For whatever reason, since maybe 6.6, none of the trackpad gestures work at all.

Definitely entirely LLM-generated with minimal review. The "docs" are literally just the LLM "plans".

Unfortunate, it's a nice idea (albeit one that makes more sense on desktop, and for most fields only pulling from their respective arXiv is more or less useless).

Niri works fine on multiple screens, you can configure it pretty well. AFAIK it does not let you drag whole workspaces onto a screen -- each screen has its own scroll of windows and set of workspaces, and you can move windows between them, but not move whole workspaces.

Came here to say this. Simply the most intuitive way to interact with a computer.

I have KDE installed as a backup, and use the whole KDE software suite, but Niri is GOATed. Especially since KDE trackpad gestures are so terrible.

I switched over from v4 a couple days ago, and its a nice upgrade.

Gotta make sure to disable any theme templates in v4 first though, or they're permanently applied, can't even get rid of them by deleting the files.

AI slop

Yeah, LUKS or multiboot make things much more complicated. I think it's well intentioned, but I've never had any stability issues skipping it, so it seems unnecessary for most folks. Also, snapper-boot is just a better solution to the upgrade stability problem.

Staying compatible with LTS releases should absolutely be the goal, but that takes work from both sides.

If Debian is applying backported patches to old software (I think the oldest version I saw was 6 years out of support) that generates a nightmare to support for package maintainers. If there are features which are not supported since the version is so old, but there are backported security patches which change the API, the developers would essentially have to maintain a specific version for each LTS distro's specific set of patches, and the number of versions you have to maintain and the length of time you need to maintain them for quickly becomes impossible to manage.

Stable is nice, but you can have stability without being criminally outdated, as Trixie shows. The ideal is to have a stable and up to date distribution.

And yes, most users would be fine due to just being in the browser, but thats true of literally any OS or distro, not specific to this.

I got fed up with Discover's whole reboot-to-update thing and just disabled it.

Eventually, I ended up just disabling updates through discover altogether, I'd rather just use my little bash script anyways.

Debian is nice & boring, but I have had issues with how old its kernel and software versions are. 6.12 isn't too bad for Trixie, but previously it was really terrible. When I was running Bookworm, I ran into plenty of situations where software I was compiling or getting from outside the repos (for niche software), wasn't backwards compatible to the library versions Debian provided.

No hate for Debian, but it just doesn't work for a lot of people. However, these days I would go for Debian over Ubuntu 10 times out of 10.

Isn't gnome the default DE on Fedora?

If you just want portability, then this could be useful. However, in my opinion a large part of why I use a shell script is to avoid compilation and just hack something together. If your goal is shell scripts that are easier to write you could also check out other shells:

• fish is the easiest to use in my opinion, but is not POSIX compliant so you do have to learn the syntax.
• zsh is a nice quality-of-life upgrade over BASH, tweaking the little things
• There are also things like xonsh which use Python syntax for shell scripting, but I dont have personal experience with them.