I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.

Still no support for high resolution monitors though?

I love the hum of ozone in the morning.

>The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it

Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it.

(Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)

I understand what you mean and it’s not wrong, but still there is a contract that is being fulfilled: human in both ends. Whether it’s rambling or not, someone wrote it, and it represents a person’s idea of whatever is being discussed. That contract is now broken, but in an asymmetrical way, only one side gets to save time. My brain refuses to spend time reading crap that I don’t even know if someone even took time to prompt. Maybe they just wrote “give me something to post, whatever makes me look smart”. It’s just completely broke for me and makes me actually sick in the stomach when I read almost anything (textual uncanny valley?)

Depends on if it's a non-formatted rant or not. Generally, traditionally, long form non-rant responses have been more thoughtful than not. This can no longer be assumed

If you received an email at work that was three paragraphs, you wouldn't assume the author put in more work than a one-sentence reply?

Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.

I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are, still use OpenOffice and think that it is the no-cost office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand recognition, last thing we need is another fork.

LibreOffice is a pretty bad name, it is too clearly a spin-off of OpenOffice and never really gained its own identity. Being identifiable as a bad project’s better fork is kind of a weak starting position.

That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be itself eternally static.

Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.

That will just create another dead fork that no one works on.

LibreOffice exists because the devs of OpenOffice forked it. If the project leadership now ejects the devs, I think that the new fork will be the living one.

Yep. Each screen is just a list of prebuilt columns reused over and over. Then they used a form of crude RLE on the lists.

There's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental.

I love XFCE but I've had a hell of a time getting it to work nicely with multiple high DPI monitors. I finally gave up and went to KDE which.. just works.

Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.

Yep. Unless you have really good eyes, XFCE is unusable on a 4K screen. On the same screen, KDE at 150-175% is glorious at providing both more real estate than 1920x1080 while being crispy.

Try LXQT :)

As long as it's not a proprietary horror dystopia.

I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.

For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.

That was years ago and I'm still on it.

Hardware support in the last years has really improved significantly. I was using arch a lot back around 2016, and it was a nightmare. On every kernel update had to recompile a kernel driver cause my laptops chipset was something bizarre, nvidia drivers were mostly half working and it all just felt like a fragile card house.

Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall

> For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch.

Probably from people who have never used it.

What do you like better than debian?

I run multiple arch systems and multiple Debian systems in my house.

Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.

Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.

Trixie now has go1.24 - including the upstream default GOTOOLCHAIN value to automatically download new compiler versions straight from go.dev if the go.mod wants them.

I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .

That is both neat and surprising.

That said while my specific example perhaps is obsolete, the general class of problem I described is not.

Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.

> It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.

That’s stable for you, even the ‘less nice’ parts are a feature of the distribution if you’re running a fleet. On desktops people have been running testing or unstable for this reason since forever.

Debian is awesome for servers or systems that you just want to keep running without messing with it. On desktop though it’s nice to have, for example, Neovim is that is not 3 major versions behind.

Good salad is delicious. I think more people would realize that if they weren't exposed to nothing but iceberg, cheddar, and ranch monstrosities during childhood.

Standing up here for iceberg, I think a proper wedge with blue cheese and bacon is delicious. The crispness is refreshing. Not as nutritional as other salads, but sure goes well with a steak and a martini.

I took that comment to refer to "iceberg, cheeese, and ranch" as a unit. Iceberg is great, the official lettuce of the greatest sandwich in the world.

The greatest, and the most American sandwich in the world. The BLT is incredibly balanced, I feel like all three elements are stars in their own right.

Often eating a chunk of iceberg is like gnawing on the demon spawn of table legs and styrofoam. Gimme those dark leafy greens.

The iceberger?