This is just as true in my non-computer hobbies that involve physical systems instead of code and configs!

If I had to just barely meet the requirements using as little budget as possible while making it easy for other people to work on, that would be called “work.” My brain needs to indulge in some over-engineering and “I need to see it for myself” kind of design decisions.

My version of this, and I bet I’m not alone here is more like

Windows -> Linux Mint -> Debian

[ Picture of grumpy yet somehow friendly old graybeard with one foot into his “goose farmer retirement” equivalent ]

I recently had a similar experience. I used Linux Mint for the longest time, which is ubuntu based. And I tried LMDE for a little bit recently.

But then I decided to try straight Debian 13 w/ KDE Plasma. I absolutely love it, and I’m old enough that seeing

starting Debian GNU/Linux

just feels cozy and correct. Plus like you said the speed and stability are somehow even better, but that I had issues before.

I thought with them it was more about the entire device than just the OS. People might say they love their mac but nobody is telling friends & family to just install macOS on that old PC that’s losing Microsoft support.

Bold move to combine their names and then give it those damn “we’ve forced AI into this” sparkles, lol.

My Windows partition at work went unused for several months before I wiped it.

At home it took about two weeks before I reclaimed that space!

I have had to learn about random things to fix problems on Windows computers far more often than with Linux computers, or even just to get them to behave the way I want.

It’s usually a lot faster and more permanent on Linux, though. And I get to learn about an open technology rather than a closed product.

I used a few different OSs before Windows 95 and I have also used a taskbar for the past 30 years. It’s just a design that I like. It’s like I feel grounded or something.

I just use a single taskbar at the bottom of my left-most monitor though. I ain’t all fancy like you!

I have a good example of “both are useful” on my second screen right now, but it’s a difference in output and not input. I was watching system resource utilization a few minutes ago while running something, so I have plasma’s graphical System Monitor on half the screen while I have a big ole terminal window with htop running next to it.

The GUI side uses the speed and bandwitdth of our visual processing to communicate complex historical data about a handful of values very quickly. It does it with graphs that, while accurate and to scale, are a bit analog and imprecise feeling to the eye.

The text-based side uses the speed and bandwidth of the hardware to show me a huge 2D array of values that constantly updates. It does it with monospaced text in a high-readability font that is very clear and precise.

The GUI does more processing on the computer first to communicate quickly about the targeted values, while the text side leaves more of that processing to be done on my end. But that’s not a negative, because I can search through those hundreds of values as quickly as my eyes can dart around the screen. There’s no navigating a GUI that quickly.

In general when it comes to GUI vs CLI, I like GUIs too. I am just old enough that I remember how awesome it was to start using graphical desktops and file managers and computer mice and all that. But I’m an engineer who uses the terminal every single day, and I often just leave it open when I’m at work with a bunch of monitors. To me, any decent computer must have a powerful CLI and text-based configuration and scripting and all that.

For most USERs, the GUI is all that matters. And since the GUI needs to be simple and rock solid, it can be advantageous to just leave the arcane shit in the text files and not try to cram everything into the GUI. If I want to change my screen resolution, system fonts, or change my network connection, I expect to find that in the GUI and I’ll just go there. But when I want to be the dork customizing the colors on my GRUB screen or tweaking the swap/cache behavior of my OS, I’m quite glad to edit text for those.

The same way you tell if it’s copy & pasted from Stackoverflow or some other search result!

If you do a search for something like “why is Rust safer than C++” you will find multiple examples of the fun ways we can screw ourselves in c/c++, lol.

I ended up on AnyType and still really like it.

It’s kind of open source even if not proper FOSS, it has effortless cloud sync on free accounts INCLUDING mobile apps, and it is focused on privacy and local first. Like I don’t think I have a login and password - there’s just a 12-word passphrase that gets generated on device and that lets me connect my other devices to my “account.”

I don’t think it directly stores things in plain text, but the interface makes it easy to use it as an organized pile text pages, because that’s what I usually want to do. You can of course export it as well.

I’ve been a fan of the easy to install all-in-one Linux experience of modern distros, being an old guy with a family and a keen awareness of how much I need to maintain some of the non-computer hobbies in my life. Mint has been my jam for a long time.

But just recently I had reason to try out regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, and I think I have found my happy place. I just moved around my hard drives and set up my handful of self-hosted things on this fresh system. It’s so nice to occasionally use as a desktop while it is also a rock solid server.

The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.

It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!

Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”

The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.

I’m another data point where displays work under Linux better than Windows, making this particular example amusingly wrong.

This is a Dell precision laptop with a dual usb-c connected docking station. Intel cpu plus a discrete nvidia gpu.

Using Cinnamon in X11 on Linux Mint or LMDE, works great.

Using KDE Plasma in Wayland on Debian? Works great!

Using Windows 10? Bzzzt.

I think I’ve had Linux DEs occasionally forget my monitor order & rotation just like Windows would, but out of the box Windows wouldn’t even use all my monitors.

I leave ls alone and instead do

alias l='ls -latrF'

I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I’m in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I’m in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.

The head-to-head comparison between the update user experience is so incredibly lopsided against Windows, that it kind of seems silly.

I bet if both have a big yearly update, I could format and install an entire fresh copy of the linux distro before the windows machine would be usable.

Thank you for this post!

For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.

I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it’s pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.

I don’t have any issues with KDE, and I admire their work beyond the DE/UI. Kdenlive is my chosen video editor, for instance. I believe it’s the flatpak version too, so it no doubt loads a bunch of stuff into ram.

I’m not sure what you mean by “restricting” with the DE since I have a terminal at my fingertips at all times. I assume you mean some design decisions or lack of some customization options that KDE has?

But the weird selection of apps has me lost. It comes with stuff installed that you might expect, like firefox and libre office. It uses mostly the Ubuntu repositories so you can apt or apt-get install most things you’re looking for. And since it’s linux you can add repositories and all that fun stuff.

I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.

I’d expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 (“start” button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.

I’m a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It’s still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn’t take away from that. It just meant that it wasn’t the learning experience you’d get with something like Arch.