Personally I'm more against the concept of downloading random Appimages from github.
Unless you've personally gone through the repository code and know that it is clean and safe the hash tells you nothing of importance in that regard. It can be used to verify that the file is complete and didn't corrupt during the download and ensures that no MITM attack went through undetected.

Flatpaks are at least isolated and when you grab a popular package from flathub one can hope there would be an outcry if it's unsafe. AppImages per default get full access to the user /home.

Tiling and almost all have workspaces as a big feature, also I recently switched to niri, as I don't like vaxry for obv reasons, and it seems to have all the benefits of a tiling wm, but you have infinite space as it scrolls to the right infinitely

In most tiling window managers I have both tabbing and fullscreen. Which in my use, tends be fullscreen most of the time. Switching workspaces with a keybind's instant, contrast to the faff of alt-tabbing or moving windows around with the mouse. It's just one more thing to get out of the way of brain ideas coming to fruition. ;)

Can always have windows floating/stacked in most tiling window managers too.

How long before you're trying tiling window managers?

I never felt the appeal. My understanding is that all windows must be on the screen all the time (but maybe some window managers support workspaces?) and I don't like that. I like to have my web browser windows big, same as my IDE. I have 34'' 1440p monitor and it's too small for me to fit all the windows :)

I'm not sure how difficult OpenSuse rollbacks are.

They are actually very easy. Check the list of snapshots and note the one from before you screwed up, reboot, select the snapshot from which you want to launch the system, test, if it's OK run sudo snapper rollback and reboot. I use LUKS / TPM with auto-unlock, so I need to reenroll the key

I know setting up Snapper to snapshot takes a few extra steps/maintance.

In openSUSE it's set up out of the box, that was one of the reasons behind my choice of this distro.

I'll vouch for most books out of No Starch Press.

I'm not sure how difficult OpenSuse rollbacks are.

I know setting up Snapper to snapshot takes a few extra steps/maintance.

I can say: Aurora, Project Bluefin and Bazzite are all based on Atomic Fedora.

I run more bleeding edge with Bazzite-Testing, Fedora Atomic OS-Tree update and rollback system is really nifty for if you find yourself being weary of "updates" like on OpenSuse.

I've only ever had to rebase/rollback/pin certain images for troubleshooting situations once in ~3 years of use. (dam Qualcomm/Antheros Wi-Fi 7 drivers).

And for the most part is just set and forget. I don't even bother manually updating things anymore. Chromebook-easy.

I know Jorge has a LTS of Bluefin.

And also an Alpha bootc image of GnomeOS.

Debian

Or Devuan or AntiX.

:)

I also have a pretty beefy old PC at home, but it’s currently damaged (I think either the motherboard or the PSU is dead, I didn’t diagnose yet).

Same

Though mine's been dormant for so long, it wont be so beefy in a couple years.

[Edit, PS:

Week 1 was a good read too.

&

How long before you're trying tiling window managers?

]

How linux works is a great book! Halfway through it right now. I set up immich a while back and as far as I can tell, its almost identical to google photos, and unless you have like a terabyte of photos doesnt need a lot of proccesing power (it will take a while for its first scan, but after that it uses barely anything)

Appindicator and dash2dock are your biggest friends on GNOME. Those, and alphabetical app grid.

Yeah I saw someone said that. I've not used newer versions of GNOME extensively, but last I used it, it didn't have any indicators, nor has anyone mentioned them being added to me :p

Not sure if this is standard GNOME behaviour but on Fedora Silverblue under the control centre (where volume, bluetooth etc are) there is a Background Apps section if an app is running in the background.

Yeah it's one of things that really fuels the memes GNOME devs not designing for their user's needs lol

I feel like everyone I know who uses GNOME has at least appIndicator since a ton of apps rely on the basic function of having a system tray

OK, but it DOES work in the background. I generally like GNOME's minimalism, but this is a bad design choice IMO. Maybe I need that AppIndicator after all. :)

On my first day on GNOME I missed Slack notifications for 4 hours. It was great, no distractions and laser focus on my work! ;)

If it's an app with background functionality it goes in the background, but with no indication it does because there's no tray for them to have an icon in

Benno Rice always has interesting talks, good recommendation!

I tried OpenSuSE for a while... and while I prefer Fedora, I will point out Debian Stable is literally so. Very stable.

My biggest problem with SuSE is its insistence on certain ways of doing things that have been out of the norm for a long time. The big one is requiring root to be an active user with a password. Most distros lock the root account, which has no password set and can't be logged in without it, preventing root logins period, and requires you to first login as a normal user that has sudo permissions, then use sudo to do root commands.

Glad to hear it, and thanks for following up to benefit others!

Oh, thanks!

The Tragedy of systemd: https://archive.org/details/lca2019-The_Tragedy_of_systemd

It sounds like you're doing great and having fun! You're more intentional than I am - I don't have any kind of a plan even a year later.

On Debian, I installed a few DEs and could switch between them with a drop down on the login screen. It was trivial. You do end up with junk laying around from the other DEs, but it didn't cause me any trouble. Some programs don't support theming in your DE, but I believe that's because of the widget toolkit the program developer choose rather than an issue with having multiple DEs.

KDE is definitely more Windows-like, which is nice because it's easy and familiar. The KDE built in apps all seem good to me. I'm on Gnome now but thinking of moving to an even cleaner window manager thing.

Since I use Nixos as my distro it's trivial to change stuff like that, but I don't know that I would recommend it for development work.

Thanks for the post. Sounds like you're getting on very well. Some people say you can swap desktop as easy as uninstalling one and installing the new. I have done this with hyprland and ive seen this done with Gnome and KDE but im skeptical and worry that with these bigger desktops it will cause some really weird issues that would be super annoying to find and debug for a noobie.

Btw if you want packages from another distro you can use distrobox to create an image of that distro and then run the package there. You can make an alias for the command so you can run it easier. Might come in hand for your OpenVPN issue but since its a container it might also be annoying to setup.

The setting is actually under Display Configuration. Look for "Control hardware brightness with DDC/CI."