Cinnamon for 2 reasons

1. KDE is missing a lot of features which still only works in Gnome. Like the taskbar Calendar app syncing events with services like Google Calendar

2. cinnamon is extremely stable and doesn’t move your icons around when you connect to an external display with your laptop and the display has a different resolution.

You loose out on automatic updates and not all packages are easy to build. I am not personally familiar with building Gimp. But I’ve tried to build other projects from GitHub only to get errors I couldn’t decipher.

It’s a skill which not many have.

Debian/Ubuntu/Mint packages are always older and only get updated once everything is stable.

If you are looking for more up to date packages I would recommend using FlatPaks or AppImages since they are usually maintained by the devs and kept up to date.

I agree, however if the price is making your nervous try a Factory Seconds Framework. We noticed no issues with on our end and it’s cheaper.

Sure you get a 11th gen Intel, but the performance is still good enough for indi games and more than enough for surfing the web

So I have a Framework 13 AMD with Mint. Framework on older firmware isn’t the best, but with Mint 22 and by extension 24.04 it’s fine.

Got mine back in December and had no issues with the installation process. Games play fine though the fan goes to 100% after a bit. But with power profile in 22.1 it can quiet the machine down.

Other than that and the occasional hiccup. Compared to other laptops it’s the best machine I’ve used. So far no issues with only a few times of opening the terminal to fix minor issues.

Trying to avoid apps with subscriptions. The way I see it, it’s a question of when not if they change how the app works.

I 100% agree, and have Fusion360 in my VM. But there is a method to FreeCAD’s madness and once you get it, FreeCAD begins to make sense.

I found it hard to go back to fusion especially with the amount of control I had with my designs.

Also FreeCAD V1 is out, and it’s a marked improvement over their previous releases. Might be worth a try.

Being able to sync music or movies to my iPhone/iPad. More of an Apple issue than Linux, yet Mac/PC is compatible.

VLC does work, but since it’s not how Apple wants you to use your device it’s not as convincing nor flushed out.

It does but from my testing only on impossible shapes. Like two triangles mirrored at the tip with a width of 0.

It has other issues still, but the app is stable.

Is it decent ? Yes

Should I look elsewhere? Also yes.

CAD is difficult to understand on a good day, and FreeCAD is a beginner unfriendly implementation of it.

I personally love it and it’s an excellent tool if you already know what you are doing. If you don’t, it’s a mess of screens and spaces with no rhyme or reason.

My two cents. Learn CAD first, Google Sketchup or Fusion 360 are good and beginner friendly with lots of tutorials. Then move to FreeCAD to learn the differences.

That said if you want to just try FreeCAD, this release is the best I’ve used from them.

Here’s the guide I used: https://www.standingpad.org/posts/2024/06/affinity-on-linux/

The only thing I did differently was I used this yaml to make the container: https://gist.github.com/gnat/8b69cf49b68e2349afe5e8cb5af49bf8

There’s a bit of tinkering afterwards, but it runs.

Pretty stable from my testing, outside of a few crashes when I was asking too much of it.

That said Inkscape/gimp/kirta are good alternatives if you are in the market.

While it’s a pain to setup, Affinity does work in Bottles and a specific build of Wine. Not easy to do, but it’s possible.

Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.

For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.

In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.

In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.

Can’t remember any more, either it was installed along side another package, or it was installed because of intel openCL support. Either way it’s been over a year since my last Manjaro install borked, and I’ve been running (and upgraded) Linux Mint.

For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.

It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.

I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)

Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system… Then it crash and bricked the install… 3 times.

Anyways I’m on Mint now.

Depends on the distro.

I found Linux Mint good enough for 99% of things, and most problems can be solved without a terminal.

Problem is you’d still need to know enough about Linux (just like with windows) to troubleshoot. For example, the files app was causing an error when plugging in drives, I need to figure out that the files app wasn’t call files, but nemo, it’s config lived in a hidden folder called .config in my home folder, and in .config I could delete my configuration to fix my issue.

In my view Linux is about Windows XP or 7 in terms of usability, a bit of a learning curve, but one worth learning.

A few modern improvements which makes using Linux easier.

Use Flatpaks where possible, it’s platform agnostic and usually supported by the actual devs.

AppImages (think portable exe for windows), are another option, but to “install” them you’d need an app called Gear Lever.

Check with an apps developer before installing, flatpaks can be packaged by anyone, and they might loose support (steam for example is installable via Deb not flatpak).