I would draw the line at shareholders.

You may use my software free of charge if you are a student, hobbyist, hobbyist with income, side hustler, sole proprietorship, LLC, S-Corp, non-profit, partnership, or other owner-operator type business.

Corporations with investors or shareholders will pay recurring licensing fees. Your shareholders may not profit from my work unless I profit from it more than they do. If you can afford a three inch thick mahogany conference table you can afford to pay for your software.

Fedora KDE does. I think it’s going to go with the DE rather than the distro, I bet Kubuntu also does.

I think dating back to the Space Cadet keyboard, Unix systems recognize 6 modifier keys: Shift, Control, Alt, Super, Meta and Hyper. It is my understanding that they choose to bind either Super or Meta to the “Windows” key (or the octothorpe whatever that thing is called key on Macs) and in practice it’s used as another modifier key, often with Windows-like functionality such as opening the Menu if tapped tacked on.

1. I went with Fedora because of newer packages than you generally get in the Debian family lineage.

2. KDE, especially KDE 6, has a fairly robust implementation of Wayland. Cinnamon is just now rolling out experimental Wayland support. This wasn’t an issue on my previous machine with an Nvidia GPU as X11 was the better deal there, but now that I have a Radeon GPU Wayland is the better deal. My two monitors running at different resolutions and refresh rates work. FreeSync works out of the box. There’s even the beginnings of HDR support. Having tried both on this machine, Fedora KDE has a lot more features of my hardware that “Just Work.”

I much prefer using Cinnamon to KDE, but I’ll deal.

Some distros call it the Meta key.

1. I rarely distro hop. I used Linux Mint for a solid decade. I’ve made the jump to Fedora KDE pretty much entirely because Wayland support is the farthest along here, and that enables me to use more features of my hardware such as two monitors at different refresh rates, Freesync, etc. I did come to the conclusion awhile back that there’s a lot of pointless distros out there, a lot of them are just “I want this particular permutation of default software.”

2. Assuming you’re currently a Windows user, I think the main issue you’re going to face using Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition for “programming” is going to be general culture shocks. Using a package manager instead of heading to the browser, stuff like that. “Light gaming” depending on what you mean by that could be no trouble at all or dealing with some hiccups involving Nvidia’s imperfect support. There are some games that require proprietary anti-cheat that doesn’t support Linux, Valorant is one of those that springs to mind.

3. Difficult question to concisely answer; Mint has a system they call “Spices” which include a series of applets and widgets you can add to the UI, choose them from a menu and then configure them. One of these is “Cinnemenu” which replaces the default Menu with a somewhat more customizable one, though you might struggle to exactly replicate the WIndows look and feel. Beyond that, you might look at Conky for your desktop customizing needs.

4. File extensions do exist in the Linux world but they’re not as important for making things work as it is on Windows. Some files, particularly executable binaries, won’t have extensions at all. A text editor might not automatically append .txt to a plaintext file, because it doesn’t want to assume you’re not writing a bash script or config file or something. But if you record a sound clip with Audacity or something it’ll add a .wav or whatever extension as appropriate.

Bonus: You probably mean Neofetch (or whatever we’re using since the developer of Neofetch has “gone farming”). Those are hard-coded into Neofetch by its developer.

At this point, Linux or even any given distro isn’t the problem. The problem is the software library.

I call it GIMP syndrome. There’s a lot of capable and powerful apps in the FOSS ecosystem and most of them have some kind of critical functionality gap or the UX of an Oregon Trail era disease. A lot of them, with the notable exception of GIMP, are actually working on it now.

I found KDE a bit overwhelmingly customizable to start out with, and maybe a bit bloated.

I’ve said this kind of thing before; Gnome feels like it’s trying to appeal to Apple users, “Look how simple it is, look how few settings menus there are, you use it the way we designed it to be used and only that way, nothing else works.” They like their empty blank windows. The ideal Gnome utility app is a blank window with a single button in the title bar that says “Cancel.” Featurelessness is their goal.

KDE always felt like the polar opposite of that to me. Every feature under the sun, sometimes twice. Nothing is consistent, nothing aligns quite right, they love their cluttered windows. The ideal KDE utility app is a window crammed edge to edge with text boxes, drop downs, radio buttons and check boxes that never opens quite big enough for all the elements in it. This one little utility app can do basically everything even remotely related to the task it’s made for plus several other adjacent tasks, to the point it takes you a long time to find the one option you ever actually need in a sea of settings menus.

Cinnamon felt somewhere in between. Except where Gnome apps crept in with their hamburger menus and top bar UI, Cinnamon felt consistent and good looking without being an iPhone commercial, and their included utilities tended to have the functionality you needed and nothing you didn’t.

