It used to be called Serpent OS but Ikey thought the name was a bit silly/immature if I remember correctly

How about don’t implement it and when California realises they need computers then they might change their mind?

Non-free codecs out of the box

I think Linux mint Debian edition is cool if you want to use Cinnamon, but otherwise Debian makes sense.

A while ago I tried out cachyos since it was the big new thing. I can’t remember what the update was, but I recall Pac-Man threw up a warning to say “Manual intervention required etc etc etc” rather than updating.

I might be remembering it wrong.

That’s easy; because Ikey Doherty wanted to make one.

He abandoned Solus years ago as the project became something he didn’t enjoy anymore, and wanted to start a fresh project closer to his philosophy of engineering everything.

When a person starts a new project it’s usually because they want to.

So the key here is, in classic Ikey style, they want to use/develop all their own tools. engineer everything themselves to be exactly what they want it to be. This is what suits them and Ikey has the chops to do this better than most.

He started this project about 5 years back as Serpent OS, rebranded it last year as he got to alpha release stages.

As others have s pointed out, it looks like as a relatively new user you’ve tried a whole lot of stuff meant for advanced users and managed to completely avoid the tried and trusted Linux mainstays that have been around forever. Like KDE, Gnome, xfce, and most user friendly distros like Linux mint.

Tiling WMs for example are best for people who want to spend weeks if not months working in their configs and dot files, and are privately designed for keyboard and not mouse use (hence the WM you identified as not having a button to close the window)

But I’m curious for you end up doing these things as a new user. Is there a lot of bad advice going on out there?

I was putting it out there as a suggestion for inexperienced Linux users to manage their appimages. Writing a desktop file won’t update your appimages or handily install them in a consistent location.

I believe if we imagine a Venn diagram, users of this software would have some overlap with users who’d prefer or require a gui tool.

Years ago. I thought it had been abandoned but I see it started getting updates again last year.

No comment on the software because I have no use case for it, just wanted to note that GearLever can “install”, and integrate your appimages into your menu quick and easy, and in most cases keep them updated too.

I’ve used gog launcher before, years and years ago (13? 14 years?) so maybe it’s better now, but it was bad. Really bad, I had to get rid of it and just use the offline installers.

Heroic on the other hand is very good.

The one I’ve been thinking about is gentoo

My first impression of this was trying to work out when and why would we see Tux during boot

Not every sense of the word -see Michael Jackson - Bad, George Thorogood - Bad To The Bone, Badass, and so on.

When we got our first computer it was a Win 95 machine, with a copy of Encarta, Atlas. I don’t remember what word processor, but it wasn’t a full office suite.

It was cool. We did lots of typing and using ms paint.

Then we got a shareware cd. Hundreds of pretty useless games + 4 or 5 big ones like doom and transport tycoon, but it changed everything. Every day we’d try a new one. We’d mess around in DOS trying to get those ones working.

Then 3D Movie Maker - the full version. It all really started to come alive.

Then a microphone. Just messing around with sound recorder was like when we used to make “funny” tape recordings of ourselves, but without the hassle of tape.

These are the basic concepts of what I think made computers fun.

I guess the direction I’ll probably go shortly is the old AMD 2400g mini itx I have laying around. Put on an opensuse slowroll. We have a microphone handy. We have 900 games on our GOG account. I have an old intuos drawing tablet that might work. Add some of those education flatpaks - solariums and stuff. I think you can definitely do a modern version of what we had back in the 90s when computing was more than watching youtube.

Still good idea to check the feature matrix on their github though, I think depending on the device you could still need surface kernel.

Many surface devices don’t need a specialised kernel anymore anyway.

Surface Go 1-3 for example, everything is in Linux kernel 6.14+. And everything except the cameras is in since 5.17.

Hell yes. And every time I see it pop up, these points come up, usually a bunch of times. So people know this shit is trouble, and it’s still blowing up.

I assume it’s just that his channel mostly seems like advertisement for products. I like him enough, but I know what I’m getting if I watch one of his videos.

I’ve been using smb protocol for years. NFS is great when it works, but something about my network makes it unreliable or inconsistent between devices.

Smb has never caused me any problems.