I’m a monthly donor to KDE EV and to the Mozilla Foundation.

Bash

Not because it’s the best or even my favourite. Just because I create so many ephemeral VMs and containers that code switching isn’t worth it for me.

FWIW Plasma 5.27 works very well on Wayland with AMD GPUs. The fact that desktop mode uses x11 is probably not related to them still using Plasma 5. I would guess once KDE announces an LTS version of Plasma 6 (possibly as early as 6.2?) they’ll upgrade Steam OS to that.

Kubuntu

Probably the black sea, dad.

The best version of the Signal app was back when it was available as an actual web app.

It’s because it’s an electron app. So in addition to the chat app itself, it also includes a full Chromium runtime. Worse still, the Electron architecture doesn’t really lend itself towards reusing electron itself; this means you might have several copies of the same version of electron on your machine for various apps.

People complain about the sizes of things like flatpaks and snaps, but tbh the whole architecture of applications is like this these days. Ironically, flatpaks and snaps could help with this because their formats can work decently with filesystem level deduplication.

Yeah that’s solidly it. I use strictly confined CLI snaps all the time. (In fact, I maintain the snaps for a couple of CLI apps.) They work fine as long as the snap has the right plugs.

But I don’t want to have to run flatpak run dev.htop.htop to get to htop.

I’ve installed Gentoo from a stage1 install. I’ve kept the same KDE Neon install running for over a decade, including moving the 3 SSDs that made up the install to another desktop.

But I’ve never managed to successfully bootstrap an arch system.

EA is continuing to do what they’ve always done - attempt to suck up as much money as possible. It just so happens that for once they think being less shitty is the best way to do it. Don’t hold your breath about this being a trend.

Given that Valve has been one of the driving forces for certain gaming-related Wayland changes, I’m guessing we’ll continue seeing this for a while.

(Funnily enough, some of these changes were things that NVIDIA first proposed that got rejected, but coming from an organisation with a better reputation people were more open to hearing it. Although I’d guess Valve were also more open about why the changes were needed rather than Nvidia’s “trust us bro” answers.)

Yeah the XFCE dunking of KDE doesn’t even make sense these days - a fresh XFCE system has similar memory use to a fresh Plasma desktop with similar features.

(To be clear: the only one of those dunks I actually feel was deserved was the dunk on gnome.)

I’ve got a desktop that got a dirty install of KDE Neon when the repositories first got put up (before there were isos). Been in-place upgrading it ever since.

Yep! Most of us are even homo sapiens!

Kubuntu works well on mine. A friend has Lubuntu on his.

Yeah, the market for those handhelds seems to be people who either specifically want Windows or want better specs (or think they want that), but don’t mind the trade-offs.

Honestly, I’m not too sure how much price goes into it. I’ve used several of the Steam Deck competitors, each with better specs. But each has a worse overall experience. Each of the people I know with one of the competitors seldom uses it. But even the people with Steam Decks who planned to use theirs only for travel have ended up using them far more than they intended. My Steam Deck has become my primary gaming machine. I’m not sure how a hardware company competes there without working with a major game store, but I don’t really see Valve being particularly opposed to working with hardware companies to provide Steam OS builds for competing hardware since it pushes their platform.

Personally, I don’t think Epic is in a position to make a really feasible Steam Deck competitor, partially because they’ve gone all-in on Windows, and the break from Windows is one of the things that’s allowed the Steam Deck to have its great experience. The only company who can really customise Windows to that extent is Microsoft, and they’d likely rather make an Xbox handheld than work with Epic on a Windows-based one.

With 20+ years of using various Unix OS’s as my primary OS, I can say for sure that my answer to “vi or emacs?” is “neither.”

I keep flip-flopping between Kate and pycharm community. I prefer Kate’s LSP access, but pycharm’s management of multiple projects is great.

I wish I could easily set up Kate so it would open random text documents in a separate session from my session that’s running a certain project. And I wish it were aware of whether a session is running on the same activity. (In fact what I’d really like is per-activity Kate sessions).

Trouble is, I’m not good enough at C++ to make a merge request for those features.