The desktop background is the modern customized splash screen.

Window decorations and effects matter to me, for both functional and aesthetic reasons. To me, KDE is a sort of modernized cross between Windows 7 and NeXTStep in that department. And it gets right things that Windows has gotten worse about in 11, like being able to read the fucking clock. I seriously don't know who came up with that idea, but on the same display, I can read the taskbar clock on KDE without glasses and not on Windows unless I scale everything and throw away the benefit of the high-resolution display. And that's on the automatic display mode, but you actually also get settings.

I tried using Wayland with Devuan Excalibur (Debian Trixie) and my experience with it was not good. I had some games not work and a lot fewer windows could reopen where I left them. This is with AMD graphics. With Nvidia on Devuan Daedalus it really just doesn't work at all for me, and I'm not interested in figuring out why.

This is irritating, but hopefully X will last until my next PC or even my next GPU, which will probably be from AMD. The Nvidia Linux driver situation is unsatisfactory — they will not miss my money in any case, which no doubt helps explain the lack of attention. While their Linux drivers are typically current these days, and have approximately the same performance as the Windows drivers, they still just aren't very stable. Also, the installer sucks, where with AMD OSS drivers that's simply not a thing.

I ran every wm under the sun back in the 90s as well, designing whole desktop and widget themes around each one, and now I just use KDE. Does it do every single thing I used to do, no. Do I care, also no, because it's a great desktop. It does pretty much all the things I used to actually do with compiz. The thing I really want it to do (per-window scaling) I didn't have with compiz either. Yeah I know compiz still exists, but it's flakier than ever.

I used Gentoo on a K6 laptop and it "only" took about three days to rebuild the entire system. Updates were not a serious burden.

LibreOffice isn't as good as mickeysoft office, it's way better. The only thing Ms does better is that excel has live pivot tables

Run along, coward. I have people who are only stupid to mock.

I've bought all kinds of stuff because people bought it to use with one Windows version and the very next version didn't support it. This is usually due to literal malfeasance on the part of the maker, not Microsoft. The new devices speak the same protocol and WOULD work with the new driver, but either the driver is coded to not work with them or even just the inf file doesn't have the right vid/pids. You can sometimes make them work with hackery but your average user can't do that. The idea that Windows has good hardware support is very stupid, but there's no shortage of stupid people here.

Hahahahahahahaha

Tech literate

You guys are hilarious

Hajahahahahhahahahaa

Things just work

Tell us you know nothing about Windows without telling us

People may simply be used to the cinematic look, but it might also be objectively better in some ways, hiding some defects for example.

I support this idea but it's not trivial to implement, some bills are big and cover a lot of related area for legitimate reasons (whether they have bullshit tacked on or not.)

Perhaps they simply don't believe that copyright terms should have been extended, and that culture belongs to The People, as copyright law used to acknowledge with its original period. Maybe the extremists are the ones that think that culture should never belong to The People, like you.

You can't trust that a Chinese RoHS label is legit, Chinese companies are slapping it on shit like shoelaces. Meanwhile China has an essentially impossible to comply with RoHS standard for goods sold in their country, where you are taking responsibility for the content of your product, and you cannot simply cite your suppliers' specifications.

We had this discussion in 2023. And in 2021. 2020, 2019, 2017, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2007 and I think 2005. Or so.

Oh dear, poor users don't know where to start. I'm sure that is the one and only thing that stops the entire world from switching to Linux. Certainly not the lack of games, business applications or compelling reasons to switch from the shit that they currently run and know is shit but at least they know that shit.

Linux has won the server OS wars. When's the last time anyone had a serious discussion of using whatever the last windows server OS version is for anything critical? When's the last time you logged into a Solaris machine?

The desktop is a different game, always has been, always will be. It's a game run not by technical excellent. I mean, exhibit A: DOS and Windows, who were never, ever, the best OS - just the most popular one. But on the desktop, what matters is if the users can use it (it's right there in the word) and that hinges on two things: a) familiarity and b) availability of applications.

a) is a lot more serious than most of us nerds realize. Think about any random corporation. Let's say 5000 office employees currently using Windows. Re-training them to use Linux instead might take just a few hours for the tech-savvy ones, and let's say a day for the less so. Add twice that as a period where productivity is at least somewhat hampered by them having to look up again or ask a colleague how to do X. Suddenly you're looking at something like 30-50 thousand hours of lost productivity. And these are not minimum-wage people. So your bill is what, half a million?

b) this is the applications the business actually uses, not some Open Source alternative. If the graphics designers use Photoshop, they need that, not Gimp. Tons and tons of enterprise software is windows-only. And there we are with the chicken-and-egg problem.

Seriously, "the Linux desktop is too fragmented" is bullshit. All things considered, that's the least worry of anyone. And one of the greatest strengths. I know that I would've given up completely on Linux a lot sooner than I actually did if there had only been KDE and Gnome, and not Enlightenment and other interesting options pushing the boundary of the possible. Heck, E would still run circles around almost all UIs today.

30% (I know those are not real percentages but anyway) of Slashdotters would have turned in Anne Frank

And Clinton was happy to sign it. You don't just sign bad laws, you send them back and make the opposition pass it over your head if they have the will.