muhyb

Huh, no idea if that's already a thing.

Maybe they ARE moving to Linux? I expect Power Shell next. /s

Well, they appreciate any kind of contributions. Thanks for considering this.

I see. Well, while GUI has improved a lot on Linux in recent years, if you still want to know it fully, you'll need to learn the CLI part. CLI on Linux is really powerful and that's why you usually won't find any forum replies related to GUI. That might seem a down part for people who are new to Linux, however it makes it easier for the people who are trying to help. Sadly you can run into jerks and gatekeepers everywhere but fortunately they are not a big portion, they just talk loudly.

Once you learned the CLI, it's almost always the same and it changes very little in time. This is the hard part and normal user don't need to know CLI anymore, which is why the desktop Linux adoption gets better nowadays. But if you're a power user, you'll need to learn the CLI, at least the parts you require.

what is a DE?

Sorry, I should've mentioned it at least once. It means desktop environment. You may also see people talk about WMs, those are window managers. Every DE has a WM, but if you decide to use a standalone WM, you'll need to install every other software yourself which normally come as bundled in a DE. Of course, I'm not talking about distros that come with WM options. Those usually cover the software part pre-installed. If you don't want to configure anything on yourself, DEs are the safe choice here. If you enjoy configuring everything (at least I'm looking at it that way) to your needs, you usually do that once (and upload your configs to your personal repo, that way when you need a reinstall, you just pull your configs from git and you're ready to go). That's why Linux veterans seem to prefer WMs a lot. There is no limit to configuration, this is both pro and con, depending on where you stand.

Regarding not auto-mounting, the main reason there most likely security related. Again, I agree that more distros should offer more visible options related to that, though some distros already do that. But it should stay as a choice. There are differences between Windows and Linux and this is one of those. If you're talking about the filesystems on the disks installed in your PC case, they'll auto-mount if they're a Linux filesystem. As default, this won't happen with NTFS partitions.

Fragmentation is not a bad thing but I agree that instead of making programs deeply related to their DEs, they should keep that minimal if that's possible. Like I mentioned, Flatpak mostly solved this issue. Bazzite uses almost everything from Flatpak which is actually good from this point of view (while it might have other challenges on its own, like not everything is on Flathub, gets better though).

I would say even Ubuntu with telemetry is leagues better than a cleaned Windows 11 when it comes to privacy, but I understand what you mean.

Not sure when did you switch but if you're kinda new with Linux, it just needs time to recalibrate your knowledge. Once you learn the best for your every need, things like these won't be an issue. I wish the defaults would always be the best. Some distros actually pick their pre-installed programs really well, but most distros usually go with default suites, like if it's KDE, then everything is KDE because of the integrity.

So, it's not just banking, payment apps etc. but all of the apps will eventually go there? Does this mean all of the custom ROMs have to become more device specific like GrapheneOS rather than just the devices using the same peripherals to solve an issue like this? (if it's solvable by devs)

Apparently older devices that don't get updates with their stock ROMs will also face problems because of this, even though they can be used as up-to-date with custom ROMs.

No problem! FOSS alternatives are really good as an office suite on their own but when it comes to Excel, things might go tricky. I hope they're as compatible as they claim.

Usually both KDE and GNOME includes all kind of programs as default for many tasks, however both side have a better program for something than the other. As a result, going purist is not the best option all the time. Distros that choose KDE or GNOME try to minimize the package size by not mixing these two a lot because nowadays many DE related programs come with a lot of dependencies. Naturally Gnome Disks also has dependencies that you will only install because of it, unless you already have other Gnome programs.

I always choose the best program that does the job so I end up with both KDE and GNOME dependencies. Flatpak kinda helped with this issue though. I tried going purist once years ago but when it comes to productivity, I always ended up with the program that works the best, so a lot of dependencies. I don't care anymore since I started using SSDs.

Not FOSS but maybe this might work for you: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/

I'm using Gnome Disks and never had to edit fstab for years.

You can archive the repo and write that the project moved elsewhere.

We will be able to play Half Life 3 as a curated dream.