Alaknár

Bluesky is not a true alternative. Just recently there were news about them banning opposition accounts in Turkey.

My journey was: Kubuntu -> Tuxedo OS -> Garuda Linux.

Kubuntu was painful, lots of issues. Maybe just got unlucky, but cannot recommend it.

Tuxedo OS was phenomenal until I bought a GPU. Then stuff broke left and right. I wasn’t able to get Steam to launch anymore so I switched.

Garuda Linux is the one I still use. I had it for 53 days and had no severe issues to date. There’s still a bunch of stuff that needs ironing out, but that’s the case with all Linux distros, it’s never “fire and forget” like Windows, in my experience.

I chose Garuda because it’s advertised as “the Linux for gamers”. It’s packed with extra goodies that make life easier - you can pick and choose popular apps to be installed right away (things like Lutris, Steam, Heroic Launcher, Proton, Vivaldi browser), and you get an application that helps with maintenance.

The only major issue I had was due to my ignorance (but I kind of blame it on the OS because it was supposed to be “noob friendly” and this bit was very much not so) - just after installation and updates you’ll get the system maintenance app ask you to “merge pacdiff files”. This shows up a comparison window of two files, and if you’ve never used Linux you have no clue what’s going on. When you get that, just don’t overwrite the one on the right with the one on the left - you’ll break the entirety of your package manager. :D

Other than that: I’m having a great time. The OS looks pretty, games run great. 9/10

Right. And then we see comments like the one that started this thread: “whoa, there was a Pocket integration??”

For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending

This is… not quite related to the topic, no? Trial ending warning is not a “hey, here’s a new feature you might want to try out”.

They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen

Could you elaborate? I used to use Edge as my daily driver, now it’s my secondary browser. I have no clue what you mean here.

In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features

This is exactly how it works in things like Office or Edge.

If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in

Yup. Or unless a new feature is introduced, in which case a new pop-up appears. That’s precisely how it works.

Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification

Edge, most of the time, just opens a new tab with “Your Edge was updated” and a list of new things.

If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.

If it was about the same feature that you already dismissed - yeah, I get the sentiment. If it’s about completely new things - it’s a really weird thing to say. How are users supposed to know that something new was introduced? Sift through thousands of lines of changelogs…?

The difference is in convenience.

On the one hand, you can add a page to your bookmarks, after choosing the correct folder, of course.

On the other hand, you can click a button and a page gets automatically saved in your “read later” storage, with a description, summary, and a preview of the content.

On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket

And then people get all pissy when Google or Microsoft show a pop-up of a new feature…

How about this - I configured Kate to have full Markdown support, with preview.

There was an update today. The Document Preview plugin got disabled and once I enabled it, it’s no longer able to display Markdown preview.

That’s what I call “unstable”. Shit randomly breaking for no reason at all. And I know it’s probably SOME dependency SOMEWHERE that got updated which broke a DIFFERENT dependency, but that’s kind of my point - things like this just don’t happen on Windows (since around Win10).

Do you get a window?

I run games in full screen mode, so maybe it would work. Seems like Wayland has Ctrl+Meta+Esc as the equivalent of xkill. I’ll try this if it happens again.

To me “stable” means: “fire and forget”. Maybe a reboot needed every couple of months because something broke, or having to kill a hung process. That’s my experience with Windows nowadays.

I’m on Garuda Linux, which is based on Arch Zen, and every now and again something random breaks. Network connection doesn’t stand up after sleep. Steam randomly breaks. Signal refuses to connect. One monitor’s brightness doesn’t go back to default value after the OS dimmed it due to inactivity. Uninstalled application still shows up in Application Launcher’s search results, even though I deleted it from the KDE Menu Editor.

Lots and lots of little things like that.

Steam does something weird when running a Windows game via Proton. I haven’t figured out which task to kill to kill a game it’s running.

More stable

Wellllll, I wouldn’t go that far.

I just had to reboot because clicking anything in the browser randomly started sending the CPU utilisation to higher 70s, which was triggering the fans to spin at full power.

Then I ran a game on Steam and Steam said it’s running, but it was nowhere to be found. Had to reboot again.

Both of these happened completely randomly after I changed nothing, just browsing the web.

I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error.

It doesn’t put formulas into the cells. It will write the formula for you, but you have to put it in yourself.

Also, there’s versioning in Office, so your spreadsheet blowing up for whatever reason isn’t a problem at all - just roll back to the previous version of the file.