I don’t hate flatpaks, but flatpaks require more disk space than the same apps from traditional repositories, and they only support a handful of the most common default themes. Since I only ever use older and slower computers, my disk space is limited, and I like to rice my desktop, I personally avoid them. But your use-case may differ.

It does not run well. You can’t see the performance difference between KDE and XFCE on neofetch, but you absolutely can on on old machine.

Source: I have an old computer.

Enable the chaotic AUR and you won’t even have to build from source.

Linux is modular, not fragmented.

Except Gnome. Fuck Gnome.

Thank you for providing an actual answer. Most of the comments in this thread are condescending as hell.

This is a popular opinion outside of Lemmy. You won’t find many lowercase “l” libertarians here though.

How important is the Windows-style desktop? If the VM is designed for one thing and one thing only, I’d pick any minimal WM that can alt-tab, say JWM, and then just add Firefox and Thunderbird to the autostart file.

Ultra-libertarian Jingoist? I’m as confused by that combination of words as I am the flags on the truck.

Give me an archive link and I’ll click it every time. Otherwise, almost never.

But… the abuse is literally baked into my original comment. DRM. DRM is the abuse. Just because you’re used to it doesn’t mean that it was ever ok.

Valve is a company whose profit model is based on DRM. They were never your friend. Thanks for proton, though.

Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn’t install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don’t want to waste space on flatpaks.

Sometimes you can literally just go to the youtube invidious channel of a professor at a big name college, if it’s the kind of topic where a lecture series alone can provide the education you’re looking for.

Why wouldn’t there be warlords? I’m not sure how this comment follows. Without a government, you get both eggs in one basket, which the original commenter agrees is bad.

By any chance was this in a VM?

In response to everyone’s sandals comments, you’re really missing out if you don’t go barefoot in the snow every now and then, so long as there’s only a light layer. Every step is cushioned and refreshing. It’s good endorphins all around, like taking a breath of fresh air after leaving a stuffy room. When the snow gets high enough that it kicks up onto the tops of your toes, that’s cold.

I’ve never dived into this, but if electronic keyboards are just glorified midi-controllers, I’d have to think you could find a FOSS solution. If they’re not simply midi-controllers, I wouldn’t begin to know. I’d imagine you might have an easier time with keyboards from the 90s or whenever.

You can skip this comment if you’re avoiding anything arch-based; I don’t have any additional distro suggestions beyond what’s already listed (they really are mostly the same), but in regard to the arch-based suggestions, I would only add that you can reduce the maintenance by choosing a DE with a slower update cycle (e.g. XFCE or any WM) and, more importantly, remembering that you don’t actually have to update your system every day. Even once a month is probably fine. I don’t get the impression you want vanilla Arch though; Endeavor or even Manjaro minimal will have the defaults you’re looking for, or literally any other non-Arch distro if the AUR isn’t important to you.

Everyone is actually mildly intolerant to carageenan. Why it’s used as a food additive is beyond me.

Edit: My wife switched us to Colgate and hasn’t had problems since.

A GUI to build these EWWidgets I suck at making. The only reason I’m using them is the fancy animations, otherwise xfce4-panel or tint2 would be fine.