Yea I like to play around with some different distros in virtualization occasionally to see what’s up, but I have found Debian just always meets my needs 98% of the way in addition to basically never breaking.

I know Bazzite is built specifically for gaming, but I can play pretty much everything I want on Debian using my Nvidia card and Proton. The Nvidia drivers were a lot easier to install than I think a lot of people make them out to be, but I might just be lucky with my hardware or something. Armored Core VI runs great for example, and I’m even using Gnome, not KDE.

In my experience I’m kind of hard pressed to see the benefit of Bazzite over Debian when it comes to gaming actually, but I don’t know a tonne about Bazzite so I’ll digress.

I really like Debian stable, and have for a very long time. I’m not too fearful of fucking up the system because Debian stable is more stable than most anvils, and I have timeshift installed with regular backups configured which get stored locally and to a RAID 5 array on my NAS system (which is also running Debian). Anything super duper important I also put onto a cloud host I have in Switzerland.

If I want to do something insane to the system, which is rare, then I test it extensively in virtualization first until I am comfortable enough to do it on my actual system, take backups, and then do it.

I am working to make my backup/disaster recovery solution even better, but as it stands I could blow my PC up with a stick of dynamite and have a working system running a day later with access to all of my stuff as it was this morning so long as a store that sells system hardware is open locally. If it were a disk failure, or something in software, It would take less than a day to recover.

So what keeps me from switching is that I really do not see a need to, and I like my OS.

That’s a good question, I’m not too sure since I work in IT/Software as well and am currently using kakoune. I think a lot of efficiency upgrades in other industries are typically a cost gap instead of an understanding gap. For example, a carpenter could start out with a tool like a hand saw, and then later upgrade to a band saw, but they need to pay a lot more for and find space for the more efficient tool. This can kind of exist in software as well, but the funny thing is that a lot of the time these days I find the FOSS stuff better overall, which I think sets this phenomenon apart from other industries and whatnot.

I have used inkscape though it has been some time. I felt as though it was not super featureful at the time so the UI felt slightly barren compared to something like Adobe Illustrator, but I don’t recall having the same kind of trouble with it that I do with GIMP honestly.

I only see one on your previous comment, but it could be because blender has recently started getting a better reputation for usability/learnability.

6 years ago I touched it and I was horrified, but I touched it a few times this year and found they had made some good improvements.

That is interesting and I did not know that. Thanks.

I think what you are thinking of is the ellipse selection tool, and yes this exists and can be used - however I am referring to the tool class of geometric shapes which is quite common among other software. Basically it creates a vector (In most cases I think) shape with options for stroke and fill, and controls the same way that the ellipse selection tool does (constraints etc.).

GIMP does not have this, instead you have to go through a decent amount of trouble to get simple geometric shapes drawn to the screen, and at that I believe they are always raster.

Take these procedures as an example for GIMP.

https://www.alphr.com/make-shapes-gimp/

This makes GIMP difficult if you want to use it for some niche uses such as making a quick flow diagram, or a quick vector mask which can be changed later.

True, but I prefer intuition over efficiency when I pick something up for the first time, second time, and third time, until I eventually have a good enough understanding to begin worrying about efficiency.

There are use cases for Libre office writer, just as there are for vim, even though they are both capable of producing text documents. One is arguably more intuitive while one is arguably more efficient, but if I didn’t know anything about word processing/text editing and had to pick between the two, I would pick writer.

Same goes for anything else, and it’s also why a decent number of text editors/software support emacs/vim bindings - so that you can use the software intuitively, and then once you understand it, you can become more efficient by using modal bindings. Same goes for GIMP versus other software. The thing about other softwares in the same genre is that they can be learned relatively easily and can also be used efficiently. GIMP I find harder to learn, even if it is efficient later.

For anyone who is new who has to make a choice as well - very few people would pick vim to start out with.

