The homeserver doesn’t have to be fancy. We’re running all our stuff off a Dell Vostro from 2012 we got for like $30 on Craigslist. (It did need another $30 replacement PSU though. And it has 8GB RAM and a 500GB SSD which is nothing to sneeze at for a machine that cheap and that old.)
I mean, I could just go “TLDR grab Debian’s live KDE edition” if that’s easier!
The whole point in me explaining all that is that people don’t know all this stuff. That’s why I’m explaining it. I did gloss over the fact that distros exist, but it seems like the person I’m replying to already knows that multiple versions of Linux are a thing so that’s not a huge issue.
And going “here’s some options to pick from” helps if it turns out you’ve got different priorities than we do. But yeah, “TLDR Debian” is also good if you’re overwhelmed.
Funnily enough, Gajim from Flatpak (1.9.5) does drag and drop just fine!
I can’t remember what version we’ve got on our laptop– [can’t we just check packages.debian.org?] right! It’s 2.1.1-2, apparently. Good to hear that 2.2.0 is non-adwaitified, that sounds like a good place to fork from.
– Frost
Anything with the KDE desktop!
That’s a neat thing about Linux, the look and feel is actually totally separate from the distro. Everyone focuses on distros when really, that’s mostly under-the-hood stuff, the look and feel is the desktop environment.
KDE is windows-10-like (out of the box, you can also rearrange the crap out of it, ours is set up more like Mac!) and also happens to be one of the most full-featured desktop environments, so you won’t be missing stuff (like HDR support or whatever).
So, a distro with KDE.
Debian is great if you want something that Does Not Break on you. Ever. It will never throw you a curveball with an update. That also means you just won’t really get updates very much, outside of a Big Major Upgrade every couple of years. If you’re tired of Windows Update screwing with you, Debian’s perfect.
Fedora is pretty good if you want the new shinies all the time. Major updates every 6 months. Debian has a bigger appstore and even stuff that isn’t in there often provides .deb packages, which Fedora can’t run, but it’s not a huge deal.
Mint doesn’t have a convenient KDE version (but you can install KDE after the fact). It has its own desktop called Cinnamon. More Windows 7 vibes. It’s based on Debian so you get the Debian compatibility, as well, and they put work into making sure you have GUI apps for stuff like installing drivers (Debian you might need a terminal command or three during initial setup).
There’s also immutable distros like Bazzite, which is basically SteamOS But Desktop. It also comes with similar restrictions to SteamOS, though. Good for an Appliance Computer, an absolute fucking pain if you ever need to install drivers/VR stuff/other system software or what-have-you. I’d avoid for your main computer.
– Frost
I’m a furry and even I don’t get most furries, haha!
Like, I’m here to be an animal. I heard “people who like to be animals” and went “whoa, sign me up!” and it turns out a lot of furries DON’T like to be animals, they just… pretend to be animals but “oh that’s a character not really me” and they still consider themselves human…?.. also they’re only half-human-half-animals, not actual animal shape either?.. I don’t get it
turns out most of the actual “I’m just an animal” animals are the therians instead (once I found them I decided I’d be both). I’m still a non-character, non-anthropomorphic (the furry jargon for normal animal shape is “feral”) furry though, and the anthro furries can just deal. :3
– Frost
Tried that, didn’t really help… but I got it working! Steam forums for the game turned out to be helpful. https://steamcommunity.com/app/420530/discussions/1/600766503721121457/, PrototypeDelta’s list of libraries to move out of the way seems to work.
– Frost
That makes sense!
Whatever it is, it must flow.
We were homeschooled.
Not the “religious nut” kind of homeschooling though. I wasn’t even aware that was a thing growing up. Our parents actually raised us totally atheist, so almost the opposite!
Personally I’m glad we were homeschooled, our parents actually did teach us well and we learned all the academic stuff you’d expect us to learn. (The state we grew up in also has a system of “you take yearly state-run standardized tests to make sure you’re actually being taught stuff”, which probably helps. But like, I don’t think that was the only reason our parents taught us well, I’m pretty sure they actually cared, too.)
The downside of all that is that it helped our parents keep us isolated. But honestly, I’ll take that over the bullying (and indoctrination) we’ve heard of public school having. Public school sounds like hell.
– Frost
SELinux is also just a pain in the tail. We’re on Debian which has got AppArmor instead and while it has caused problems, it’s caused problems a heck of a lot less often than SELinux did when we tried Fedora.
