My primary icon theme and widget style are 20+ years old and not flat in the least. You can still have that look and feel on a real computer if you want it (but you may have to compromise elsewhere or do some extra work). On phones, all bets are off.

Dunno what your issue with that icon pack is, but I’d bet there’s a good chance it can be solved with a few file renames or symlinks if you care enough to bother.

Um, if your primary use is typing accented letters, why don’t you just set a compose key? The character sequences you need to type are much more intuitive, and you don’t get this type of problem.

In my case, I have scroll lock (the most useless key on the keyboard) set as a compose key. To get “é”, I type scroll lock, then e, then '.

You can set a compose key using setxkbmap, for instance setxkbmap -option compose:sclk. (If scroll lock isn’t to your liking, there are a number of other modifier keys that can be used instead—list here, starting around line 810.) You can also specify it permanently using X configuration files, although I don’t know the exact method.

The GPU doesn’t care about the CPU, or vice-versa. AMD is probably better value for money right now if you’re intending to replace both CPU and mobo, but Intel will work.

The reason you don’t see AMD CPU + nVidia GPU in premade machines these days has to do with corporate contracts, not interoperability. Before AMD bought out ATI, it wasn’t an uncommon combination.

Configuring captive portal wifi without network manager or any aids beyond what’s provided by wpa-supplicant. Eventually I gave up, since it wasn’t really that important.

Adjusting freetype so that it works more-or-less the way I want it to, because the maintainers hate anyone who disagrees with their current hinting algorithm and make the setting as opaque as possible. I would prefer it if they allowed me to have hinting on some fonts and exclude only the ones that were designed to be pixel-aligned, but unless something’s changed recently, that option isn’t even offered.

It used to be much, much more difficult than it is today, but your experiences will still vary according to what type of printer you have. The problem is drivers. There are still printers out there that have no working Linux driver (mostly old, non-Postscript-supporting, with no Mac drivers either). Some will work with a generic driver, but some features aren’t available. The more annoying case is the one where the manufacturer put out a driver once, many years ago, it doesn’t work properly with modern versions of CUPS, and they can’t be arsed to revise it.

But most printers these days will do basic one-sided 100%-size prints out of the box, and that’s all many people need.

One thing people reading this should remember is that you cannot guarantee all packages on a Gentoo system will be updated simultaneously. It just can’t be done. Because several of the arches affected by this are old, slow, and less-used (32-bit PowerPC, anyone?), it’s also impossible to test all combinations of USE flags for all arches in advance, so sooner or later someone will have something break in mid-compile. For this change, that could result in an unbootable system, or a badly broken one that can’t continue the upgrade because, for example, Python is broken and so portage can’t run.

The situation really is much more complicated than it would be on a binary distro whose package updates are atomic. Not intractable, but complicated.

That being said, even a completely borked update would not make the system unrecoverable—you boot from live media, copy a known-good toolchain from the install media for that architecture over the borked install, chroot in, and try again (possibly with USE flag tweaks) until you can get at least emerge --emptytree system or similar to run to completion. It’s a major, major pain in the ass, though, and I can understand why the developers want to reduce the number of systems that have to be handled in that way to as few as possible.

To be exact, OpenRC was developed to be run on top of sysV init, and still can be. (Many distros had their own “on top of sysV” things, but most of them stopped being maintained as systemd became common. OpenRC started its life as Gentoo’s “on top of sysV”, but was then cleaned up and made distro-agnostic.)

s6 is apparently a daemontools-like process supervisor that can be run as an init or in company with some other init.

Gentoo’s comparison of init systems lists Artix as the preferred service file supplier for s6 (although that may be outdated), so I expect it is or was used extensively by that distro.

Or, if you can’t find any of those other settings, try decreasing the font size by 1 pt or 1-2 px (not sure what unit KDE6 uses for font sizes) and see if that works better with the new font’s letter widths and kerning.

Assume anything you can buy has a shelf life and set a yearly reminder on your calendar to copy forward stuff more than five or so years old, if those files are of significant value to you. Or for the documents, print them out—paper has better longevity than any consumer-available electronic storage.

That being said, quality optical discs are probably the best option in terms of price to longevity ratio for the average person right now. Just keep in mind that they are not guaranteed to last forever and do need to be recopied from time to time.

