If you’re using a computer you know you’re going to be accessing files on in the long term it’s generally the way to go since it’s a simple, robust, high performance protocol that’s used by pros and amateurs alike. SSHFS is an abuse of the ssh protocol that allows you to mount a directory on any computer you can get an ssh connection to. You can think of it like VSCode remote editing, but it’ll work with any editor or other program.

You should be able to set up NFS with write caching, etc that will allow it to be more similar in performance to a local filesystem. Note that you may not want write caching specifically if you’re going to suddenly disconnect your laptop from the network without unmounting the share first. Your actual performance might not be the same, especially for large transfers, due to the throughput of your network and connection quality. In my general experience sshfs is kind of slow especially when accessing many different small files, and NFS is usually much faster.

If you’re on Linux I’d recommend using btrfs, or bcachefs with snapshots. It’s basically like time machine on MacOS. That way if you accidentally delete something you can still recover it.

Yeah, for this reason I would pretty much never encourage exceptions in Python over some other form of error handling. It’s so frustrating when called code throws some random exceptions that are completely undocumented. This is one of the few things Java got (sort of) right

Idk if this is really true, I don’t what situations you need to use the command line in Ubuntu or Fedora that would affect more than 10% of users max. You install packages through the store, wifi can be managed through the gui, external drives mount automatically. Imo this should cover the use case for almost everyone.