Wow! For how long have you been using scrollers?

Probably a over a year now I think

That workflow just really clicked for me.

I also still use multiple desktops with the scrolling

EDIT: And before that I used Hyperland after switching to Wayland. Before Wayland I had used i3 for several years

I freaking love niri

It’s easy to lose windows that are off-screen

By default. They should really change the defaults, but in config, you can make it so if there is a window to the side hidden, a piece is always visible.

It’s called struts.

layout {
    ...
    struts {
         left 16
         right 16
     }
}

It ensures a piece of the window is always visible

Plus with a bar like from QuickShell or WayBar you can see all open windows anyway up there.

To achieve this, I’ve been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.

The things you show in the gif are already possible with niri via Super + [ and Super + ] (default bindings) for placing into columns

It has limitations, but everything in the gif at least is already there. Niri actually has quite a bit of support for base tiling.

I can’t go back to non-scrolling ever. I even use a similar setup on my work machine (a Mac) via PaperWM.spoon, tho it isn’t as well integrated (bc it’s a mac and you’re forcing it to not be a mac)

EDIT: One tiling feature of niri I love is that with Super + W you can switch to a stacked mode like in a tiler. For KiCAD PCB editing, you have three windows - project, schematic, and pcb. It is essential that at the very least the project tab be stacked behind and out of the way imo, since there is no minimize

Not sure if it helps, but traditionally the max was 80 columns by 25 rows on old computers, and that became a standard.

Nowadays we can be much bigger with a terminal emulator window, but 80x25 is still the “standard” and most terminal emulators default to that size when you open their window.

It’s not the max size possible, but if you’re making software for terminal, that really should be your target size imo

Tried it once for a few months. Installing software stayed taking hours forever. Gave up. Arch forever

Niri + QuickShell (e.g. DMS) is already better than what you can get on Windows and Mac. Manual window dragging should die off already (GNOME and KDE; looking at y’all)

Even tools like PaperWM.spoon can only mimic a fraction of the grace of Niri (no offense to the PaperWM.spoon team; macOS is holding them back)

Wow that’s like over double in 2 months

It’s going to be a sad day when Linus finally leaves the kernel

I like thunar with Arc theme but it’s Gtk based, and you really need to install thunar and its plugins (volman, archive manager, etc)

I think this is more idiomatic:

let result = foo(a, b)
    .map_err(|e| MyErrorEnum::Error(e.to_string()));

Pros:

• Better UX for system. On Windows and Mac you’re stuck with the old-style window movement desktops which suck and are chaos with lots of effort to maintain when trying to do anything productive. Even with third-party tools it’s nothing like being able to have something like Niri. It’s just better on the Linux world.
• It actually meets your needs instead of making your change your needs. The customization is insane, but usually you don’t even have to go very far to be happy.
• No bloat, no forced features like AI (tho you can get your own AI stuff if you want), less privacy concerns, better tools generally

Microsoft Windows is actually a complete piece of crap

Unfortunately, cons of switching:

• Have to use non-standard apps for certain things like office files or DAWs for audio production
  • Tho, these are less bad these days. In fact, some are better like I’ll take Blender over Maya any day, and I use OnlyOffice even on Windows, bc why pay for the “Copilot App” (formerly MS Office) when OnlyOffice is just as good and is fully compatible?
• Some games don’t work (esp multiplayer), and sometimes for no good reason other than the devs don’t like Linux users, e.g. Bungie.
  • Also far better than it used to be. Very few things I miss out on
• MacOS clearly has the better app distribution system. A single folder with all necessary deps save a couple core libraries. Simple, effective, can still be put in a store. Instead we have an obsession with sandboxing or overcomplicated packages. AppImages were so close to being right. But nope. We can’t have nice things sometimes

I’ve been using Linux-only since around 2019 (having used it alongside Windows for gaming before then) when Proton finally started getting good. I’m also an engineer, artist, writer, gamer, musician, maker, and more, so I feel like I have touched a lot of the different ways in which computers are used. I’ve used several distros for extended periods, and my fav is Arch (tho Nix is a close second; it’s just not quite ready for primetime)

Linux is absolutely a viable alternative, but you have to know what you want from your PC. How do you want it to function? Pick that choice. It’s not ice-cream flavors where all are equal and you have to decide; form follows function here. Decide what you need and then build your own system from that - bc Linux is yours. Refuse to be spoonfed slop no matter if the slop is from Microsoft or from a Linux distro. Slop is slop. Cook your own meal. It tastes better. If you don’t like mushrooms, don’t get mushrooms.

You still need X11 or Wayland somehow. I would suggest something that can run in “kiosk” mode. That’s essentially what you want - boot a single app and run that.

If you don’t care about wayland, just install xorg-xinit (since you said Arch) and put this in ~/.xinitrc: exec steam -bigpicture

Run startx to launch it on its own. There may be other dependencies you need for steam or for games, but you don’t need a whole DE.