– Frost
That’s a thing?? Whoa. The wooden ones SUCK, plastic is alright but plastic… how are the potato ones to clean? One of the nice things about the plastic ones is you can clean them and keep them around in your bag for next time you need a spoon.
Yeah, personally I don’t really like the GPL* (for stuff that isn’t actively of interest to companies), but this kind of stripping the GPL from an existing project is just, gross. Definitely seems like an active attempt to nuke it and take it over.
(*because I like it when other open source people can use a given piece of code e.g. I wrote, and I’m not particularly picky about whether they agree with me on what specific form of open source is best; wanna use my MIT or public domain code in a GPL project? go for it!)
(s/open source/free software/g if you’re one of the “open source isn’t REAL FREE SOFTWARE!!!” people; I use the terms interchangeably, bite me)
(also I get using the GPL for stuff that companies would actively want to take over. Like, apparently, this project.)
– Frost
Honestly, the US (where we live) does this surprisingly well, considering how backwards of a country it is in a lot of other ways.
Credit cards, and even debit cards (like the one from our bank), generally have NFC these days, just like phones do. But you don’t need to faff about with your phone. Just pull out your card, tap it, done.
No app compatibility to deal with, just as easy as phone NFC, I don’t know why that’s not the standard over there. (Plenty of people do use phone payments here too though. I don’t get why.)
– Frost
Yeah! Exactly.
(There are plenty of other video editors, by the way! We’ve only used Kdenlive, but have heard of Shotcut and… Open…something-or-other? But yeah, there’s more.)
The Rust people often push the idea that “Rust is the only memory-safe language” (or at least imply it, “all projects should be written in Rust for memory safety!”), completely ignoring that like… MOST languages are memory-safe these days. Yeah, that doesn’t apply as much in the low-level space C sits in, and C is the opposite of a memory-safe language (it’s basically “memory is just a bunch of bytes, do whatever you want, just be careful”), but still.
(C does have advantages, though. It’s been around forever, the way C programs are built is kinda foundational to how programs are built in general on Unix, and basically every language that has cross-language interoperability does it with C, so libraries in C can work with nearly everything. It’s also relatively simple to implement (compared to other languages), which is great if you’re writing a compiler for fun or for a new architecture. I kinda like C! Absolutely abysmal string handling though. But for that there’s Perl. Which, is memory-safe. :3)
– Frost
a) you’re using “animal” like an insult. That’s not cool.
and b) calling shitty people “not people” isn’t cool either.
and c) just to reiterate, by contrast, animals (human or not) are people, and calling them “subhuman” is just… dude.
– Frost
I’m not sure about a full-on cult, but the people who push Rust push Rust REALLY, REALLY HARD. And they frame any opposition as “you just need to GET WITH THE TIMES!!!”.
Much like the Wayland people, and the systemd people.
Personally, that massively turns me off. Especially because when I tried rust, it tried to force us to use snake_case instead of camelCase in our OWN CODE, throwing up “style warnings”. That’s not okay.
It feels like they want to end style diversity, programming language diversity, want everything to be done Their Way because it’s Just Better and how dare people disagree.
(Python has similar “having your own style is frowned upon” culture problems, I think, but they don’t really do the same “we need to wipe out other programming languages!!” shit.)
So I’m against Rust myself, not for technical reasons, but because of that.
– Frost
This is why we run Gajim 1.9.5 in flatpak.
Which. Got removed from flathub, so to install it on our laptop, we had to do some kind of weird flatpak sideloading thing.
On our laptop we’ve been using Gajim 2.something from Debian 13 (our desktop runs testing so we can’t do that there). It’s not Full Gnomified. It also locks up whenever we try dragging a picture into the chat window to send. So… yeah.
Someone should fork Gajim pre-2.
I had a poke through Kate’s settings… try going to Editing > Auto Completion and turning off keyword completion?
It says
Keyword completion provides suggestions based on the keywords which exist in the document’s language.
which sounds promising. I guess they just added e.g. “English” along with all the programming languages, heh (in a programming language it would autocomplete stuff like “if” and “for”).
… I tried turning it off though and it didn’t seem to help, which is weird, because it looks like it should.
– Ylfingr
Honestly, I may not be the best person to ask if an IDE is what you want, heh. We usually just use it as an editor, and we don’t really have much in the way of IDE features in vim either. But we also don’t really use languages that practically need an IDE, like Java. Stuff like HTML and perl and JS are much easier to write with a normal text editor.
If you just need LSP autocomplete and such, though, Kate’s got that! There’s a plugin for it, I think. You might have to turn it on.
This is awesome. Should be the normal way to do things!
– Frost