except musl distros

• for most people, use whatever your distro ships with and installs for you
• choosing desktop environments still starts heated discussions – high end, it’s a choice between Gnome and KDE – mid-tier has Xfce, LXQt, Mate, Cinnamon, and more – limited hardware go for IceWM, JWM, FLWM, or similar – want to get your hands dirty? go for a tiling window manager
• X11 is (effectively) abandonware at this point – it’s still getting security patches, but the devs left and started Wayland 17-ish years ago
• XLibre is more political than technical – and I’ll leave it at that

I’ve had a couple systems that started with nothing more than vi, but rather more that started with nano (don’t think I’ve come across any that started with vim) – that being said, I’ll tolerate vi long enough to get micro installed

(now if AppImages would work on musl systems …)

ImageMagick really is a Swiss Army Knife of usefulness …

start with something simple that’ll teach the basics of Linux – like LFS

depending on preferences, alternatives could include UwUntu or Nyarch

(sidetrack: crontab guru helps you make sense of the first part of each crontab line)

• -auto-orient – auto-orient will read from EXIF
• -strip – strip will remove all metadata
• WARNING: if you’ve already used -strip, then -auto-orient will do nothing

Alpine Linux + LabWC – as I update my hardware, I seem to end up paring down my software – the more powerful the computer is, the less use I make of its capabilities 🤷 – I’ve worked with Macs and Windows, and settled on Linux more for its simplicity than anything – I don’t have any problem with MacOS or Windows themselves so much as the companies behind them

Alpine is a nice, clean, lightweight distro that works surprisingly well on a desktop despite the whingers complaining it’s for containers only … Pop!_OS ⇒ Debian Stable ⇒ Alpine (with Gentoo back in the dawn of history)

LabWC is the spiritual successor to Openbox, a nice simple stacking window manager that I’ve added a handful of tiling keybinds – I’ve added utility programs as I’ve wanted them rather than going for the cohesiveness of a proper desktop environment … Gnome ⇒ Xfce ⇒ LabWC (and with Openbox way back when)

oh hey, a project that actually has a manual to read

now … how many of those were by Linus?

• !guix@lemmy.ml
• !guix@infosec.pub

after trying a tiling manager

I like the idea of tiling window managers – I just find it so much less hassle to use tiling keybinds on a stacking window manager …

• main thing to keep in mind is that a window manager is normally just one component of a desktop environment – full desktop environments like Gnome go to great lengths to assemble a whole fleet of apps to work together to make a cohesive experience
• if you’re going to forego the full desktop environment, then expect to have to fill in on the various missing pieces to suit your needs (file manager, terminal, text editor, clipboard manager, bar/panel/dock)
• if you just want lighter weight but maintain a cohesive experience, then Xfce or LXQt
• otherwise, there are a LOT of choices (both for X11 and for Wayland)
• tiling window managers
  • i3 on X or Sway on Wayland are probably the most popular
    • special mention: Regolith – pairs Sway on the front end with Gnome components underneath
  • dwm for the full do-it-yourself experience
  • awesome if you like Lua, xmonad if you like Haskell, exwm if you live in Emacs, Qtile if you like Python
• stacking window managers
  • Openbox for the old school feel, LabWC as the Wayland successor
  • IceWM and JWM for a minimal experience (both show up regularly on Raspberry Pi)
  • Motif for the retro enthusiast

search for information when Google intentionally lies to you and hides results to keep you on their site looking at ads longer …

along those same lines, used Chromebooks – Google ends support after only a couple years so school districts all over the place are generally stuck with palettes of e-waste

(don’t know how amenable they are to individuals versus corporations (or just affordability in general), but a recent news article mentions Ukraine is looking at Govsatcom, Eutelsat, and Iris2)

(one of the older tropes in Linux-land is giving new life to old hardware just by replacing Windows with Linux)

(one advantage of Flatpaks over AppImage is Flatpaks bundle their libraries – most AppImages won’t run on musl libc systems)