How would you set up a fallback kernel in Arch?

Exactly. archinstall is pretty nice, and if you want the frustration of dealing with random errors, it’s still there. But it’s straightforward (but keep the docs handy since you’ll likely need them).

I just use DeArrow so I don’t know what the original thumbnails are. Thank God.

About 100-200

Wine stuff was janky as hell. As were Qt apps. For one thing wine applications, too, expected a Tray, and would instead spawn a tiny window at the corner for tray stuff. Plus there was weird behaviour with some windows and the way they layered. As for Qt apps? Gnome offered no features for setting the look of Qt apps, so if I set Gnome to dark mode (by the way, very neat feature how Gnome’s default theme deals with that, no joke here, very seamless and elegant, even if I’d never use light mode willingly), Qt apps would still be bright and I had to just install a third-party application for it (qt5ct) and set something in my /etc/environment.

Sorry, I laughed out loud when I read that. Only in Linux land would we run into issues like this because stuff is modular so when things aren’t the way something expects, shit breaks in the stupidest ways.

All of these things had solutions, to be sure, an extension for the tray, a third-party application for the Qt apps, etc. But then I did an apt upgrade and literally all the extensions broke. So I had to spend an extra hour that day figuring out what I’d do about that. Joy of joys.

Oh I learned early on to either update super regularly so I can see what’s breaking as it happens, or be careful upgrading. The number of times I’ve broken shit by updating software is insane (and not limited to GNOME). Even on macOS, the number of times I’ve fixed something by symlinking a library file to the same location with an older version name is stupid. I can see why people are interested in something like NixOS.

Then there is the Gnome File Manager.

You could’ve just stopped there, I had forgotten how weirdly awful it was. The amount of time I spent getting that stupid thing to just fucking have options like “Open in Terminal” is insane.

Cinnamon absolutely is fantastic, and I 100% agree that it gets out of the way really well.

I’m curious what you needed to do that GNOME was fighting you. I’m not invalidating it, I’m genuinely just curious, since I haven’t used a Linux system for personal/work use for about 5 years now, so my ideas of GNOME/KDE/etc. are almost certainly dated. To clarify: vanilla GNOME is kind of awful, and I’ve always wondered if anyone genuinely uses it stock while also being aware that extensions exist.

Gnome devs want to decide what is best for you

Rebuttal: I’m extremely fickle, so someone else making choices for me is what I need. In KDE I spent wasted days customizing and just gave up in the end. It’s the same idea as using prettier instead of using your own lint rules: you stop wasting time and just do the thing you’re there to do.

In general, for configs (linting, neovim, etc), I prefer taking something really good and tweaking the parts I dislike—which is the model GNOME uses. Probabilistically, it’s exponentially likely that your preferences are only a little bit away from someone else—just use their thing and spend 15 minutes tweaking them.

A majority? I mean use something else if you like them better, no need to shit on GNOME

I honestly like the vertical integration, but I can see why Linux folks would be annoyed. Honestly GNOME fits my workflow perfectly after a few extensions (mainly Dash to Dock). I’m super fickle, so its rigidity helps

Yeah there’s only so many actually open-ended questions you can ask without being repetitive, while also on relatively limited users.

Yeah. My sister uses Linux, and I’ve taught her basic commands to just make things easier (apt install, cd, ls, that sorta thing). And she knows how to find a decent website for support and copy the commands, which are usually fine.

Get your Vitamin D level checked, just in case.

Yup, that’s been my experience with getting people to at least consider Linux as well. The first thing they ask when I tell them it’s a different OS like Mac is, “so can it run XYZ?” Most people don’t actually care and just want something that runs the apps they use.

Interestingly, my mom (a Windows user her whole life) seemed just as alienated by macOS as by Linux. Her work gave her a Mac and she couldn’t understand anything after about a week so she just asked for a Windows system instead.