(I have yet to have a DVD fail on me, but I keep them in hard plastic jewel cases in climate-controlled conditions, and I’ve probably just been lucky.)

I prefer Claws Mail. It does what I need it to.

There’s an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:

Linux Airlines

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

Gentoo is still very much a “You had to do what with the seat?” distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.

Some individual window managers are full-featured enough to be somewhat usable as program launchers all by their lonesome, such as awesome, fluxbox, and openbox. There’s also Enlightenment, which is somewhere between a bare WM and a DE. If you really want to play with standalone WMs, start with something from this paragraph.

Other WMs need a bunch of other things like dmenu and feh piled on top of them to get a useful environment. i3 is one of these. You can find and fit together enough software pieces to get a fairly full-featured environment out of one of these setups, but it’s more work than just installing the core portions of a DE.

Figure out first whether you’re dealing with X or wayland (hyprland is a wayland compositor, which is slightly different from a window manager). Read guides, and especiallly stay away from things that say they’re “lightweight” or “minimalist” until you’ve read the documentation and know exactly what you’re getting into, as they tend to be for advanced users. If you just want to play around and have no particular problem you’re trying to solve, just look for live CD/DVD/USB images you can boot inside a VM and save yourself some work.

TDE has had occasional discussion and ruminations, but no action yet. Porting it is complicated by the fact that it has its own widget set (TQT, forked from QT3), which would have to be worked on first and is currently undergoing some unrelated rewriting.

The likelihood of any wayland milestones for TDE being set before the end of 2024 is very low unless some major distro completely drops X support.

I consider bootloader attacks a very low-probability threat, and quite honestly I don’t trust the average board vendor to produce anything that’s actually secure anyway. If I were in the habit of carrying a laptop back and forth across international borders I might feel differently, but for a desktop stuck in a room in Canada that hardly anyone enters when I’m not present, Secure Boot is a major hassle in return for a small security gain. So I just don’t bother.

Technically, you could bundle a Perl script with the interpreter on another system using pp and run the packed version on systems with no installed Perl, but at that point you might as well just use a compiled language.

Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from apt to rpm, you’re probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don’t trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.

(Note that I don’t generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS

In addition to everything everyone else has already said, why does this have anything to do with desktop environments at all? Remember, most open-source software comes from one or two individual programmers scratching a personal itch—not all of it is part of your DE, nor should it be. If someone writes an open-source LLM-driven program that does something useful to a significant segment of the Linux community, it will get packaged by at least some distros, accrete various front-ends in different toolkits, and so on.

However, I don’t think that day is coming soon. Most of the things “Apple Intelligence” seems to be intended to fuel are either useless or downright offputting to me, and I doubt I’m the only one—for instance, I don’t talk to my computer unless I’m cussing it out, and I’d rather it not understand that. My guess is that the first desktop-directed offering we see in Linux is going to be an image generator frontend, which I don’t need but can see use cases for even if usage of the generated images is restricted (see below).

Anyway, if this is your particular itch, you can scratch it—by paying someone to write the code for you (or starting a crowdfunding campaign for same), if you don’t know how to do it yourself. If this isn’t worth money or time to you, why should it be to anyone else? Linux isn’t in competition with the proprietary OSs in the way you seem to think.

As for why LLMs are so heavily disliked in the open-source community? There are three reasons:

1. The fact that they give inaccurate responses, which can be hilarious, dangerous, or tedious depending on the question asked, but a lot of nontechnical people, including management at companies trying to incorporate “AI” into their products, don’t realize the answers can be dangerously innacurate.
2. Disputes over the legality and morality of using scraped data in training sets.
3. Disputes over who owns the copyright of LLM-generated code (and other materials, but especiallly code).

Item 1 can theoretically be solved by bigger and better AI models, but 2 and 3 can’t be. They have to be decided by the courts, and at an international level, too. We might even be talking treaty negotiations. I’d be surprised if that takes less than ten years. In the meanwhile, for instance, it’s very, very dangerous for any open-source project to accept a code patch written with the aid of an LLM—depending on the conclusion the courts come to, it might have to be torn out down the line, along with everything built on top of it. The inability to use LLM output for open source or commercial purposes without taking a big legal risk kneecaps the value of the applications. Unlike Apple or Microsoft, the Linux community can’t bribe enough judges to make the problems disappear.