but they aren’t parallel

Yeah, I’ll probably switch eventually I’m just trying to talk myself out of it because I don’t have the time to learn right now

I have a desktop, laptop, and a few VMs and servery things. Dotfile manager (yadm, which is a git wrapper) to sync personal settings, everything else I just do manually. The system-level configs are either different enough that standardizing them isn’t very helpful, or no more complicated than installing packages and activating services.

I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.

The desktop environment is all the stuff like the taskbar, the settings menus, the application launcher, the login screen, that kind of thing. It’s the system level user interface.

You choose which one by which distro you download. Linux mint uses cinnamon, Ubuntu and fedora use gnome. There are “flavors” of Ubuntu and fedora that use KDE. That’s why I suggested ventoy: you can download a few different ones and boot into them without making a new thumb drive.

If you don’t feel like bothering with any of that, just use Linux mint. It’s good.

• before you switch, sort out your apps. Look at what you use on windows, see if it runs on Linux. If not, find a replacement that does and test it out.
• Most Linux distros can boot into a desktop from a thumb drive. You can play and test without touching your windows installation.
• in that vein, ventoy is neat. You can make a bootable drive and drop ISOs in a folder to boot from. No messing with etcher or whatever it’s called
• desktop environment matters as much as the distro. Check out gnome, KDE, and cinnamon.

It’s true, I’m completely broken. I can’t even use a stacking window manager on Linux, I’m instantly pissed off

Obviously pierogi and vodka

they work in private spaces too

Nine parchments! Take Diablo, strip out the loot system and plot, add friendly fire and some colors, and you have 9p. It’s not a perfect game but it’s super fun to play with a few friends

I’m “everything is too loud” old

Yeah, when someone is interested in switching I always advise them to sort out their apps first. Many Linux applications also run on windows, the reverse is rarely true.

Yeah, that’s my experience. The backend is an environment you control completely and has well-defined inputs and outputs specifically designed to be handled by machines. Front end code changes on a whim, runs who the hell knows where, and has to look good doing it.

Sure as shit does!

I just want my coworkers to stop dumping ai slop in my inbox and expecting me to take it seriously.

That and the need to learn a bespoke, weird programming language that will only ever be useful for this one thing have really turned me off of that distro.

Probably getting hammered by ai scrapers

That’s a lot of the reason you buy it, but RHEL is a paid product that you buy copies of.

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux/how-to-buy#online

You haven’t heard of red hat? Or Ubuntu pro?

NAS at the parents’ house. Restic nightly job, with some plumbing scripts to automate it sensibly.