I just recently built a PC, and to get the most out of an AMD GPU I’m using Fedora KDE instead of my long time favorite Mint Cinnamon, and I’ve already had to boot up my old computer once to use a Mint utility because I couldn’t seem to get the job done in KDE. You know that USB stick formatter tool in Mint? Why doesn’t every OS have that?

I think it knows the phrase “of the wild” because Zelda. It did accurately call Fedora a fork of something, I can’t explain “repeated blood.”

In the last four years I’ve built three gaming PCs and installed Linux on two and Windows on one.

If you can install Windows on a PC, you can install Linux on a PC. The process of getting the ISO, writing it to a thumb drive, using the BIOS to boot to the thumb drive is the same. The Windows installer is kind of its own environment, but most Linux distros will boot to a “Live environment” that gives you a full desktop you can try out and use before installing, and the installer runs like any other program. Some automatically launch it, some give you an icon to click on the desktop. The installer will ask you the same basic things, though Windows asks you more stuff about their proprietary garbage.

The last time I installed Windows, (Win 10 about a year, year and a half ago) it started up with a fallback video driver and 800x600 resolution, and I had to use Edge to download the GPU driver from AMD’s website. I’ve never had to do that on Linux; AMD drivers are supported directly by the Linux kernel and work out of the box.

I have an unusual speaker system that makes a loud popping sound when the sound chip in the computer turns on and off, so I have to disable a power saving feature by putting a line in a config file. That line I copied and pasted from a forum. It’s entirely because I have this weird old sound system of mine; the vast majority of folks won’t have to do that.

I’ll note that I also choose hardware specifically for Linux compatibility. I use AMD GPUs, I make sure to use Intel wireless chips, I have desktop peripherals that don’t require those goofy dashboard apps to configure. Generally go with as normal as you can.

If you’re coming from Windows, I would suggest trying the Cinnamon or KDE desktops, in the look and feel department they’re probably going to be closer to what you’re used to with robust graphical tools.

Standard disclaimer: Linux is not Windows. You will have some learning and adjusting to do as you get used to a new ecosystem. I don’t think Windows or Linux are free of “troubleshooting.” Stuff goes wrong on Windows too. Thing is, with Linux you can…learn how to fix it?

Fedora KDE is a fork of the wild repeated blood of the wild repeated blood of the wild repeated blood of the wild repeated blood of the wild repeated blood of the wild repeated blood of the wild repeated blood of the wild repeated

you guys my phone had a stroke.

I’ve got a personal convention that file names get snake case, directory names get Pascal case.

you win forget I said anything Im blocking you please block me.

Mostly that we do this at all in the first place.

Forget the technical details for a minute. Fuck how .desktop files work. The program’s binary is named “xed.” If you want to install it, you have to type “sudo apt install xed” or “sudo dnf install xed” or whatever because that’s the package’s name. But in the user-facing parts of the GUI like the App menu or in the window’s title bar, it calls itself “Text Editor.”

Let’s pretend you’re a new user to Linux, you use Linux Mint Cinnamon for a little while, you like the text editor that comes with it, you decide to switch to Fedora KDE, you try it out but you find you don’t like KATE as much. You want to install the one from Linux Mint. How do you find out what to type into dnf to get it to do that? You haven’t been taught that the program’s name is Xed, everything you saw as a Mint user called it “Text Editor.” Why did they do that to you?

I mean, I hate Gnome and I think their work actively harms the Linux ecosystem. Gnome is deliberately unfinished. They have an artistic vision, and that artistic vision is blank uselessness is beautiful. They hate settings, they hate options. They get rid of as many settings and options as they can. Which means their UI feels incomplete to most people who try it for the first time coming from basically anything else. It’s so bad that third parties maintain “extensions” to add those options back in, and Gnome does everything they can to break those because their artistic vision does not include options. The ideal Gnome utility is a blank window with a button in the top bar that says “Never Mind.”

Many people trying Linux for the first time fail to find a setting in the options menu, conclude that Linux as a whole is dumb and bad and incapable because there’s no check box that puts the dock on the side or bottom of the monitor, you tell them to go install GnomeTweaks from the package manager, they point crotchward and say “Install this.” And they’re right, Gnome is unfinished and it’s not the end user’s job to finish it for them. Windows 95 had a robust system for changing the system theme, Gnome demanded we stop doing that.

