What I’ll say is, I’ve got no comp sci degree, and when I started, I had no idea how the terminal worked. But… My mindset was the following:

1. I really don’t like windows, I’m not going back
2. I don’t like paying others to “do it for me”, I want to do it myself
3. I want the freedom to be able to change anything to make the machine fit me, even if that means I need to learn things along the way.

If you’re the type of person where this general philosophy, you’re going to crush it.

But if you’re more along the lines of “I just use this computer as a tool to do the things I want, I just need the computer out of the way, and working consistently so I can get on with my actual goals”, you probably will hate it. Becuase all your troubleshooting experiences will be “why doesn’t this thing just work, like it does on Windows?”

I can’t speak to it as a desktop environment, but as server, the default customizations around packages are just… Strange. I need to move to Debian at some point.

Traditional distros have decades of guides, forum posts, and StackExchange answers. Atomic systems? Not nearly as much. When something breaks at 2am, knowing there’s a million Google results for your error message is comforting.

This is my reason. I’ve been using Arch exclusively for a few years, but have used it on and off since 2008. I still don’t consider myself an expert by any means, and I frequently pull the docs and old forum threads to solve issues I run into.

Documentation is the most important deciding factor for me. I didn’t use more fully featured distributions, even if they were “easier” becuase if I can’t look up the answer, and I have to live with something because I don’t know what button to press… I mean you may as well just give me a windows box again.

We’ve been called out, but deservedly so.

I second this. Fastmail has been a joy to use. Since the users are paying, the company has (less) incentives to enshittify. JMAP? Count me in!

Am I crazy? I’m seeing a github page with commits from 6 days ago. When you unmaintained what do you mean, like no new features?

The point you raise reminds me of when Signal dropped SMS support, after my efforts to convert all the non techie people in my life over to it. So sad when it happens…

I’ll be slightly contrarian to others and give a different perspective: you may find yourself hitting some roadblocks, I’ll try to explain.

I set up Linux Mint for my elderly parents. The key thing is, I set it up for them, functioning as the administrator for that machine, making sure they had a non admin account and configured their desktop to only show the shortcuts they cared about (firefox).

It worked fine, and I only got calls once every few months. They got scared if some popup occured, or if they accidentally saved something to their desktop that they wanted to get rid of. I don’t know if that really meets the definition of seamless, and I don’t know if you’d even consider those problems.

The other thing that can happen, is hardware interfaces. I know that you’ve listed out your use case. I’m just saying that if your birthday rolls around and someone buys you a 3d printer where you “just plug it in”, you’re going to be in for a long troubleshooting day, if it isn’t natively supported.

With Steam games, you can often get away with enabling proton, but… Small issues like being able to select multiple drive folders have sent me down long troubleshooting avenues as well. And when I use the word troubleshoot, I’m inevitably referring to the command line.

Lots of people are encouraging you to try, and you can make that decision. I just want to toss out that it might not be seamless. But I don’t think Windows is seamless either. It’s just what most people are used to.

I had many problems with installing grub in a dual boot configuration, so much so that I moved to systemd-boot and never had problems after. I don’t know why, but it’s config file approach felt more intuitive.

I’m actually not sure why GRUB is such a popular boot loader that comes packaged with so many distros. Maybe GRUB does something more complex than just bootloading, but I don’t know if most users would care…

That sounds exhausting. I hope you find peace, one day.

This may be a minor point, but I often think in discussions like these, people are talking about the entire OS rather than just the kernel. And while you can take a fully featured desktop system environment for a spin, and it’s pretty good, a lightweight window manager is lightning quick.

If you stick to minimalistic apps for things like photo viewing, you can open folders with 1000s of images in thumbnail mode at incredible speeds, or enormous PDFs. Those are the types of tasks that seemingly slow W10 to a crawl.

In general I also have pretty good luck with stability on my machine. I don’t find myself needing to kill apps that start misbehaving for unexplained reasons, except Firefox… But usually an update sorts it out.

I’m the same as you! I recommend “trash-cli”, then you can undo if you mess something up. You can even set an alias to echo “wrong command” if you use ‘RM’.

I guess their company might have a BYOD policy… Damn I hope that’s the case.

I saw this thread on stack Exchange

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/41210/redirect-terminal-output-to-image-file#41211

I think you’d write a script that turns standard output from something like khal to an image, then use a feh command to turn it into your background. But honestly it’s pretty fast to set up a keyboard shortcut to launch a terminal session and type khal.

I think PhotoPrism

I think you want to use hwdb and evdev to do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nypsi1/updated_guide_to_remapping_keys_on_linux_using/

If you check out the mailing list archives there is some active discussion about dbus-broker as well.

Vimwiki + Syncthing. You can deafult your vimwiki to create markdown files… This only works if you use vim/neovim as your text editor.

What software did you use to put the slide deck together? It seems to work so nicely when placed on a webpage, too…