Xubuntu on my desktop/laptop, debian on a server. Mostly because while I really like tinkering with things, I usually just want shit to work so I can get something done.

Xfce. Partly because I’ve used it for a long time, but mostly because it does what I need it to do and little else.

It apparently doesn’t like me using a VPN. 🤷‍♂️

I may get hate for this, but… I do this a fair bit because I prefer TUIs for a lot of stuff, and also end up doing a lot of things in emacs because I usually have it open anyway…

That would be the very worst malware. I mean both the malware that installed it and win11…

Hello fellow fish user.

Disown is. I even have a fish function written so I can do ‘launch foo’ and it’ll run foo, redirect everything to /dev/null (not sure that’s necessary, but doesn’t hurt), and then disowns the process. Mostly because I have a habit of running stuff using whatever terminal I happen to have in front of me.

Vivaldi is pretty nice and was my main browser until the announcement about MV3, but Vivaldi isn’t going to support it beyond whenever google removes MV2 from the source (IIRC, Vivaldi folks expected it around June next year). But I saw the way the wind was blowing and decided to jump ship while I could still do it and take my own sweet time doing so. In retrospect, glad I did. Still miss some features like markdown notes and sidebar web pages, but it’s still better than being buried in ads.

I usually go with Xfce.

I don’t hate windows, it just annoys me. I’ve run linux in a VM under windows for years and about 2 years ago it annoyed me enough (I think it was something about a patch breaking things badly enough that I had to restore the system) that I said ‘screw it’ and switched the arrangement to linux and the few windows programs I really wanted running in wine. I’ve been skipping back and forth between them since Yggdrasil was a thing, so it wasn’t like it was uncharted territory.

And after hearing some of win11’s BS, I’m glad I did.

I don’t care what it’s called as long as it’s a decent distro and does what I need it to do.

If you’re going to not use software because you don’t like a program with a similar name, I really don’t know what to tell you… 🤷‍♂️

Cheaper than what? Scrounged free parts?

Unless it’s all you have. Speaking as someone that’s at times been poor af, sometimes people just have to cobble up a frankensystem from whatever parts they can scrounge.

One of the things I love about linux is that it makes this reasonably possible.

Weechat. Terminal based, flexible scripting system using a handful of languages, still actively developed, and I can make it work the way I want it to work.

Nah, I’m good. I’m fine with services being limited to what information they can convince my browser to give them, rather than what they can convince my phone to give them. Or try and convince me to give them permission to access.

I wouldn’t even bring my phone, or if I absolutely needed something like that, I’d buy a cheapass pre-paid burner. And keep it off until you actually need it.

Yep, I and a few friends use it.

Probably depends how you define things. Like, is Xubuntu Xubuntu or Ubuntu with Xfce included by default? How much change is necessary before it’s not “debian with added bits”?

I don’t. Modern computers have a LOT of resources. The whole ‘minimalist computing’ thing some people go on about is really odd to me. And I say that as someone who remembers when 16K was impressive. I can see it for restricted environments, where every byte counts, but not for desktops.

Compiling code converts it from human readable source code into optimized machine code which the processor understands how to execute. For a lot of software you can just unpack the source code, run ./configure, run ‘make’, and then ‘make install’. This can vary a lot and is a simplified explanation, but it’s a start…