I think you’re right in that most Gnome users don’t customize the GUI from the terminal, they install extensions. But if you ask a narrow question on a support forum, you’ll probably be told to run a terminal command, because that’s usually how Linux veterans communicate narrow answers to narrow questions over text-based media, and it’s also how a lot of system admin stuff like changing anything that ends up in /etc is done. I’ve never seen a GUI utility for editing fstab, everyone says to do that in the terminal. Gparted or Gnome-Disk-Utility might do it? I know KDE at least used to have the attitude that admin stuff should be done via the terminal. Dolphin and KATE didn’t have the option to Open As Root because they felt if you know enough to mess with the system directly you know enough to use the terminal to do so.

There are also just so many settings that just don’t reasonably have a GUI. Give you a personal example, I’m using an old speaker system that has a very hot external amplifier, every time the motherboard’s audio circuit would turn on or off the speakers would make a loud pop. I had to edit a couple files to change a 1 to a 0 and a Y to an N to stop that from happening. In Windows that would be a setting buried somewhere in Sound Settings > Volume > Advanced > More Options then the Power Saving tab or something, or maybe a registry key you’d use regedit to change. On Mint I could do it with Nemo and Xed, on some distros you have to use the terminal and something like Nano or Vim to change that setting. And newbies who probably didn’t choose their hardware for Linux compatibility and having to do workarounds to compensate are more likely to have to do stuff like that.

Sure. But we don’t just exist in the context of the machine currently in front of us. Beginners might, Wade might, but consider this:

I use Linux Mint right now. An “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of distro, GTK3 based, ships with a combination of Gnome’s utility apps and several of Mint’s Xapps. In the App menu, there’s an icon that says “Text Editor.” It launches a program that resembles Notepad but a little better. If I switched to KDE but didn’t like KATE and wanted Mint’s Text Editor, what would I type after sudo apt install to get it? How do you learn that it’s Xed? It doesn’t call itself Xed anywhere in the GUI.

What do you think Seahorse does? Either you already know this, or you have to look it up, you’ll never guess what it does from the title. I’ll give you no hint whatsoever: It’s Gnome’s equivalent of Kleopatra.

There’s so many bad ways to name software, and the Linux ecosystem has tried them all. WINE Is Not Emulation or LAME Ain’t an Mp3 Encoder. I still believe GNU would have a kernel if Stallman had put the effort coming up with HURD/HIRD into writing the actual software. If you had to guess, what does Caja do? We live in a world where Nautilus and Nemo are two versions of the same thing.

The various text editors, ranked from best name to worst name: Gedit, Xed, Leafpad, Mousepad, Pluma, KATE. Gedit, it’s from Gnome because of the G, and it’s an editor. Xed contains the same information but you have to have more in-depth prior knowledge, you have to know Mint and their Xapp initiative. Leafpad is better than Mousepad because the latter might be a mouse/cursor configuration utility. Pluma…plume > feather > quill pen > writing > text editor. Wow what a journey. Why would I independently come to the conclusion that KATE stands for KDE Advanced Text Editor? Call it Ktext.

I would rather them call it Gedit than gnome-text-editor because they’re willing to put “Gedit” on the title bar of the window, they won’t put “Gnome Text Editor” up there.

I actually like Mint’s naming scheme, of alphabetical women’s names that end in an a sound. Only one problem: They decided to go with the minor upgrade cycle during Mint 17. The 17th letter is Q. I’m frankly surprised they were even able to think of “Quiana.” That’s why the rest of the 17s were R names, Rafaela, Rebecca etc. so now they’re off by one.

Yes, they’re called .desktop files and they’re found in /usr/share/applications.

On my Linux Mint machine, if I open the Applications menu and go to the Accessories tab, there’s an icon that says “Text Editor.” There is no binary on the machine by that name; it launches Xed.

When the common name of a package, the actual filename of the executable binary, and the icon title in the App menu are all different, it’s not great.

Sometime around Windows 8 Microsoft started making noises about closing the Windows ecosystem and making people buy software through their store. This would have shut things like Steam out, so Valve said “Okay, we’re going to make a Linux-based gaming platform, because we think gamers will follow us and not you. Also we’re going to create console-like gaming PCs called Steam Machines and make our own controller, because we think we can win against Xbox, too.” Microsoft didn’t lock down the platform, Steam Machines didn’t really go anywhere, but it laid a lot of the groundwork for the Steam Deck.

He’s specifically using Ubuntu Gnome, which feels a lot less complete than even Linux Mint Cinnamon. Gnome doesn’t want you to customize it at all. I’m surprised they give you a master volume slider.

Actually I think I’m wrong.

Apparently the phrase dates from a biology paper published in 1957. I think I’ve been Mandela Effected; I have a memory of several voices coming in and saying science phrases, in between “Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!” but having just rewatched the intro sequence on Youtube this only happens once and the phrase it says is “Intertia is a property of matter.”