Kevin

I’ve been using gimp’s 3.x branch since 2016 or so (after getting a hidpi display) and gimp itself since the early 2000s, both for personal stuff and for work. I’m typically editing existing photos and images to clean them up, apply effects, make new clean images from pieces of existing ones, etc, and for my uses it’s great. Also, having been using it for so long, I actually really prefer the ux to Photoshop (especially since they added an option to use it in single window mode).

I’ve seen videos showing some of the features it’s missing for certain types of things though, and while there are hacky scripted ways to emulate them, you might find it lacking if you’re expecting those particular features.

I’d recommend looking up tutorials on YouTube for things you frequently do and see how much work it is and what the final product looks like. You could up the playback speed to save time since you won’t be following along with gimp yourself.

I run two multimonitor systems with different DPIs and 2.5gbe and they both run great. What issues are you hitting?

Because they only offer open source apps they build themselves

You can also use weechat as a bouncer, and it works even better with its own clients which can sync chat history rather than receiving it in a dump. The android client is fantastic in that respect.

The plugin ecosystem is also great. I have a plugin that pushes notifications for PMs and mentions to my gotify server, alerting me on my phone without having to drain its batteries staying connected.

konsole does support sixel images

I’m curious what about Graphene you think would prevent certain demographics from using it as a daily driver? There are pretty well no downsides to using it compared to a first party ROM aside from not having certain things like Google Assistant baked in. It has automatic updates, you get the play store and services if you want them, it even has android auto. It’s also the most rock solid android experience I’ve had since I switched from iOS in 2012 or so.

Obviously a stereotypical grandparent would need someone who knows computers to do the initial install and setup, but after that it’s pretty well just set and forget.

Signal started out as textsecure, an sms/mms app that encrypted your text messages. It quietly started sending messages over its server at one point after an update, but before that sms is what it was about.

Is it possible she has variable refresh/gsync/freesync support and that it’s enabled? That turned out to be the cause of the flickering I was seeing.

The Lenovo Yoga 6 works surprisingly well. I got it to replace a surface book for my daughter and wasn’t really sure what parts of the hardware would be supported, but literally everything I tested works (the only thing I haven’t tried is the fingerprint reader) and the included stylus is amazing in krita as well as just generally. The tablet mode works well, and tent mode is more convenient when it’s on a desk (screen rotation requires the iio-sensor-proxy package). Battery life is decent; it gets around 6-7 hours with moderate use. I’d recommend using it with KDE.

https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/p/laptops/yoga/yoga-2-in-1-series/yoga-6-gen-8-(13-inch-amd)/len101y0027

You should put your foot down and tell them it’s all about free software while they’re under your roof; they can push open source once they’re 18 and have their own place.

Hah, I feel like they might not approve of a Microsoft laptop? I could be wrong though :)

I got my daughter a surface book with Archlinux on it when she turned four. She’d previously been using an ipad so I wanted something that had a touchscreen, and I installed KDE as the desktop. She learned how to use it extremely quickly, and has even started in on the commandline now that she’s 5 and knows how to read. GCompris is great too.

Me and my wife haven’t bothered with parental controls and instead just keep an eye on her usage, but I agree with other commenters that controlling things at the router level seems like a better bet.

Hey, wow, that’s quite the collection of issues!

For one, the kernel completely stops responding to even Alt+SysRq+R-E-I-S-U-B when validating my Wallpaper Engine install in Steam and I don’t know why. I found a plug in that allows it to work in KDE but I can’t even get that far if I can’t even install the app. I just ended up not installing it, but I’m still looking for a Linux-native app for animated wallpapers.

This one could be any number of things- one trick for figuring out what the issue could be is to see what your system log looked like right before the hang. You might have to scroll up a bit and there’s going to be a bunch of noise from random stuff reporting their status that you’ll need to ignore. Look especially for lines with red text and the word “Error”. To get the log from the current boot (not the one you’re looking for) run journalctl -b, similarly, to get the one from the previous boot (the one that would have crashed) run journalctl -b-1 - you can also look at the logs from boots before that with journalctl -b-2 and so on (assuming your haven’t limited the size to the point where those no longer exist).

Secondly, I have this weird flickery-ghosting effect when playing games in fullscreen (Well, actually just Helldivers 2 cause it’s the only game I’ve tested so far). Borderless windowed is fine but then there’s a distracting thin white border around the window.

Just a hunch, but I ran into something similar and realized it was g-sync/freesync (which only runs when an app is fullscreen). The refresh of the game changes the refresh of the monitor, and on my TV it only gets flickery when the framerate is slow (like in menus), while on my desktop it gets flickery in a bunch of situations, so I assume it’s just a bad implementation there. Interestingly, I don’t seem to get tearing even with it disabled, so I just turned it off.

