Default? I think the first thing I did once I settled down with my current setup was find a background of my own liking, not something curated. And it’s all mine; no one else has it.

For those that care, all zero of you, it’s a bunch of frames from a cool star field animation, timed to rotate to the next every few seconds or so. Because I could not find anything that would simply play a video as a background, I made something that worked. If that’s not Linux level, I don’t know what is.

“I’m all for trying new things and experimentation. But I also know to count on techniques that work.” ;)

I am indeed using Gnome. I had uninstalled the Snap LO and found the more current version because of some issues, and I want to say maybe the older one did have a floppy and that’s why it stood out. Or it could be theme-related. So many apps now don’t even have an icon, so I can’t say I’ve seen many that have a different icon than the old save version.

I’m (un)fortunately old enough to remember the green screen terminals, mainly in the university library to look up books, new tech that would replace the still-existing card catalogs. Good breakdown of the wording. A bit parallel with the save icon, although some software has migrated from that, I noticed LibreOffice has a generic down arrow implying it is being downloaded to something, I guess.

I immediately thought, no, terminal. But apparently, console is correct depending on what it’s displaying/being used for?

It works, but it’s a lot slower and clunkier. And looks worse. Probably could improve with some tweaking, but I don’t use its special features and addons that much, and gedit works quite well for me.

I’ve used VLC in WIndows forever, but it started giving me glitchy behavior in Ubuntu. Tried to upgrade to see if it was an old version/Snap thing, got frustrated with it not working. So I went through all the lists of Linux players, tried most of them. I like Audacious. It’s not perfect, but it works well, and I can deal with some of the minor things that are more preferences than problems. That’s all I wanted.

I barely remember WinMe…

As I installed over it with 98SE on a laptop. Didn’t even hear the screaming.

That goes back to my point, that there’s choices out there with Linux, from the OS distro on up to the applications. That’s not being different just to be different, it’s trying to fill niches where there are needs. And things change, even the tried and true sometimes go obsolete for newer approaches. Stagnation is a killer. But if it works for the needed purpose, then great.

I just don’t get the internal arguing within Linux. Embrace even the “crazy kids”, after all that’s where Linux came from.

So you’re saying diversity is a bad thing? That seems very anti-Linux. The very fact that you can choose not to change for so long instead of being forced to accept the next version is diversity itself.

Everyone has different needs and preferences. Finding something early on and being able to stick with it is great, but many don’t find that right away, or things change with their needs or the distro.

Plus it depends also on how long you stick around each time. I know I dipped in and out of dual booting for a long time, only now in the past year settling in well. And each time I tried Linux again, lots had changed so I couldn’t just go back to what I used before.

Isn’t part of being in the Linux culture to experiment with things, even if it’s just the window manager, settings, or particular apps?

Good analogy by using cars. You can test drive a car. Since a lot (all?) distros have a way to run off a USB, so you can get the general “feel” of it. Then you can go from there. Or if you have room to work with, setting up dual boot isn’t that hard (outside of how Windows acts sometimes about it). Asking a lot of people what flavor ice cream they prefer isn’t going to help you decide your own.

Maintained, a bit slow on the updating sometimes, as I mentioned. But a big factor for going with Ubuntu was if you’re looking at software out in the wild, chances are they’ll have either an Ubuntu version or something that will work with it. I’m not a fan of compiling stuff (although maybe with more Linux exposure that will change too).

In hindsight that’s probably not a great reason, after all it’s why Microsoft dominated the field for so long.

Being supportive of Ubuntu seems to be a minority, but I picked it over others simply because it felt more like what I wanted from the Debian lines. And I haven’t had any major issues at all. The main project I’ve got ahead of me is to remove Snap, as I see that’s a problem, mainly due to updates being so far behind (plus I’m pretty sure it’s a resource hog, I can see it there in Btop all the time). I’ve had several apps that I originally used Snap (I mean, it’s right there, why not) to find the version is old and missing newer features. So I just find the Apt or deb version, or even AppImage, and I’m back running. The OS itself is solid, and I so, so love just booting up and going within seconds, as well as shutting down right away. Not the classic Windows “hang”.

But I get that some people run into incompatibilities sometimes with hardware, so you do have to look around and find what works best for you. An example of mine on that was an old MacBook I had that simply was stuck since the OS isn’t supported anymore. So I put Kubuntu on it (since it needed a light OS), and it works fine for what it is.

Copying an old Waterfox logo. They really are going downhill.

I’ll be glad to give more info. I’m not sure where to find the logs to tell you what VLC is doing. See my other comment on the comparison of a browser - I want it to use VLC as if I was browsing websites where it just loads into the existing window.

I’m trying to get any new video I click on to play in the existing instance of VLC after running a first video. Not in a new instance. If VLC is open no other video will ever use that instance. It’s like if you load a new webpage in a browser but have to either close the existing browser window first or load into a new tab or window, and I find it difficult to believe that’s an accepted behavior.

Mint is one of the more “Windows-like” versions of Linux. The deal breaker for Linux usually isn’t the OS, but what software you’ll run on the OS, and often a crucial one will be MS Office and compatibility with the proprietary junk that comes with it. If you need just a spreadsheet and word processor and they don’t have to be 100% MS compatible, then LibreOffice will work fine (even ON WIndows). If it’s other types of software, then see if they have a Linux option, or if there’s success in using Wine or Lutris to run it on Linux.

Linux won’t be without some learning curve, but it’s not nearly as steep as it used to be. I spent years occasionally playing with dual boots of different distros but not really using them, but last year found some things that would run better on Linux (I started by using WSL on Windows but it’s so slow because of what it is). Now I’ve all but completely remove my Windows partition, everything important is now moved over to my Ubuntu and I do not want to go back now.

The real annoying part of CDs was the failure rate. It could be the medium, the burner, or the software, but it always seemed you’d spend time waiting for the data to be saved to a more “permanent” source, and it would finally pop up with an error and the whole disk is now trash. Kind of glad that tech is now obsolete. I think you could redo a read/write a few times, but they had similar issues and it was a pain.

That makes sense, from why some things were captured more than others and from the pov of starting an archive service - using what’s already been done and going from there. So things that weren’t part of such a network and didn’t rank high in existing search engines really didn’t have a chance.