Furthermore, in this instance, I do have a decent amount of photo editing experience and have used multiple softwares to do it, but even after that, the problem I have with GIMP is that a lot of this knowledge does not transfer to GIMP like it does for other software. If I learn photoshop, I can get away with using affinity, krita, corel draw, clip studio, and other software - but not nearly as easily GIMP.

I would also argue that efficiency is equally dependent upon the software as it is the task. The workflow for digital painting, animation, and photo editing are all quite different, and no one UX/UI is the most efficient at all of them. This is why most of these softwares have modular interfaces, which is good, but I simply find the modular interface of GIMP harder to use or understand versus the rest.

Haha, yes the feeling is similar there, though I think I personally still had an easier time learning blenders current workflow.

Under the hood I actually really like GIMP. I’m also not too bothered by there being no circle tool. My problem with GIMP is that if there were a circle tool in it, its a little too difficult to find it if it does exist.

If they had some front end re-write eventually where they just moved some stuff around and better organized the front end of the application, I think a lot more people would use it. UX/UI is really important, and I’m sure the contributors of GIMP know this as they seem to have done well to try to make the interface feel straightforward by putting stuff under menu’s and whatnot, but the location of things just seems unintuitive/non-standard compared to what every other application does.

The other issue I have with GIMP is just that its development cycle takes forever compared to most every other open source application I have seen.

Not to say there is a great answer to any of this, image manipulation/animation software is not an easy thing to program by any means so I understand why it can take forever, but I just wish there was a real answer.

In the mean time, I’ve just been trying to get by with krita, though krita really seems geared toward digital painting specifically.

I went and checked out Thunar because of this post, and regardless of the original intention, I have found a file manager I much prefer as a result. Thank you.

Awesome, thank you! Saving this comment so that I can refer to this in the future as well.

Oh, that’s beautiful. Thank you!

So the software you are trying to configure is using an outdated version of nodejs, has a poor default username/password combination, and doesn’t implement PAM by default/easily.

Yes, I definitely want people to use Linux if they would like to, but perhaps not the node.js web application your complaints actually refer to which don’t seem to have much at all if anything to do with Linux itself.

If your only real complaint on the OS side is that nodejs is too up to date, perhaps consider raising your concerns on the Mine-OS projects github instead of directing your anger at a tangentially related operating system. It’s like getting mad at your cars engine when you are having trouble figuring out how to roll down the new windows you just had installed at a third-party body shop.

That was my thought as well.

Back when I was new to Linux, I tried a lot of different distros in virtualization for shorter periods of time, and of course ran into the issues that come with the cutting edge stuff.

Last year I wanted to install a distribution to my laptop properly as a test before putting it onto my desktop, and I came to that same conclusion because at the end of the day I couldn’t justify using bleeding edge, because I couldn’t really even name anything I NEEDED from it. Yes, it is fun to have cool, new things, and it can be a lot of fun to play around with in a VM or something, but I don’t actually need any of that stuff for what I do on a computer day to day right this second.

After that, the answer was pretty clear for me as to what distribution to use.

Prompt is pretty simple, mainly just adjusted coloring and added a timestamp.

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;36;01m\]\t \[\033[01;32m\]\u@\[\033[01;37;01m\]\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;36m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '

Maybe 1 or 2 back when things were less stable, but any time I have used Linux in the past 7 years or so, and particularly since I started using Debian as my primary OS, I haven’t had any problems outside of trying to get some windows applications to emulate correctly, and one time when I echo’d into sources.list with > instead of >>. Anything else is just stuff I had to learn, like my boot folder filling up with old images that have to be cleaned out occasionally.

My understanding with Tuta is that you cannot configure it to work with a third party desktop email client though, you are locked in to using theirs. You can’t configure a Tuta email address to work with mutt or something for example I believe as there is no regular imap/pop like there are for services that don’t use E2EE, or services that have some form of bridge for that like Proton did.

Maybe I am misinformed though.

Using timeshift. Very, very easy, works great.

For nvidia drivers it probably took me about 15 minutes and one page off of the Debian wiki.

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

You basically add some repositories, install the drivers, and then set and check some configurations depending on what other parts of your environment look like.