adarza

afaik windows has no native capability to control brightness setting on external displays. an optional driver for the display may be available via windows update which might allow a third-party utility to control the setting directly.

immutable distributions use flatpaks as their source for desktop applications, it is what they recommend you use.

most (endless os does not) support layering, but they also advise against it unless you have to. even bazzite says to do and try literally every other option, even running a windows binary under emulation, before layering packages. they know their shit better than i do, so i’m not gonna layer a ton of packages and depends for dozens of applications just so i can use a clipboard or drag stuff between any them.

nor do i want added complexity of screwing around with toolbx containers. for one program to try or to run temporarily for a one-off task or very specific thing you don’t want your system cluttered with? sure. i’ve got a couple things set up right now using toolbx. for 30+ desktop applications, some of which are large or pull in a bunch of depends? hell no. it’s not the right tool.

i also do not need or want yet another package manager and binary repos in brew, and brew doesn’t have that much i’d be looking at anyway.

appimages are not really the answer either, not everything has one, some are built upon fuse v2 (no longer supported), and some are third-party builds you might not want to trust.

so, that leaves flatpaks as ‘the’ source for desktop applications–unless you are fond of terminal screens and hoop-jumping, needless added complexity, or want to go against the strong recommendations of the folks that literally make your immutable rpm-ostree based distribution.

the term ‘clipboard’ is not present anywhere in flatpak, bazzite, or fedora atomic documentation.

tl;dr: author got tripped-up over fedora’s flatpak repo and having to click once to enable flathub in kinoite.

but Bazzite is also another one that is actually specifically focused on gaming.

its sibling, aurora kde, is the one i nearly went with. in fact i still have it sitting on this pc’s twin (have two identical ones, bought before the market went to shit). the flatpak-only environment was giving me constant headaches. i ended up on debian, and it’s been an absolute dream. it’s great to be back ‘home’, i haven’t had a pure debian desktop in years.

fedora’s immutables are nice. just ‘not for me’ (right now). i’ll still suggest and install them for others, though, because for basic tasks and newcomers it’s a solid and hard-to-break choice.

that would be the fault of amazon’s genius idea of mixing inventory from multiple sellers and suppliers together.

we’ve been through similar bullshit here. we just cut out those companies and never again do we buy from them, for ourselves or our clients.

i don’t like tiling wm, and can’t stand seemingly random placement a linux d.e. usually gives (if not just centering everything every time).

i use the kwin script for ‘remember window positions’ to get behaviour similar to windows. gnome has something similar, too (‘smart auto move ng’). so now a window for a program will open right back up the same size and in the same spot next time you run it.

plasma mobile works on more than just handhelds, and you’ll find it in fedora and debian repos (among others, i’m sure).

you can add it, and switch at login. there’s a cinnamon spin of ubuntu, so packages are in the repos. you’ll also find meta packages assembled by both ubuntu and debian that will install what their respective ‘full desktop experience’ has (browser, libreoffice, utilities, and what-not).

i just switched back to debian for personal desktops after years of mint (and a few others). i’m using intel cards right now… drivers are a total non-issue… so that helps some, not having to deal with nvidia drivers. games are running great on stable kernel and drivers (heroic flatpak for launcher and wine).

you can have your ‘start button’ in the bottom left if you want, and still have the panel going up the left edge instead of along the bottom.

the panel on the side. it just makes sense–if you can get ‘used to’ it.

screens are wider than they are tall, but most content viewed by or worked on by most people goes vertical: web sites and text documents. hell, even most pictures and video people take these days, too, because they still don’t know enough to rotate their damn phones.

i almost went cinnamon when i set up my trixie here last month, but went plasma because of some kwin addons. i did install its nemo, though, for when i need a file manager that doesn’t choke on thumbnails (like dolphin does) when an extension doesn’t match what the file actually is (like a lot of images served by web sites and saved by a browser these days)

iirc (gnome) tweaks has a toggle for separating dialogs from parents.

gnome dumbed itself down too far, it’s turning into the win10 or 11 of linux–with features, basic features… expected features and functions, now missing… and the bland ui that makes it difficult to even see a damn window border without customizing tf out of it. i do not subscribe to their idea of one workspace per window or application. fk that.

the only thing that was keeping it on a few systems here was an extension. one not even made by them. i found an equivalent kwin script for plasma. starting switching stuff over the next day.

i won’t go back. and i’ve found that gtk and libadwaita stuff actually looks better on kde, anyway. so no change in what i’m using, just what everything runs from.

i might still put gnome on for others, if all they’re looking for is a dumbed-down, simple launcher for their browser–like an alternative to chromebook, but that’s it.