No. You don’t manually place apps on homescreen. I have it configured to only show one row of favorites, which are categorized as “pinned - manually sorted”. Than the rest of my favorites are seen when i swipe to app drawer.

Can do homescreen icons. It has a widgets “pane”. You don’t place them on the home screen but put all widgets together than swipe to widgets. You can configure kvaesitso so it’s not too different from stock android experience.

I have 5 “favorite” apps at bottom of screen, above the search bar, similar to stock android.

I swipe left for my app drawer, which allows for more pinned favorites above full list.

I swipe up for all my widgets.

Swipe down for notifications, like stock.

Swipe right for my camera app.

I too would be put off if it had to be used that way. But it can be used as a regular icon tapping launcher - it has a regular app drawer - which is how i use it. I don’t think it should market itself as a “search-focused” launcher.

Kvaesitso has risen to the top as my favorite launcher after trying a ton of launchers.

Does set-default-sink change an already current stream? Or do you need move-sink-input.

I’ve looked at the manpages but was a bit overwhelmed and didn’t try to make my own script. Your solution gives me motivation to do so. I also use sway and pipewire. Though I use fuzzel for my launcher.

pavucontrol. I switch between usb headset and my external speakers all the time. Continually going to this gui is kind of annoying.

My first linux install was crunchbang. I don’t remember why I picked it. Perhaps i liked the minimalistic look. Ended up not really liking openbox and I vaguely remember running into some problem with debian’s old packages, though I honestly can’t remember what. So I switched to ubuntu, which was great for me as a linux noob.

I just built a amd 7600 system in January 2024 and had no issues. Not sure that counts as very new but it was for me!

I dumped ubuntu for debian 12 due to snaps, and i’m very happy so far. I run sway as my window manager. I guess we’ll see how i feel in a year but i honestly can’t think of any software i run that i’m simply fine with it not being the most recent. I’m even using the firefox-esr version that debian ships with and it’s fine.

Yup. I teach at a university. It used to be adequate for instructions to say something along the lines of

open the file C://Folder/anotherfolder/subfolder/document.ext

I encounter more and more students every year that have no idea how to do this.

User you are replying to wasn’t replying to OP?

Maybe my reading comprehension is bad, but it seemed obvious to me user was replying to a specific comment seeing how it was a reply to that nerd comment instead of OP and post used the phrase “this comment”.

Not an issue. I did the same thing a while ago, switched from nvidea to amd. After i confirmed the radeon was working fine i purged all the nvidea stuff

You say this as if command line is bad? I love the command line for certain tasks. A very common task I do is convert an image from one filetype to another. How does this work on windows? Assuming I have a program that works with each image filetype, I open up the program, click on some menus and dropdown selections and click convert or “save as file type”. On linux, where every major distro has imagemagick installed by default I type

convert image.jpg image.pdf

and done. I mean, how much easier can that be?

Or another example is merging a bunch of pdfs. I imagine adobe acrobat can do this, but I’ve never bothered to learn how, as I quickly learned that I can do it using pdftk on linux by typing

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output merged.pdf

and done. If I do happen to forget the exact syntax for that command, google gives me the answer instantly.

If there’s a difficult command line thing to do with lots of options that can get confusing, there is a GUI interface that someone has written that has the dropdown boxes so you don’t HAVE to learn the specific options, but a little bit of learning the command line makes many tasks way more convenient than a typical windows GUI program.

Regarding wine, you’ve obviously have never used it (or likely even linux). I used my linux pc for 13 years before installing wine to play WoW. (side note to another of your strange assertions, I knew zero programming languages when I switched to linux.) Although, I wasn’t really gaming at all in that time period. I mainly do work on my pc, and the software I use is so much more convenient to us on linux than windows: mainly latex and vim. Some friend asked me to play WoW with them and I said “If I can get it to run on linux, I will.” Kind of thinking it would be a huge pain in the ass to get to run. But the whole process went super smooth, it was maybe 3 commands and now I use zero command line to launch WoW using wine.

Finally, I don’t like the windows UI. Floating desktop managers always annoyed me (including the linux ones such as gnome) whenever I needed multiple windows displayed at once. Way too much fiddliness adjusting window sizes and borders. I learned about tiling window managers, and that’s what I use now. Is tiling even possible on windows? I know you can win+arrow to kinda do this, but then rearranging can be a pain. I know this is all personal preference and most people like floating windows, but it’s a choice I can make on linux.

Well, Pop was released way after I bought the first laptop. I guess I haven’t had any reason to try it out, as I’m happy with my i3/sway setup. I don’t really hop distros at all. Maybe when system76 completes/releases their full cosmic desktop (not based on gnome) I’ll give it a spin.

System 76 customer here. I just replaced my 2011 system 76 lemur with a new lemur. I have Ubuntu installed on both and have never tried pop os. I was very happy with that laptop and the company in general. It actually still runs okay. I did replace the battery after about 5 or 6 years. I’m thinking of trying out nixos on it.

My guilty reason for upgrading was I wanted to play dwarf fortress at more than 5 fps…

Thanks for this write up.