I usually go with Xfce.

I don’t hate windows, it just annoys me. I’ve run linux in a VM under windows for years and about 2 years ago it annoyed me enough (I think it was something about a patch breaking things badly enough that I had to restore the system) that I said ‘screw it’ and switched the arrangement to linux and the few windows programs I really wanted running in wine. I’ve been skipping back and forth between them since Yggdrasil was a thing, so it wasn’t like it was uncharted territory.

And after hearing some of win11’s BS, I’m glad I did.

I don’t care what it’s called as long as it’s a decent distro and does what I need it to do.

This. I’ve never voted for ‘not the other guy’, but I will this time. Honestly, the democrats could run Vinny the Wino and I’d vote for him over Trump.

If you’re going to not use software because you don’t like a program with a similar name, I really don’t know what to tell you… 🤷‍♂️

Cheaper than what? Scrounged free parts?

Unless it’s all you have. Speaking as someone that’s at times been poor af, sometimes people just have to cobble up a frankensystem from whatever parts they can scrounge.

One of the things I love about linux is that it makes this reasonably possible.

Weechat. Terminal based, flexible scripting system using a handful of languages, still actively developed, and I can make it work the way I want it to work.

Personally I use ksnip. Pretty sure it doesn’t do video though. It does do assorted image capture, OCR (if you have Tesseract installed), and supports uploading to imgur, FTP, and anything you can manage to do with a script.

There isn’t really a perfect replacement for ShareX that I know of.

Probably depends how you define things. Like, is Xubuntu Xubuntu or Ubuntu with Xfce included by default? How much change is necessary before it’s not “debian with added bits”?

I don’t. Modern computers have a LOT of resources. The whole ‘minimalist computing’ thing some people go on about is really odd to me. And I say that as someone who remembers when 16K was impressive. I can see it for restricted environments, where every byte counts, but not for desktops.

Compiling code converts it from human readable source code into optimized machine code which the processor understands how to execute. For a lot of software you can just unpack the source code, run ./configure, run ‘make’, and then ‘make install’. This can vary a lot and is a simplified explanation, but it’s a start…

Check your keyboard settings, should be something in there for enable/define compose key.

It does. I use it all the time. I have various window cobtrol stuff bound to alt-keypad keys.

Fediverse and RSS mostly.

Ntfy.sh is my go to and croc if I want encryption.

My take: I don’t recommend distros like mint because they’re windows-y, I do it because they’re good ‘shit just works’ starting points and Linux newbies probably don’t need to be spending 2 hours figuring out why audio doesn’t work or whatever. Once they get their feet under them and learn their way around a shell, etc then they can start playing around with other distros if they like.

Absolutely not. And they can fuck right off with that whole needing an account to use a terminal thing.

Annnnd that ended any curiosity at all I may have had for it…

Linux is bloat. You should be entering your own minimal kernel in microcode via front panel switches at boot instead of being so wasteful. What do you think all that RAM and drive space is for? Holding data??

(Seriously, the modern minimalist thing is hilarious to me and I’ve been using computers since 16K of RAM was impressive…)