I am Lattrommi. Yes, that one. You’ve never heard of me? I’m not surprised. It is often said that anything you put on the internet will live there forever. It becomes immortal. I do everything backwards and wrong. I do not live forever, I am always dying. ¿|√∞²|?
I don’t know if there is a word for what I was trying to point out.
Like an opposite to gatekeeping, sort of.
I do not like when people use ‘we’, in ways that include people that it does not apply to. Lumping everyone together inaccurately into a group.
I agree that gatekeeping is no good and people should not do that.
However…
we all copy
I do not feel that assuming all people copy, should be done either, in my opinion.
is that three or a visual representation of two? either way, i’m in.
idk, i’ll just grab from the pile…
I’ll bet a testicle this was done in GIMP
That was me recalling a time when I was using MX Linux XFCE edition. i installed something that I didn’t realize was pulling most of KDE in. i was still very new to linux and still relied on a couple windows programs, so i was dual booting as well. i was using zim because it has windows support, so i could keep notes in zim in both windows and linux, sync it to my dropbox and not lose notes switching between them.
I think my default text editor changed, either by me and forgotten or from something after KDE was pulled in. i think it went from mousepad to kwrite, and kwrite uses kate, which made zims behaviour change because it was using whatever was the default editor as its backend. i think. it’s still a bit beyond me honestly. one change had to do with how tabs are processed. some tabs were done as 4 spaces instead of a tab, which messed up some formatting i did in zim. so i thought i had to figure out which text editor to set zim to use to get my tab key to work like expected again.
me saying “a dozen” is an extreme exaggeration. i do that sometimes, use hyperbole too much. the application launcher grouped libreoffice stuff with kwrite, mousepad and kate. i think it had emacs and vim in there too. i kept trying to figure out which one was was causing formatting errors. there were issues with newlines due to going from windows to linux as well i think.
it led to me getting trapped in a recursion, doing test notes in linux with different editor backends set in zim, going to windows to see the effect, going back to linux and trying another editor, repeating this while sometimes forgetting to sync to dropbox, forgetting that kate and kwrite are connected, or forgetting what i was doing and just sort of going insane. i don’t have any friends that use linux. at the time, i had severely limited internet because of data caps with my isp. it was also the first year of the pandemic. so other factors were involved.
i eventually tried uninstalling everything KDE but that did not go well and i ended up without a DE at all somehow, it just booted into busybox and i started over. i’m pretty good at making the wrong choices and reacting by making worse choices. creating my own hell. i feel like i’ve witnessed other new users doing similar things too, so that adds to my reluctance to encourage beginner users to try things that might be too much.
Maybe things have changed and it isn’t that bad anymore. Doing a search for something along the lines of “installing multiple desktop environments” and you will see there are plenty of people suggesting to not do this. Probably just as many saying it’s usually fine. Note that the OP asked for a beginner friendly distro. That implies they might not be experienced enough to understand how some things work.
Saying “literally no problem about trying it out” is incorrect in my opinion and this applies to all contexts I can imagine, whether related to Linux or not. There is always a potential problem when trying something out. Nothing is idiot-proof or immune to wear and tear or perfectly free from bugs, software or literal. I personally am blessed with the uncanny ability to make the wrong choice in the majority of situations where I have a choice. That may even include the choice to make this reply.
Maybe for your use case, on the hardware you have, you haven’t had any issues, with the software you use. That doesn’t mean the issues don’t exist. I’ll mention again, do a search online. There are problems that can happen. They have happened recently. They have happened a lot. Not everyone has them.
I hate to come back to this example, since OP never stated they had it, but since you have ADHD, you may be familiar with analysis paralysis and executive dysfunction after being overwhelmed by too many things. Maybe forgetting which text editor worked best and seeing a dozen in the application launcher and start searching for the right one but by the time it is found the short term memory loss kicked in again and the original reason why it was needed has been forgotten. There could be frustration when starting to hyperfocus but an app is not working the way it did and so instead the night is spent grinding through preference menus already configured previously and eventually seeing that an update for one of the DE’s rewrote a config file or is using a differsion of python or it could be more than one of these things happening and one program also has a bug that spams the journal so troubleshooting becomes much more difficult… I’m digressing and projecting too much.