Thirdly, I can’t even begin to comprehend how OpenRGB is supposed to work. It’s like trying to understand a foreign language, especially given how intuitive and easy to use SignalRGB is (Windows exclusive). I can’t even figure out how to use OpenRGB to simply disable the damn lights so I don’t have to deal with it.

Haha, oh man, yeah, I personally just wanted to turn off the lights on my RAM, and iirc deleting items was pretty easy though I’d have to check to see what I did to remember exactly how it’s done (let me know if you want me to take a look). Trying to configure stuff to light up a certain way is an adventure I haven’t attempted to tackle yet.

Fourthly, the Nvidia X Server app is missing almost every single feature that Nvidia Control Panel has. Where are the 3D settings for games? Where’s the AI stuff? Where’s RTX Video Super Resolution? I didn’t spend $1800 on a GPU, only to not be able to use it to its fullest.

A lot of the fancier consumer features end up lagging behind in terms of support on linux. I personally hate how AI makes videos look and I use AMD which doesn’t have those fancy features in the first place :), but I can see how you’d be annoyed not at least having the option. I think all of the nvidia features games utilize are supported, but a lot of the stuff you’d normally need to open up the graphics card configuration tool on windows to access and configure is likely going to be missing. At the same time, there are quite a few CUDA-based AI tools out there that you can use on linux that would be a pain to set up on windows, so you lose some things and gain some others. The ollama-cuda package on archlinux is a fun place to start.

And most importantly: HDR is completely broken, which is a show-stopper for me. I’m too used to HDR to go back to SDR, especially in movies or games. Turning it on makes the desktop and all SDR content look dull and washed-out on an LG C1 OLED, like a faded photo from the 1970s. It’s obvious that KDE isn’t properly mapping SDR colors to an HDR space. The SDR color intensity slider does nothing, either. HDR works perfectly in Windows 11, even when showing SDR content.

That’s really odd- I’d seen examples of that being the case before KDE 6 was released, but when I first tried it on with my LG G3 (so pretty similar to you) I found a good slider brightness position and everything looked great from there. I wonder if it’s an issue of nvidia vs amd or something else?

tl;dr: I don’t actually expect any help; just wanted to vent. I’ll figure this shit out eventually, but until then, I’m dual booting Windows 11. From what I understand, HDR support is still in its early stages for KDE. So I’ll check back again in a few months to see how things have improved. Anyway thanks for listening.

Haha, well I did my best anyway :) After your experience I can’t really blame you for dual booting (and probably mostly sticking to) windows 11 for now. If nothing else, you can keep your linux install around to occasionally check and see if the caveats have dwindled enough to start using it more regularly eh?

Awesome, good luck! Feel free to PM if you need any help.

The SDR option is actually called “SDR brightness” and it seems to increase both the colour intensity and brightness as you slide it up. I have it set to 150 out of 500 and it’s about as intense as I’d want it.

Yeah, I’m on plasma 6, and interesting that they call it experimental. The setting is available by default in the display settings with no warning or anything. Either way, it works perfectly- hopefully kubuntu updates to 6 soon because it’s so much better than 5 :)

HDR has been working great for me in KDE. I’ve been using mpv for HDR videos, and games with HDR work great. KDE has an SDR vibrancy setting when HDR is enabled that lets you decide how bright and colorful you want SDR content (turn it up enough and it looks like HDR to me), I’m not sure if that’s how auto HDR works.

I recently got an LG OLED. I initially used ethernet to update it and then took it offline. There’s an agreement that pops up during setup which enables some extra AI features (these all suck and should be disabled anyway) and content tracking if you agree, but you can say no and it disables all that if you do. Hidden in the menus there’s also an option to use the last selected input when the TV powers on, so I’ve enabled that and my desktop pops up a second after I hit the power button.

The only mildly annoying thing is that when the input is changed to the Nintendo Switch and I manually change it back, sometimes it alerts me that the internet isn’t working and I have to tell it not to worry. If I had a single input though (like a receiver or just a PC) I’d never see that, and it’s pretty minor.

All in all I was pretty worried about the smart stuff going in and have been pleasantly surprised by how nicely they let you get around it. OLED with HDR is fantastic too.

From what I understand, the updated firmware image has passed all the tests and will be included in an upcoming release. My system has been rock solid for a few weeks now with it running, but if you aren’t up to dropping the blob in yourself it sounds like you’ll have it officially soon (assuming you run a distro that keeps those up to date).

Input Leap is a Synergy fork with mostly working compatibility for Gnome Wayland, and Waynergy works well as a client on sway (and possibly kde?)