No shade to Gnome, because there is a place for them in the ecosystem, but this is why I moved from Gnome 2 to KDE (with a few stops along the way). One size will not fit all.

KDE for the desktop and xfce for the laptop

Huh, I hadn’t heard of CachyOS. It seems like everyone went Arch>Manjaro>EndeavorOS. It looks good from the screenshots and I like seeing my favorite DE/WMs in there. If I don’t know what any of those acronyms and technical terms on their page mean, would I still get something out of it? I’m about due for my every-few-months wipe and reinstall.

We’ve been on similar journeys. I started with Ubuntu Warty Warthog and happily remember all the desktop effects lost to time (emerald window decorations anybody?). I went through a Windows phase and settled back into Linux. My newest epoch is the age of self hosting and I’ve been learning a lot especially since the advent of Lemmy. I also play games, but I’ve been using a fully segregated Windows PC for that, though I’ve used Linux in the past.

The last time someone asked this question a lot of people said Mint packages are too out of date. I love Mint, I used Mint for several years, but the graphic driver stuff seems to depend on being very up to date. Someone else could probably explain it better than me. Perhaps it’s not relevant anymore, but I would look into it.

As for KDE, it’s really good now. I used to cling HARD to Gnome back in the old days and really disliked KDE, but things really got shaken up and KDE has been absurdly good for a few releases now. The steam deck even uses it. Also, a lot more distros seem to have releases for more than one desktop environment now. I guess what I’m trying to say is stuff you used to like may suck now and stuff that used to suck could be S-tier. Good luck getting back into Linux. Don’t get discouraged. It’s gotten a lot easier since old timers like us were hacking around on Ubuntu in the early 2000s.

I’ve been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I’ve tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven’t used either of them recently.

With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!

I’m in the same boat. I have to change it every now and then to break the visual fatigue of staring at the same theme for weeks. I miss Compiz with Emerald and whatever we were using 5-10 years ago. Themes are less transformative nowadays. I used to have crazy themed and now it’s hard to find something that isn’t just a recolor of a fairly plain theme.

Having said that, someone shared this great theme roundup here on Lemmy a while back. I used the purple one and now the Solaris color one. https://quickfix.es/2023/10/going-off-theme-the-prologue/

I think they are saying the other way around, their caps lock activates Ctrl. I have mine set up as a left hand backspace. KDE has a number of built in options for this where you just need to tick a box to activate it. I miss it a lot on my work PC (windows)

I have an XPS 13 9370 that has been great for my particular preferences. Having said that, I won’t buy another one. When it finally dies (on my third battery and still going strong) I will go for something more open, repairable, and Linux focused, maybe Framework or System76.

Get what you can afford. In many cases, Linux running on a potato will outperform and outlast a more expensive machine running windows for basic use tasks.

I never appreciated snapshots until I ran a server. I used to just install a new distro whenever anything significant went wrong. Now I use them everywhere.

I can’t switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit, the switch just reverts. I do think it looks beautiful and has weather stats that I use when I bike but other apps don’t always have (air quality, UV) .

The change was 95% unnoticed for me. I looked at the session one day and thought “oh yeah, I have been using Wayland”. I don’t mess with many games or AI GPU stuff though, so it may be that more complex use cases result in a worse experience.

I used the base model and it ran at a very acceptable speed with CPU only. Decent accuracy considering the recording was mediocre quality at best. Thank you for the suggestion.

I was able to quickly set up and use whisper (base) using Speech Note without issue and it saved me over 80% of what I would have had to manually do. Thank you for the recommendation.

Whisper worked for me. I’ll have to go back through and tag speakers and fox a few spots but you guys have saved me 80-90% of the work. Thank you.

Transcription of numerous voice mails and phone calls for a legal matter. Would like to supply transcripts with the audio files so we don’t have to pay as much time for the lawyer’s paralegals to review and decide what is actually going to be useful.

I like that terminology. I use some very high quality, high visibility FOSS software and sometimes feel bad that I more frequently donate to smaller projects that bring me value by filling a specific want or need that no one else is working on.

Yes, and the desktop is delightfully simple. Makes older hardware feel new but still looks good enough on modern hardware.

I hear you on the tiling. I wish my window arrangement on KDE was more keyboard based. As it is, I end up dragging and resizing across multiple monitors and workspaces.

I should have been more clear,

Assuming dev/sda is Linux and dev/sdb is Windows, I have grub on sda and Windows bootloader on sdb. I use a hotkey at boot to tell the bios which drive to boot from.

Theoretically windows thinks it’s the only OS unless it’s scoping out that second hard disk.

Is there any issue with having windows on one drive and Linux on the other and toggling in the bios at boot? Do I introduce any problems by keeping my rarely used windows installation on a separate disk like this?