I used to prefer Gnome before the KDE 6 update due to the rough edges in KDE. After KDE 6 came out I’ve tried it again, and it’s incredible. The team has spent a lot of time on polish for this major release and it allows KDE’s suite of more fully featured applications to shine. GNOME apps like gedit, nautilus, and gnome terminal tend to provide the minimum level of functionality, whereas KDE’s applications feel like they’re trying to work for power users. Kate goes as far as supporting the LSP for code autocompletion. KDE’s desktop is much more customizable as well, so you don’t really need extensions to get the functionality you’d be looking for in GNOME, stuff like the application launcher are built in. KDE connect is a really useful application you can install on your phone to get file transfers and notification sharing, among other things, between your phone and computer while connect to the same local network. Performance wise they seem pretty equal, even on older hardware, but KDE might have a bit of an edge in terms of RAM usage, YMMV depending on how you customize the desktop. The one thing I miss about GNOME is their “start menu” experience, I haven’t found a way to replicate that in KDE, but I haven’t looked very hard either. Overall I wouldn’t hesitate recommending KDE, plasma 6 makes me actually feel like the Linux desktop is ready for mainstream.

Wish the URL bar, etc would move up into the titlebar, that’s kind of the whole point

Will you need your own account for the proprietary ones? Mozilla paying for these feels like it couldn’t be sustainable long term, which is worrying.

Windows only PWA’s 😮‍💨

Gitlab’s AGPL so I don’t think there’s anything stopping you from moving to a self managed instance.

Because until you spend many hours getting used to it, it’s annoying as hell. I’m a longtime bash user, but if I have to do anything in PowerShell, it sucks. Bash is even less friendly to novice/casual users due to tools like awk and sed being totally obtuse. When you’re unfamiliar with the workflow, not being to see everything you’re able to do at a glance is pretty frustrating.

Mullvad (and every other decent VPN) supports WireGuard and OpenVPN configurations that will be supported on any distro through the network settings without the need for additional software. It’s also pretty likely the mullvad client will be in the software center of whatever distro you’re using

NFS is generally the way network storage appliances are accessed on Linux. If you’re using a computer you know you’re going to be accessing files on in the long term it’s generally the way to go since it’s a simple, robust, high performance protocol that’s used by pros and amateurs alike. SSHFS is an abuse of the ssh protocol that allows you to mount a directory on any computer you can get an ssh connection to. You can think of it like VSCode remote editing, but it’ll work with any editor or other program.

You should be able to set up NFS with write caching, etc that will allow it to be more similar in performance to a local filesystem. Note that you may not want write caching specifically if you’re going to suddenly disconnect your laptop from the network without unmounting the share first. Your actual performance might not be the same, especially for large transfers, due to the throughput of your network and connection quality. In my general experience sshfs is kind of slow especially when accessing many different small files, and NFS is usually much faster.

If you’re on Linux I’d recommend using btrfs, or bcachefs with snapshots. It’s basically like time machine on MacOS. That way if you accidentally delete something you can still recover it.

Isn’t a huge part of the point of copy left licences that an author can’t change the license without rewriting the code entirely?

A dedicated server is needed because something needs to keep a catalog of the smart devices available on your network and ideally be accessible to many people in one household. You could make a system that went phone -> device but you would need to set up each device on each phone you wanted to use, which isn’t a great user experience. You could also run into issues where devices would need to handle multiple conflicting commands from different users coming in at once. Since smart devices are usually trying to use as little power as possible, that extra complexity would hurt you in that department. The third reason is that having a separate server enables automated workflows that would depend on an always online server that orchestrates multiple devices. For example, let’s say you have some automatic insulating blinds, a smart thermostat. You want to raise and lower the blinds to maximize your energy efficiency. Since you have the dedicated server, that server can check the temperature set point of your thermostat, current weather, and sunrise\sunset times. If it’s sunny out, and your set point is higher than the outdoor temperature, the server can raise the blinds to let warm sunlight in, and vice versa. If only your phone could control the devices a workflow like this couldn’t work when you were out of the house.

I wonder if the Gnome team’s cavalier aditude towards agreed upon standards is related to Redhat’s influence 🤔 It’s totally possible the devs are just high on their own fumes due to being the default for so long.

Back in the Gnome 2 days this wasn’t as much the case. Plus KDE was kind of a mess back then so the main choices were Gnome or XFCE which had fewer features. When Gnome 3 came around the devs switched hard to a much more opinionated approach, leading to Gnome 2 forks like Cinnamon since KDE was still very underpolished. It’s a bit regrettable that all that effort was poured into Gnome forks instead of improving KDE especially considering how great it is now.

Fzf has some scripts packaged for most shells that’ll replace ctrl-r reverse history search with this behavior

It’s also a nightmare if you want your config to work with both nix and non nix platforms. If I’m using my config on windows or at work, I’m not going to have nix and home manager to interpret the nix version of my vim config. On my systems with home manager, I’d like be able to install my nvim config as part of home manager rebuild. If I have home manager pull my configs git repo, it causes lazy to freak out whenever I try to update my plugins. It’d be nice to have some sort of integration with lazy that exists with cargo and similar tools but it doesn’t look like anyone’s been working on it.

I got a set off ebay, Jesus christ they’re loud. I ended up returning them cause I could hear the grinding through my whole house

If you’re interested in using flakes, this repo was helpful when learning how to get my first system configurations set up in an organized way https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs

Plus 99.9% of people will never think of doing that

It kinda crazy you can’t do this, wasn’t Microsoft forced to let you change default browsers in an antitrust suit?

As long as you have a master password it’s basically the same as a password manager, Bitwarden is more convenient because it works across apps on your phone.