Have you ever uninstalled a DE after having more than one installed? Sure, it is possible. It’s easier and less time consuming to reinstall the whole OS in my experience. I’m not a professional, far from it. I know it didn’t go well. I can’t remember the specifics, I think I added a KDE package while using xfce and accidentally hit continue instead of cancel. It brought in all of KDE, which I didn’t want so I tried to remove it and everything broke because it removed shared xfce dependencies. It might be better now. I’d prefer not to try until I’m confident I know what I’m doing and what to do when things fail afterwards.
My point originally was, and still is, that it is often not recommended to do, especially for a beginner. I mean no malice towards you and hope this doesn’t seem aggressive or angry.
some nuisances are not so ignorable. having duplicate apps all over the place, each with their own settings, so if you forget which one you are using, you might find yourself spending more time in settings than desired. then there’s browsers. switching DE’s can cause browsers to log you out of everything, so switching often and you end up having to sign in to everything repeatedly, which for some can interrupt workflow and be frustrating. then there’s the fact that some use gtk and some use qt so title bar buttons and program menu’s can become confusing and ununified. can these things be ignored? sure, some people can. some cannot, such as people with ADHD for example, who can easily be sidetracked when the “file > open” menu is in a hamburger menu in one app and a bar on another.
I did say that I read about, but did not try, installing two and setting different users for them. i believe the idea is that they are both installed but don’t generate config files until you log in with a user. so keeping two users, one for each DE, works but only if you never log in with the wrong user. from what i understand, i could be wrong. i believe SDDM and LightDM can both facilitate switching DE’s from the login screen.
I have a few possible options but they all rely on other things you might not have or want.
There’s a fillable spreadsheet in g∞gle sheets but that requires having an account with the company and to fill it out, you make a copy from the file menu and go from there. It’s best to make the copy for your account and leave it blank, making extra copies of that one, in case my link stops working someday (it’s been good for at least 3 years so far). Here’s the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DrSwhSxJdEfO7gAih4UHcd3myJfNh2eW6Kxv0UblAO4/edit?gid=1270711241#gid=1270711241
If you use Discord, there’s avrae, a bot that integrates with discord for online d&d sessions. https://avrae.io/
it can be used offline as well but regular pencil and paper would be more convenient in my opinion. it can read character sheets from online sources, including ones made from the spreadsheet link i shared previously, as well as others, the suggestions they give are https://dicecloud.com/ and https://www.dndbeyond.com/ although the latter i found frustrating to use for reasons i cannot recall.
Another website worth checking out is https://www.flapkan.com/ for pdf form fillable character sheets. i have not used this, it was in a folder of bookmarks i have and i forgot about it. it looks promising.
as for linux native programs unfortunately i cannot help, i do not know of anything specific. i’ve used a few different programs but none were strictly linux based and most used proprietary code so they wouldn’t be FLOSS. like for example, I used yEd https://www.yworks.com/products/yed which works on Linux but uses java stuff. I liked it because I could set links to pdf files within the character sheets i’d made, which would open to specific pages of the rules related to what was linked, like rules for spells, how abilities worked and weapon stats and all that.
Yeah this is important to know as installing two DE’s can and will cause a lot of problems.
I’ve read, but have not tried, that installing each DE under it’s own user can prevent the majority of these problems. This also prevents using apps from different DE’s simultaneously, you have to switch users to do so. Session saving makes it faster than restarting constantly but it can still interrupt workflow. Again, I have not tried this myself but have considered trying it.
There is a bug that is open right now which sounds like it might be one you were experiencing or possibly explains part of the issues.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501073
Like the web browsing might have been from middle clicking, which causes a lengthy hang and resuming from suspend and powerdevil are a prime suspect for it.
The login wait might be an issue I vaguely recall about the splash screen and that disabling it removed the startup hang.
I’ve been exclusively using Manjaro KDE since September of 2021 and the linked issue I started getting a couple months ago and it’s gotten bad enough to make me want to start hopping again.
