Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
You can customize gnome pretty far. The code to have normal human minimize/maximize/close buttons is all still there, and the window bar is there as well. You just have to know which programs to pull from dnf that know what
registrydconf settings to adjust. I have yet to find a use case for nautilus between Dolphin (KDE) and using a terminal.Huh good to know. Will be honest I’m a pretty slow learner, but I do find it pretty fun to explore all the options I get on linux. Knowing me it will probably be years until I find a de (or maybe a tiling window manager) thats perfect for me. Been using linux for maaaaybe 1 1/2-2 years but I still feel like a beginner in a lot of ways.
Install gnome-tweaks. It’ll be under “Accessories” or you can search for it in their activities travesty. There are some gnome-shell-extension-X things to install as well before you head into the tweaks program. They all used to be part of gnome-tweaks and now they’re not. If I recall a helpful web lookup occurs when you’re messing with that stuff and tells you what package to install.
gnome can be rough until you tailor it to your usage or if you’re in an austere environment with no internet. I think all those settings can be changed via editing dconf directly, but I don’t know how, and at this point in my life I don’t really feel like trying to hack a user experience provided to me into usefulness (no root, admin doesn’t want to use linux at all so he sets up the minimal least risky thing he can and won’t change it). gnome’s interpretation of “minimal” is pretty painful.
I use LXQT when I can. I’ll get around to trying modern KDE at some point.