I’ve used Linux since the mid 00’s and, well, I’ve seen some shit. But nowadays? It’s the best desktop OS I’ve used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE’s like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you’d likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.

TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!

Wait, encryption counts as bullshit now? ;)

I’ve (almost) always had good experiences with Lenovo laptops, especially T-series or X1 Carbon.

Will the future be better tomorrow?

I don’t use Endeavor or Arch (btw), but KDE Plasma is amazing. I’d probably be happy with any distro as long as it supported plasma.

Yes, I found a guide for getting Photoshop CS6 running in wine (PlayOnLinux wrapper). A recent update to something broke it for me, but it might still work for others.

Out of curiosity, do you ever rescue laptops from your work and use or resell them?

Libreoffice is essentially full fat Office at this point. If you need any , more than what it offers, you’re more likely than not a computer savvy person already. Photoshop is hard to fully replace though. I ran it in wine for a long time, still haven’t found a good alternative.

Well, there’s always the devil you know… (Ubuntu)

Kate, Terminator, k4dirstat and the amazing clipboard history app in KDE.

RISC is going to change everything.

There’s currently only two Risc-v laptops that I’ve heard of: The Alibaba Roma and the Balthazar Personal Computing Device. Most development is currently happening in SBCs and microcontrollers.

Just to clarify a few points in #1: CISC has gone largely (entirely?) extinct, so it doesn’t play into this. Arm processors are more efficient than x86, but Risc-v is even more efficient than Arm, giving them an edge in cheap, low power computing. However, some companies have started experimenting with Risc-v for HPC applications, so it’s turning out more versatile than expected. Just this week there was also news of a bunch of companies banding together to develop Risc-v chips for automobile and Telecom, so don’t be surprised if we get Risc-v smartphones and tablets in the near future.

As someone who does all my Linux gaming in Kubuntu, why should OP avoid KDE?

Not OP, but I’ve been running Kubuntu since 2017 since it’s desktop environment looks and works very similar to Windows 7 (desktop with icons, taskbar, launcher, search, options, etc) which is what I was used to after running Windows for two decades before. It’s also stable and sees a lot of mainstream apps being ported to it.

I had a colleague who ran NixOS on his work laptop and loved it. He even held a presentation to the rest of the engineering dept about it. Then IT contacted him and said company policy only allowed running Ubuntu and he had to reinstall.

He resigned shortly after.

Plasma is amazing. I’m never going back to Gnome and am ready to become a contributor just because I like the DE so much.

Don’t use mono, use dotnet core instead.

It doesn’t support syncing contacts and calendars out of the box, but there are plugins that will let you sync both. I used Thunderbird successfully with MS365 in 2019-2020.

Snaps. Everyone seems to hate them for ideological reasons rather than practical reasons. But for me, they just work. And if Canonical gets out of line, there’s already been proof of concepts of third-party snap repositories, so that’s a moot point.

Flatpaks seem like a solution in search of a problem to me. Not everything is a gui app, so not sure why the devs aren’t supporting cli apps well. But the biggest problem is that most software I use simply isn’t available as flatpaks.