How did you list your hardware like that? Where it shows the key specifications for each part as bullet points, not the bullet points though, if that makes sense. I know how to make bullets, I mean the data.
Was is generated with a script or did you copy and paste individual part stats from their website specs or some other way?
I have a few ways to generate info, like with inxi or searching pcpartpicker, but there often there is not enough info, important info that is missing, far too much info about stuff I don’t care about or I have to spend a lot of time searching for specific data and have to copy and paste each feature for each part individually which can be too time consuming.
What you have shows pretty much exactly what I would like, so I could easily share when needed.
The term for combining their computational power is “concurrent computing”, “parallel computing” or “distributed computing” which aren’t really all exactly the same but i can’t find distinctions betwen them that are well defined. making them all accesible in one place is something i want to do as well but i get distracted easily and haven’t made much progress.
KVM is an abbreviation that means ‘keyboard video mouse’ which also might be something to look into but it can be confusing as it also is an abbreviation for ‘kernel virtual machine’ which also might be related but that’s as far as i got mostly.
i believe you can create a local network if you have a router/hub/switch device with multiple ethernet ports. if all the devices have wifi you should be able to connect through that, using something like jellyfin or maybe proxmox. wish i knew more and could help, hopefully you get better advice because i want to do the same or something similar.
That layout is very similar to my own although I’m using KDE. I’d share a screenshot but it would be hard to see since I’m using 3 monitors and one is an ultrawide, plus 4 virtual desktops, so screenshots don’t do it any justice.
I want to say I’m glad you asked this and thank you for asking. In this day and age there are a lot of valid concerns for privacy and anonymity and the result is that people do not share how their system(s) work, not openly or very often. I’m still fairly new to Linux (3.5 years) and at times, I feel like I am doing everything wrong and that there is probably a better way. Posts like these help me learn about possible improvements or mistakes I might have made.
I previously used Vorta with Borgbackup locally, automatically backing up my Home (sans things like .cache and .mozilla) to a secondary internal drive every other day. I also would manually back up a smaller set of important documents (memes and porn #joke) to a USB flash drive, to keep on my person, which also would be copied across several cloud storage providers (dropbox, mega, proton), depending on how much space their free versions provided, with items removed according to how much I trusted the provider.
Then I built a new system. In the process of setting it all up, I had a few hiccups. It took longer than I expected to have a stable system. That was over a year ago (stat / …Birth: 2024-02-05 04:20:53…) and I still haven’t gotten around to setting up any backup system on it. I want to rethink my old solution and this post is useful for learning about the options available. It’s also a reminder to get it done before it is too late. Where I live, tornado season in starting. I lost a lot in 2019 after my city had 4 tornados in one day.
In 1900 on March 14th the Gold Standard Act was ratified in America, forcing the dollar to be redeemable by the Treasury on demand for a fixed value in gold. It was abondoned in 1933 during the Great Depression (which really was not all that great from what I’ve read).
In 1943 Kraków Ghetto ceased to have prisoners. Less great than that depression.
1964 Jack Ruby was convicted of assassinating JFK.
1879 Einstein’s birthday.
1883 Karl Marx’s death.
Excellant write up, thank you.
I’m not exactly sure what ‘opinionated’ means in terms of software, could you (or anyone who sees this) define it?
There isn’t anything you need to know. It’s the opposite actually. You can now forget about graphics drivers entirely if you want. Unless it’s like, a job or hobby or something.
I’ll throw in my vote for Manjaro because while it’s not perfect, it hits all of OP’s points nicely.
The last point is the most important. Rolling release means it updates regularly, so your packages will be mostly up to date. Curated means they do testing in an unstable repository. If an update breaks something, those changes aren’t pushed to stable.
I ended up with it after trying other distros but having trouble with my nVidia card. Manjaro’s MHWD tool installed their drivers easily (although slightly confusing with its unnecessary checkboxes) and more recently, I’ve upgraded to AMD and never had a single issue.
It’s not perfect but almost every issue I’ve had was located between the keyboard and the chair.
I was going to suggest yakuake for the drop down ability and also because you can make the background transparent in varying degrees, thus able to see what’s beneath it.