I have two, KDE on my laptop that runs Arch (btw) which is my tinkering machine, and GNOME/Pop!_OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use and I’m not allowed to break lol.

Although I might switch the desktop to COSMIC at some point if it doesn’t cause too much trouble.

If it helps at all, I’m typing this on a Lenovo Ideadpad 5 that has a Ryzen 5 and 8gb that’s running up-to-date Arch (btw) and KDE perfectly well with no troubles at all. I haven’t owned the Yoga Slim specifically, but I’ve had a few Lenovos over the years and mine have all run various forms of Linux quite happily.

The Steam Deck sort-of has it on some games already, but it’s a bit hacky. I did get 60fps Cyberpunk going though, which was a nice surprise. It’ll be great to get a proper unified way of doing frame-gen though.

I like Ventoy, it’s handy but I don’t think it’s indispensable so probably what I’ll do is go back to using Etcher (which is open source AFAIK) until this resolves itself one way or another. I assume either the dev will respond properly with an explanation and everything will be fine, or someone will get fed up enough to fork it. I feel like it’s probably nothing nefarious, but it doesn’t really hurt to be overly cautious in this case IMO.

Currently I use Borg Backup with Vorta as a GUI. I don’t really do anything automated/scheduled, I just back it up manually to an external SSD every few days or so. I pretty much do my whole /home folder, except for a couple of subfolders that aren’t really necessary (and Videos, which I back up separately.)

I do eventually want to upgrade to a NAS, but I’m waiting until we move to start setting that up. Also I don’t really have an off-site plan yet which I know is bad, but I need to figure that out.

Yeah that’s my main issue with them too. I like the idea in theory, but in practice I find it tends to create this weird environment where something’s always broken because everything updates on a different schedule and nobody cares if their update breaks anything else.

It’s there now!

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

My favourites are the ones that just have a Github with absolutely no explanation of what the software does at all. It’ll just be like “After two years, blurplr has been refactored to use the updated flerb library instead of flerbp, which is deprecated” and then just a link to a tarball.

I run Steam on Arch as a Flatpak (because it tends to be pretty messy with dependencies so it’s nice to have it all contained in one place) and it’s always worked perfectly well for me too.

Yeah I don’t hate Ubuntu, I used it as my daily driver for years, but it did get a bit frustrating how they seem to fixate on the new ‘shiny’ thing (Unity, Mir, the whole convergent desktop thing, now Snaps) and chase after it while other things are left to stagnate, then they seem to get it to where it’s almost good, then drop it and go chasing off after something else.

Also, I find that these days there are just better options for a ‘just works’ kind of distro (like Mint or Pop!OS) so I don’t hate Ubuntu, I just have no particular need for it anymore.

I’d be fine with switching over to Valve’s crazy high-speed frog version of Wayland if it came down to it lol

I do love how they just kind of like picked up Linux and dragged it into mainstream gaming lol. Hopefully they’re doing the same thing to Wayland now.

That’s my system, I just have topgrade aliased to update lol

If they both decide to step down around the same time, that’s going to be wild few years.

I have a feeling it might go the other way, IE when he retires or whatever, everyone’s going to want to be the “next Linus” and we’ll end up with tons of different forks of kernels all following their own philosophy of what they think Linux should be.

I ended up just making an alias for s=kitten ssh and then added my desktop to .ssh/config so now typing s desktop does the trick!

Yeah every once in a while I get restless and start thinking I should learn how to use Mutt or something, but I always end up going back to Thunderbird/Betterbird lol

I had the opposite for some reason! Thunderbird started giving lots of weird errors, especially with Gmail, but Betterbird worked fine so I just ended up switching over.

According to this, it’s been around since the 70’s and was originally just a catch-all for files that didn’t fit in the other default directories, but over time has come to be mostly used for config files. I assume it would cause utter mayhem to try and change the name now so I guess it just sticks. Someone suggested “Edit To Configure” as a backronym to try and make it make more sense if that helps anyone lol.

When using Windows, I occasionally encounter this weird phenomena that I never experience using any other type of OS, whereby it generates a problem that’s so stupid on such a fundamental level that there’s no way to really work around it.

Like when I recently tried out Windows 11, I made a manual restore point in case it fucked itself up doing a big update. Which it did, and then when I tried to restore it I found out that it only keeps one restore point, and that after it broke itself doing the update it overwrote my manual restore point with its own automatic restore point, ensuring that the fuckup it just did was the only thing to restore to. I tried restoring it anyway to see what would happen, and it said it couldn’t do it but didn’t explain why.

Like when an allegedly modern OS so utterly misses the point of both system restore and basic error messages, I don’t know what to do with it really.