RedSnt 🧩♂️👓🖥️

Ahh, a ~/.local/opt folder makes so much sense. I’m currently just using a ~/.opt folder, same purpose.

Woah, that’s wild. If you run the browser in fullscreen mode (F11) it’s almost like you’re running it on your own machine. Pretty cool service.

It won’t affect linux itself, you can restore the bootloader and get into linux when windows does that, it’s just that it’s a pain in the arse to restore. But yes, it has happened not too long ago that windows overwrote the linux bootloader. Microsoft obviously claimed it was an accident, but they obviously don’t care.
And no, on a separate drive windows won’t touch it at all.

EDIT: Maybe it’s not so hard to restore grub loader as I thought, could be as simple as these steps.

Yes. But like @[email protected] said, Windows has a bad tendency to overwrite the bootloader, and that can happen down the road during an update of theirs.
That’s why people recommend using a separate physical drive to install linux on if dualbooting with windows, because then you choose what you want to boot up on with the UEFI boot menu instead which Windows can’t overwrite (yet?).

Thanks for sharing your thought process going through this. Theming is important, perhaps more important than we think of regularly, it’s actually one of the main things I enjoy about linux. I believe it’s also a reason why people are leaving Windows as it has become way too corporate and soulless.

They do mention a plasmoid for KDE plasma, although according to their documentation that requires distro specific packaging. For Debian it looks like there’s a community package (right side).
EDIT:

By systems service you’re talking about systemd, right? I found this guide that sets up syncthing as a systemd service. Archwiki has a different one though.
And as the Archwiki alludes to, there’s this Syncthingtray tool that can be set up to show notifications.

Yeah, unfortunately there’s no inverse mouse cursor theme. I loved it on windows as well. What I’m using now is this “Hackneyed high contrast cursors” theme, the green one to be specific, and I absolutely love it.

I don’t actually know, but I assume mouse themes are universal? Or does KDE mouse themes now work with Cinnamon?

I read that there’s an extension for Cinnamon that does the same, although I also saw a bug report that it might be broken, idk. Worth a shot. Here’s how to enable it.

Thanks!

It comes as no surprise that the flatpak version of freetube doesn’t like using an external player. I tried giving access to /usr/bin via flatseal, but alas.
Installing the real version it works though, but seemingly Fedora’s current version of yt-dlp doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. There is a newer version on yt-dlp’s github though, so getting that and overwriting the installed version in /usr/bin (don’t forget to make a backup, otherwise there’s sudo dnf reinstall yt-dlp) that does the trick.

The sponsorblock plugin is an excellent shout though, I hadn’t heard of that for MPV, then again, it’s rare for me to stream directly from youtube.
But wait, doesn’t yt-dlp already have sponsorblock support? I guess it’s better to get the whole stream and then do player based sponsorblock stuff.

Oh yeah, I’m sure they’ll include the decoding chips sooner, and apologies I should’ve been more specific and say that it’s me that is not planning on buying a new GPU with AV2 HW decoding until a decade from now.

I can’t wait to possibly buy a card a decade from now with AV2 hardware decoding. Ain’t happening until after 2035 that’s for sure.
If we’re lucky some firmware upgrade or driver can make AV1 hardware decoding capable cards able to do AV2 as well, but I seriously doubt it - GPU manufacturers want to sell new cards all the time after all.

I used MX Linux all of 2024 because I had previously installed antiX on an old netbook and I really liked the tools it came with that meant I didn’t have to touch the console too much, and MX Linux is a sister project based on antiX sharing the same custom utilities. And I have no clue why it rose to the top of distrowatch, but once it was there it stayed there because people click the top distros on the list in the sidebar, which in turn gives it clicks making it stay on top.
I do still believe it’s a good starter distro, it’s just that once you get a bit more comfortable with linux the old Debian packages become more and more annoying.

What @[email protected] said, anytime you add or remove or update your system snapper does a little snapshot which makes it incredible easy to boot back into a system that works. BTRFS makes it so easy, as compared to EXT4. And yeah Timeshift is still just as valid I guess but unless you make timeshift backups every times you install or remove something, it’s hard to compare the two.

No wrong answers.

I don’t know if you’ve read about atomic distros yet, so here’s a link to that. Personally I’d pick OpenSUSE over Bazzite because I don’t like the idea of updates possibly overwriting anything I install myself that isn’t flatpak/distrobox/homebrew, but that’s not a dealbreaker for many, it’s just a different way of installing software that ensures the operating system doesn’t get packages installed that can make it unstable.
I wouldn’t be too worried using OpenSUSE in particular as it has excellent snapper integration that makes it very easy to roll back any changes made to the system that might cause said instability or inability to even boot to desktop (especially with grub-btrfs set up).

The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it’s easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that’s still Arch.

Hahaha, what a great way to start tuesday morning.

That’s certainly a concern for some, but I’m using like 30 GB for all the things I’ve installed, which is a lot (12 (flatpak-system), 76 (flatpak-user)) but that’s on a 2 TB drive, which amounts to like 1½% of the total available space. I don’t think that’s a bad trade.

Boxbuddy makes it incredibly easy to use distrobox, a great way to install software that might not be available for your distro, but is available on another distro, or just a way to keep a piece of software in a stable state (like DaVinci Resolve with davincibox).

If you use a “gaming distro”, I’m sure you’ve seen Input Remapper. It’s a neat utility that can create macros for all your peripherals or rebind keys as you like. Want to bind you controller so it works like a mouse? Possible. Want to macro key pressed by using the forward button on your mouse? Possible.

Did you leave Foobar2000 behind when you switched to Linux? Why not give Fooyin a try. It’s a relatively new audio player with aspirations of becoming just as configurable as FB2K. For me replaygain is quite important, and while some other FOSS audio players support it, not many has replaygain generation. And Fooyin does. While also being just as easy to set up and use as Foobar. Worth a look.