• main thing to keep in mind is that a window manager is normally just one component of a desktop environment – full desktop environments like Gnome go to great lengths to assemble a whole fleet of apps to work together to make a cohesive experience
• if you’re going to forego the full desktop environment, then expect to have to fill in on the various missing pieces to suit your needs (file manager, terminal, text editor, clipboard manager, bar/panel/dock)
• if you just want lighter weight but maintain a cohesive experience, then Xfce or LXQt
• otherwise, there are a LOT of choices (both for X11 and for Wayland)
• tiling window managers
  • i3 on X or Sway on Wayland are probably the most popular
    • special mention: Regolith – pairs Sway on the front end with Gnome components underneath
  • dwm for the full do-it-yourself experience
  • awesome if you like Lua, xmonad if you like Haskell, exwm if you live in Emacs, Qtile if you like Python
• stacking window managers
  • Openbox for the old school feel, LabWC as the Wayland successor
  • IceWM and JWM for a minimal experience (both show up regularly on Raspberry Pi)
  • Motif for the retro enthusiast

search for information when Google intentionally lies to you and hides results to keep you on their site looking at ads longer …

along those same lines, used Chromebooks – Google ends support after only a couple years so school districts all over the place are generally stuck with palettes of e-waste

(don’t know how amenable they are to individuals versus corporations (or just affordability in general), but a recent news article mentions Ukraine is looking at Govsatcom, Eutelsat, and Iris2)

(one of the older tropes in Linux-land is giving new life to old hardware just by replacing Windows with Linux)

(one advantage of Flatpaks over AppImage is Flatpaks bundle their libraries – most AppImages won’t run on musl libc systems)

(there’s also an older, but still working, protocol called packet radio – does require a bit more technical expertise though)

an extreme option could be something like the Varvara / Uxn virtual machine by the Hundred Rabbits collective (created after having to deal with Adobe updates and Xcode updates over a barely functioning cell connection) – emulators are available for all sorts of hardware

blog: Weathering Software Winter | youtube: Weathering Software Winter

also !selfhosted@lemmy.world (most active) and !selfhosting@slrpnk.net (less active)

with the majority here, I just use distro default / automatic setup in installer

LONG ago, I did the whole hand-crafted thing, obsessing over exactly how large each partition had to be, but with increasing speed and lowering prices of storage, this attention to detail now seems pretty irrelevant:

• hda split into /boot, /tmp, (swap), /, /opt, /usr, /var
• hdb split into (swap) and /home

Offpunk

(technically a console browser – Debian installed size 352 KB)

mpv for the win

but if you really want your ASCII conversion: mpv --vo=caca or mpv --vo=tct

when the last message was “Have taken up farming.”, kinda hard to hold anything against them …

this was me watching some of the cheering when neofetch got archived, people complaining “good, neofetch is too slow” – WTF were you doing with neofetch where speed was a factor?!

• yet another vote for Debian Stable
• second the comment on: if you need a newer kernel for hardware reasons, use backports
• Xfce
• stick to flatpaks when dealing with wanting to try out a new program (if you like it, then make the decision to use apt or not)
• don’t confuse “hasn’t been updated” with “hasn’t needed to be updated”

this is one of the things that struck me about email clients on Linux – CLI and GUI clients have followed two very different evolutionary paths – the CLI clients went for the “doing one job well” path (where you end up assembling a whole system of apps for sending and receiving email) and the GUI clients went for the “everything and the kitchen sink” path (where you end up trying to hide half the options so they don’t get in your way)

“Don’t anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.”

additionally Brodie Robertson did a video about Malibal banning countries back in October: Youtube, PeerTube

with one post, Malibal turned itself into a joke

• but corporate policy is to let IT handle updates
• but Windows doesn’t like being ignored so it bypasses group policy and auto-updates

original generation of COBOL programmers where expecting their programs to be replaced (or at least rewritten) within a decade or so – and then Y2K and we realized how much COBOL was still in the wild – and now a couple decades down the line, they’re still having problems trying to convince fintech to switch from COBOL to the new language of Java …