If you want, you can even enable auto-login and then set up auto-start by adding this to your ~/.bashrc (or whatever shell you use):

if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]]; then
  startx
fi

I’d recommend using something like Niri instead of mutter for the compositor as Niri is:

• Extremely customizable
• Meant to be used alone (unlike mutter which is for Gnome)
• Supportive of Wayland portals better than any compositor I’ve tried
• Very modern
• Pretty stable
• Making use of scrolling window management which is, imo, superior to anything else
  • You could force all windows to be floating if you want that traditional method tho

I’d also recommend using DankMaterialShell and simply providing a theming to get the appeal you want. It works well with Niri and provides all the system tools you need for an OS like bluetooth and audio management, application lookup, etc. It’s sort of a stripped down Gnome-shell for standalone compositors but way more customizable.

Then everything else can just be installed WINE apps.

I like Ardour. It’s got everything you need. It’s what I’ve been using for the past couple years now. It even supports VST2/VST3 plugins through WINE

I also recommend using yabridge to set up Windows plugins to work on Linux, but be warned there is risk of compatibility issues with plugins on Linux when buying new ones!

EDIT - Resources:

• Ardour website - https://ardour.org/
  • Recommend installing from your package manager tho
• Yabridge tool - https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge
• A few plugins that work:
  • Drum kit plugin I like (free) - https://www.powerdrumkit.com/
  • Voxengo SPAN (Frequency Analyzer, also free) - https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/
  • Luciano Dato’s Noise-Repellant (free) - https://github.com/lucianodato/noise-repellent
  • Typically use the built in LPF/HPF, Graph Eq, Reverb, and Compressor plugins. They work great

Wait a little while and low key Audacity 4 might release a fully capable DAW as well now that it’s adding better clip support, plugin support, non-destructive editing for some effects like compression, reverb, etc. Of course, it will be mainly for if you do a lot of recording. For electronic, Ardour would probably be better even after Audacity 4 releases.

Except that the Linux part of ChromeOS is still open-source and the growth of ChromeOS still would yield benefits to Linux users across the board.

It’s almost certainly much higher than that

First of all, ChromeOS is Linux. It’s a weird Linux, but it is Linux and can be made to run regular Linux software. It’s based on Gentoo. It’s not just “technically” Linux; it just straight up is. It’s even more Linux than Android is.

That adds another 2.69% up to 7.69%

But also, the 4.77% Unknown is almost certainly made up of primarily Linux machines.

So really, it’s a range of percentages anywhere from 7.69% to 12.46%. I would guess Linux users are at least 10% of the US market now

Source: The StatCounter pages the article is referring to for US: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america

World wide is also similar: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/

There we’re potentially even higher: 5.33% to 14.5%. That’s just shy of the worldwide Mac users! macOS + OS X is 15.35% worldwide.

I’ve not heard of “Firefox Send.” Why would I use something like this instead of scp or Nextcloud?

I can finally learn cobol?!?!?

I don’t use Ubuntu anymore, and haven’t as my main in a long time.

My longest running distro is probably Arch, which I’ve recently switched back to after a year on Fedora and a year on NixOS

Ubuntu back in 2014. Followed by Elementary not long after

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Really depends on the games. For the vast majority, probably not. If you play competitive multiplayer games, then it’s 50/50.

Check out protondb to see if the games you play the most work well.

Also semi-depends on hardware. Old Nvidia cards may struggle. AMD is def king in the Linux world, but it’s getting better for Nvidia

But as you are probably aware, the steam deck has been pretty successful. That wouldn’t happen if Linux gaming was all bad.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

Hit or miss. Sometimes the mod tools have to use wine and don’t work. Sometimes they use wine and work. Sometimes they don’t use wine and work.

I have just done some modding of Monster Hunter Wilds, and it was about 50/50

When it works, it’s just as easy as Windows.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

WINE or a Virtual Machine

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

.NET is cross platform as of several years ago.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

It depends on the distro. Typically you just run a command in the terminal to “update all packages” or click a button in a store front.

It’s way easier than on Windows and is never forced.

Genuinely one of if not the best thing about Linux is how software management works.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Less vulnerable due to being open source. You have all the security experts in the world, including Microsoft’s, able to view and fix any vulnerabilities as soon as they appear. Thousands of people getting their eyes on it.

There’s a reason that Linux is the back bone of the internet and nearly every server runs it.

And FYI, you don’t use antivirus on Linux.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

If it works, it will always work.

Whether it works is dependent on your GPU.

Like I said, AMD is basically perfect, Nvidia can have problems, but these days that’s less and less true (I use a GTX 3080 w/ out issue).

Mostly if you have an old, less-supported nvidia card (like pre-GTX) you may have issues.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

I’ve never heard of something like that happening.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

For beginners the correct option is almost always Linux Mint