Yeah, it is still a laptop in the end. More repairable than most but still a laptop. I just had a problem with the “ecosystem” wording as this is best used to describe unrepairable pieces of crap that refuses third party parts (looking at you, Apple).

What ecosystem? pretty sure the “ecosystem” is standardized computer parts for thinkpads.

That artifact factory, full of ghosting and stutters is overengineered? I swear Unreal 5 games only looks good when absolutely everything stays still…

Not that I know of, sadly.

There are (a few) distros that don’t even uses systemd and anyway you can still tinker with systemd.

And by leaving, I meant I’m not stuck (like the Stockholm syndrome of your comment implied) on linux and can actually leave to BSD or other (or even back to windows if I ever get brain damage, who knows), so basicaly I don’t know where you get your “Stockholm syndrome” from.

oh no! help me! I’m trapped on an operating system I chose that I can configure however I want and that I can leave whenever I want!

unlike Windows, the default OS on 99% of machines, that people keep using despite the constant enshitification because of 1 or 2 softwares won’t run elsewhere and are thus trapped, no Stockholm syndrom here.

Counterpoint : I can buy DRM free .flac from qobuz and actually own them, unrevokably, and store them on my jellyfin server. Absolutely no need for physical optical disks here.

Maybe, but 2GB would still be 4 times heavier than my XFCE average, I just wouldn’t use it for a 2 or 4 GB system, other softwares need their RAM too.

I honestly don’t understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.

RAM usage. I sometime restore machines that just wouldn’t handle KDE. While GNOME is as heavy as KDE, cinnamon is lighter and xfce even more. An average finished KDE setup eats 4GB for me while a cinnamon one uses 1,5GB and an XFCE one 0,5GB. This makes KDE close to unusable on older 2 or 4GB systems.

I tried to use linux on a tablet, I’ve tried GNOME multiple times since it is apparently the best for touchscreen-only devices. This was hell.

As much as I’d love to be able to like that thing I just can’t.

Zero customisability, everything has to be changed through extensions, but the extension manager isn’t even part of GNOME’s core and has to be installed separately.

The settings page is severely lacking so I had to configure everything in .conf files or through CLI directly.

And the whole thing is as stable as a one-legged chair on top of a unbalanced washing machine.

KDE extension crashing : “oupsie a part of your desktop crashed and restarted as fast as possible, hope you didn’t notice”

GNOME extension crashing : “go fuck yourself, I burned your whole session to the ground, log back in and pray you weren’t doing anything worth saving”

In the end I customized KDE to look and behave like GNOME, this way around was surprisingly easier than just making GNOME bearable.

Oh and to the taskbar haters out there : my first computer was running windows 95 so you’ll be taking my taskbar from my cold dead hands, only KDE let me fulfill my dream of putting taskbars absolutely everywhere (even got two perpendicular ones on my bottom monitor)

I mean… this is definitely the kind of stuff that happened to “hacker” kiddos back in the days, this stuff probably happened a lot of time.

The store that has constant sales and where you can buy dozens of small indie titles for the average price of one game on other platforms is charging too much now?

Desktop crashes, oh there goes all my applikations that I started, gnome can’t keep up with switching workspaces[…]

GNOME, found your problem.

I can take screenshots or rebind keys on KDE, all of that without session losing crashes.

All you are describing simply doesn’t happen in KDE, and GNOME is notoriously bad at handling crashes, so go complain about GNOME rather than wayland as wayland is clearly not the culprit.

KDE is incredibly “windows like”, the “bloat” you might be refering to are options. The only criticism I agree with here is the footprint, KDE is indeed heavy and not recommanded for old machines.

KDE? Lightweight? Even cinnamon is incredibly heavy next to xfce and lxde. Have you ever used a sub-4GB of memory machine?

I do second mint (LMDE) for a non gamer and non tech savy windows 10 refugee though, it’s debian so, stable, and cinnamon is an okay-ish middle ground between KDE usability and xfce weight.

My problem being quite package specific, it’s not impossible, the biggest offender being qt…

“User-friendly” and “updated” sadly sounds incompatible. In just slightly less than one year of using Fedora I’ve had 3 bad qt updates that broke kde’s softwares like kmail, 2 bad amd-gpu updates that made the gpu crash and 1 pipewire update that broke surround sound.

Those were all minor updates that were easy to revert though, just had to use the terminal for that and wait the next fixed version.

As someone in this category : wtf? I kept using the terminal all the time when I was still on windows. From 95’s dos to 11’s cmd.

I use kolour paint on kde, there are a lot of other similar FOSS softwares around too.

I switched full-time last year. Went from windows 11 to fedora kde.

The switch took a bit of getting used to, and getting to know the innards of the distro (broke my sound typing pulse-audio related commands then discovering that fedora uses pipewire, this kind of stuff…)

But I’m kinda cheating since I’ve been using linux on all my other machines since windows 8 (had a hunch about imminent enshitification, windows 10 didn’t contradict it and windows 11… ha!).

I’ve been using windows since the 9x days, windows 11 became unbearably shitty, despite my incredibly unbloated version (originaly a windows 7 install that got “upgraded” to 10 then 11), with unwanted features getting disabled as soon as they appeared. I had a windows 11 with a local account and no one-drive and they still disapointed me! (the last straw was copilot)

Now running linux full time is a real pleasure, some stuff break here and there but nothing unfixable (usually just downgrading the faulty package until it is fixed just works), games just work most of the time, the KDE desktop is the windows one but not shitty, from an alternate reality where desktop widgets took off, and where you are allowed to customise stuff. (had to wait years on windows 11 to finally get back the “display the window’s title on the taskbar” option as I’m used to since 95)

The only thing I’m missing though : system-wide autoscroll bound to the mousewheel.