1- linux 10 years ago and now are completely different beasts; I’m mainly referring to issues with making drivers work. if you have vanilla hardware, boot off a liveUSB stick and the vast majority of stuff just works.

2- you are absolutely on point on linux being noob-adverse and its users (although predominantly well-intentioned) can’t relate to people who aren’t into complex setup, shell commands and such.

3- you’d do well to steer clear of unconventional distros and stick to the middle of the road solutions, which is, and for the foreseeable future will be, Ubuntu. once everything works and you’re satisfied with the functionality, you’re free to distro-hop and switch DEs and whatnot.

4- steer clear from multi-booting different OS, that’s an advanced user scenario, and like with choosing your distro you need the vanillaest possible scenario - one disk, whole disk, nothing else.

I appreciate that funds might be tight, but a new SSD is under $20, used ones even less than that. disconnect all your existing drives (so you have a fallback solution), connect the new drive, install to it using the whole drive. your experience will change dramatically, we’re talking like 20x faster; making stuff work on a slow-as-molasses USB stick is just a horror scenario.

5- if you want concrete advice, instead of general observations, include your hardware - CPU, graphics, storage; some things are easier, some not, some are not even worth trying.

hang in there.

Fedora, Plasma, Breeze theme (gets changed from light to dark and vice versa on sunrise/sundown)

that’s with “System theme - auto”? I know I can use another theme, but this one changes with the system, bright during the day, dark at night.

edit:

marginally better with light theme.

found reddit threads discussing this, on windows it’s solved with a driver update. since I’m on latest wine, mesa, and everything, guess it is what it is…

I wish everyone and OP included would begin with their hardware, or at least mentioning if it’s a Nvidia system. if it is, I’ll just disregard everything written in regards to glitches and crashes.

my (all AMD, F41) system gets updated and rebooted like once a month, if I remember (flatpaks are on an auto-update timer); it gets suspended in the evening and woken in the morning, tons of apps are open for days. that’s a month-long uptime on a workstation that also does gaming, with those same apps open in the background. this was impossible on Gnome - just randomly closes all apps and here’s your login screen. OOM? driver? who knows - alls I know is, since the switch that happened zero times.

nothing obvious in the settings; that’s just me saying random shit, trying to remember what it was. it ain’t the AA, tried all three settings, same same.

oh, of course, sorry if I came off harsh. it’s just, I escaped Gnome’s gigantic title bars and useless buttons in it occupying like half the screen, and couldn’t wait to turn it all off in Konsole, so I’m kinda baffled with anyone having them on. just FYI, check out the keyboard shortcuts for Konsole and you’ll boost your productivity considerably.

edit: this one’s mine. there are many like it but this one’s mine.

I so want to make Kate happen, but everytime I try to replace vscodium with it I get showstoppers. presently it handles my ansible stuff OK and I still get issues with complex javascript and django stuff, but I’m not giving up, keep up the good work!

for what purpose? if it’s just bypassing your ISP, a free VPS + wireguard and you’re golden.

paywall.

also, tether is a ponzi scheme on like five different levels and that’s before mexican cartels even begin to enter the picture. it’s propping up the buttcoin “economy” because the right kinda people got suitcases of money and it is allowed to print new tokens to their heart’s content.

please post if you decide on it. I’ve noped out and went with a $50 used phone; no CalyxOS for me, but I find plain LineageOS works just fine for me.

first off chill out, Jason Bourne.

the threat mitigation is handled based on your threat model, not on a “defend all bases against anyone” approach. once you answer what your specific model is, then you can start building your defences. if your threat model is spouse looking through your shit, a password is more than adequate. if it’s the border nazis CBP, you go for encryption at rest. if it’s a toddler walking around the house smashing stuff, none of those will do you any good.

there are people with complex threat models but I doubt they post on lemmy and they def don’t scour the classifieds for used Thinkpads. the idea that there are threat actors out there infecting random devices and then see what they catch is… def possible, but highly unlikely.

you’re perfectly safe using a 2nd hand enterprise-class laptop, like a Thinkpad, Elitebook, or Latitude, wiped clean. those are tough and resilient devices built for road warriors for everyday, heavy use. the good thing is, they get periodically swapped out for new models, so they can be had for cheap, and a huge majority of those haven’t seen a lick of any significant use.

those devices are worlds apart from the laptops you’re advocating buying (I assume you mean the consumer-class models) and definitely way cheaper, like a couple times over, while being infinitely expandable and serviceable with cheap, widely available and cross-generation compatible parts.

the final part is compartmentalisation and fungibility of devices. keep the minimum stuff you need on there, assume they will break, get lost or stolen, so encryption is mandatory, and have a tried and tested backup and restore procedure in place.

I’ve noted the product families specifically and what I wrote applies to them only, not every used device everywhere.

I’m sorry, I gotta - you have the menu on AND the button bar? like, why? you click on those things? you got your screen real-estate on a sale, what?

uh, yeah, Imma pass. the way I understood it, I should build LineageOS from source specifically for the AVD and that might work. that’s just too much hassle. running jellyfin-media-player in TV fullscreen mode works just fine for me. thanks anyway!

I do. I have a daily folder, weekly and reread, apart from the usual categories for long-term storage. “daily” gets the current stuff, “weekly” gets opened once a week, and “reread” is for stuff I read but didn’t really absorb. thanks to firefox sync I can read all of that form tablet or desktop or whatever.

stole it from Cory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/

in the morning I middle-click on “daily” and it opens em all up - lemmy, mastodon, weather, stuff I’d like to buy, etc. and you go through them; got way easier with the new vertical bar + middle click for close the ones you done with.

look for docker-compose + whatyouwant specifically, it’s way more straightforward. once you have one set up, it get easier adding on different software.

don’t want google apps. any idea where to get ATV without them?

edit: the konstakang thing? I’ll try to run it in a VM

any chance of running this in a hacked environment, like plain android or x86? I’m curious what the UX is like. tried spinning up an Android TV VM once and it stopped dead axing for a Google login, which’ll happen never.

macbook boards are ultra-resilient, if you get continuous fan spin you can almost always get them to a useable state. in this particular case, the machine powered on, spun the fans, turned on the screen, displayed the white loader screen for a second and immediately powered off.

never heard of such a thing, their quirks and failures are pretty well documented (logi.wiki, r/macbookrepair, etc.), so I unplugged everything from the board (battery, keyboard, touchpad, HDD, ODD, wifi, camera, display, etc.) and connected it to power and - continuous fan spin!

then started reattaching one by one until it failed again and it was the keyboard. so, ran it with an external keyboard and checked everything and it’s in excellent working condition. I used the opportunity to change the decade old paste on CPU & GPU and cleaned it from dust, insects, hair and other crap. I’m getting a new keyboard on monday ($13 new, $15 used) and assembling everything. maybe do a write-up.

added, never heard of the term, gracias.

tried to switch to it when I transitioned from Gnome to Plasma and gave up. it takes up to a minute to start up (!) as my library is on a network share, has spotty MPRIS support, it intermitently crashes just sitting there idle, and the radio player doesn’t display artist and song. so went back to rhythmbox and I’ll check back in a year or so.