circuitfarmer

A bigger issue is that the Steam Deck touchpads don’t work without Steam being open

This is interesting, because the touchpads on the Steam Controller do work without Steam being open, at least on Linux, though without cursor acceleration. I wonder why the touchpads on the Deck were handled differently.

Not true about Proton. It’s Steam DRM that requires Steam running in the bg, same as on Windows.

Definitely makes a lot of sense to use a VM for it. Though there is something fun about having a spare laptop and just playing on bare metal.

It’s just more barebones than lots of other options, and distro hopping tends to be about exploration. There isn’t a whole lot to explore on Debian, because its purpose is stability and simplicity.

You find tons of Debian-derived distros exactly for this reason. They build on that stable core but add bells and whistles. Distros usually are defined by which bells and whistles they include by default.

I’m running Mint currently

I’m wondering if there is a lot of benefit to going more barebones

Not really. On the scale at which homelabs operate, I doubt you’ll see any difference at all – except what might be the significant time sink to set everything up again.

I’m not having any issues with my current setup

I’d put this firmly in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” category. Mint is already a distro which is ultimately a Debian derivative. It operates more like Debian as opposed to, say, Fedora or Arch. While it can be enticing to explore the many options of Linux, the benefit isn’t clear here.

Now, distro hopping on a nonproduction system? Something where you don’t care what’s on it and you just want to experiment? That’s one of the best parts of being a Linux user. But at least do that first before even approaching breaking something that isn’t broken.

It sounds more like you want to have fun distro hopping, and believe me: I can tell you from experience that distro hopping isn’t fun if you have to rely on that machine.

Bots?

That would be reported.

Friends don’t let friends be root.

Just to clarify: the “much smoother” is subjective and might be an oversimplification, but the “not using Gnome” part is correct.

Personally I don’t use any Gnome extensions and have much preferred Cosmic to the old Pop Shell. YMMV.

Linux user here. What’s a friend?

DE completely depends on your workflow. The way you do things directly impacts what DEs you’ll like and which ones you won’t.

I’m with you on KDE: I respect it and it clearly seems to be one of the most feature-rich DEs, but I’ve had trouble actually using it regularly.

I have been using Cosmic DE for the last 6 months or so. I love it because it seamlessly blends tiled and non-tiled workspaces in an effective way. Part of me really enjoys the simplicity of things like i3, but part of me just wants floating windows. It fully depends on what I’m working on and sometimes just my mood, so for me, the seamless blending in Cosmic has felt perfect.

But how important is DE? Tbh I think it is the most important part of a setup, because you interact with it more than any other piece of the system.

Tbh I have no real complaints. I would eventually like some keyboard shortcuts for moving entire workspaces around without the mouse, but what is there is quite intuitive and I find myself not leaving the keyboard to navigate. The defaults are similar to i3 shortcuts.

I like that they work in tiling and non-tiling mode, and each workspace can be set to either mode at whim.

No issues with stability (which was a problem for me in earlier builds).

I don’t use any of the Cosmic utils, though (text editor, terminal, etc). They seem fine but ymmv.

Edit: actually just thought of one thing… If you move a window from a non-tiling workspace to a tiling one, it stays in non-tiling mode. This leads to a mixed mode workspace and I don’t like that. But it’s easily fixed with mode toggle and only a minor annoyance – ideally I want it to switch to whatever mode the workspace is in.

My 3 monitor setup has been really fantastic after switching to Cosmic desktop. Really really loving the mix of tiling and non-tiling features too.

Tangential to OP but just wanted to throw Cosmic out there for folks who haven’t yet tried it.

Would be better if specifically Windows 11 and 8.1 were at top of S tier above the other versions

+Windows Me. Still the GOAT

I had those too, but they have gone away for me on 24.04.

Not the Steam client itself, but some games like to start minimized still. That’s a minor annoyance, but it is also completely fixed by simply launching everything in gamescope, which plays very nicely with COSMIC.

COSMIC now has a workspaces overview which is quite similar.

I’ve been daily driving COSMIC for about 6 months now. It has improved dramatically, and I (mostly) love it. Stable too. It’s kept me on Pop and I’m now on 24.04.

I have a triple monitor setup, and I like COSMIC’s tiling features and that I can very easily move around between windows and workspaces without the mouse. It’s similar to i3 in feel (not as lightweight of course), but with easier setup. I can set tiling on or off for specific workspaces, which is great for differing workloads. Numbered shortcuts work too (e.g. option+3 takes me to workspace 3). It is much, much, MUCH better than the tiling features they added for Pop Shell in earlier versions using Gnome.

There are a couple things I would like: the ability to pin specific apps to specific workspaces would be nice, and I wish workspace numbering could span monitors (at the moment, each monitor has its own set of numbers, but they overlap each other so you can’t jump to another display only with the number). But tbh I don’t care too much about these since everything else has been great.

I don’t really use the COSMIC apps (Files, text editor, etc), but that hasn’t mattered either.

Edit: if anyone finds it relevant, I’m running a 9700x with 64GB RAM and a 7800XT. Go Team Red.

Peggle. As a grown ass person I still play it at least once every couple of weeks. Stupid fun when you don’t want to pay too much attention.

In linguistics this is called “code switching”, and it is extremely common among native bilinguals.

To each their own I guess (which is the point after all :) ). I’ve never had an issue with Jellyfin for music in the few years I’ve used it. All setups are different though.

I’ve never had an issue, hm.