(this is not an advertisement, more-so a brainstorming post)

I recently built myself a simple bash-based framework to add dynamic UI elements on top of my window manager, currently it can trigger in 3 ways:

-#1: the mouse enters/leaves a specified zone

-#2: the layout on a specific monitor changes to/from a specific layout

-#3: a specific program gets focused/unfocused

it has per-mode delays built in, and the triggers just run commands so technically, i can wire it into anything.

so far, i've added a volume bar on the right of my screen that pops up when you move your mouse there, a brightness bar on the left and a screenshot utility at the top, all of these using zones.

i've also added a tab bar that only shows in monocle and deck modes (Where windows are effectively hiding behind eachother and it's normally impossible to tell how many windows you have open and in which order)

next to UI, this framework can start/stop basically anything or even just *launch an initialization script* when a condition is detected. So basically:

what can you think of that would be useful to have automatically start/stop or show/hide based on where on the screen the mouse is, what program is focused or what layout the window manager is on?

particularly interested in what the focus/unfocus trigger could be used for, i'm sure there's something but there's nothing obvious within my own workflow yet.

I've been working on some more guides since some people have asked for that, and i'd like to include sections on both linux pitfalls and common mistakes.

I'll be defining pitfalls as "problems a new user will frequently run into", problems can be something being broken or just something not working the way a new user (coming from mac or windows) would expect.

i'll be defining mistakes as things a new user may do on accident (for example, accidentally running some kind of `sudo rm -rf /` is a popular one)

I'd love to hear both about pitfalls/mistakes you've seen others run into, as well as pitfalls/mistakes you've personally seen or made!

(and yall, please don't get judgy in the comments, i'm pretty sure everyone will eventually make a stupid mistake. i personally managed to run `sudo rm -rf $DIR/*` with DIR being empty, effectively deleting my entire drive. that was thankfully 2 days in so it wasnt too bad.)

I've been working on some more guides since some people have asked for that, and i'd like to include sections on both linux pitfalls and common mistakes.

I'll be defining pitfalls as "problems a new user will frequently run into", problems can be something being broken or just something not working the way a new user (coming from mac or windows) would expect.

i'll be defining mistakes as things a new user may do on accident (for example, accidentally running some kind of `sudo rm -rf /` is a popular one)

I'd love to hear both about pitfalls/mistakes you've seen others run into, as well as pitfalls/mistakes you've personally seen or made!

(and yall, please don't get judgy in the comments, i'm pretty sure everyone will eventually make a stupid mistake. i personally managed to run `sudo rm -rf $DIR/*` with DIR being empty, effectively deleting my entire drive. that was thankfully 2 days in so it wasnt too bad.)

Hi Everyone!

as the title says, I do not personally use openSUSE, I've worked with it *a bit* before, but nothing major.

Recently I wrote a guide on r/linux4noobs about picking a distro, which went down pretty well, so I'm planning on writing up more educational guides for linux in general.

However, that guide did not include openSUSE *at all*. It primarily focuses on Fedora, Arch and Ubuntu (and all of the distributions based on them).

I'd *like* to learn a bit more about openSUSE, as I do think it should be included into guides like these.

Of course, I will be making a VM with openSUSE once more, this time primarily to explore the distro, but I also have some questions for the community!

Why are you (currently) on openSUSE and do you plan to stick around?

How do you feel openSUSE LEAP compares to other big "versioned release" distro's like Ubuntu and Fedora?

How do you feel openSUSE tumbleweed compares to other "rolling release" distro's like arch and void?

What do you think openSUSE does different/better than other popular distributions?

What kind of users do you feel openSUSE is for?

I primarily want to understand what the actual users think, rather than just *my* opinion, as distro choice is a personal matter and different options suit different users.

Would love to hear from you all and have a nice day!

hold onto your hats, this one may require a little explaining.

So, i am not a KDE user. My partner is, but i'm not.

We both use arch (by the way), and i personally do a lot of tinkering around with window managers as a hobby, building different isolated dotfiles around different window managers that i can access all at the same time, that do not interact with eachother (meaning that for each set, i use a different wallpaper manager, a different shell, a different terminal, the only things that stay the same are applications that are not part of the dotfiles, like discord and such). sometimes i publish these.

I found out that with the x11 version of KDE, it is possible to replace KWin with a different window manager, the arch wiki has a guide on this for i3.

thing is, i don't want to use an x11 window manager, I'd like to see if i can get the plasma shell working fully with both Wayfire (floating/stacking, like kwin) and MangoWM (scrolling, autotiling, master/stack, monocle etc etc, basically every auto-tiling layout under the sun) using a separate desktop file for each (so they can exist alongside a normal KDE plasma install without messing it up)

So far, with a little experimentation, i've made a desktop session that uses a custom init script which loads both wayfire and the plasma shell directly, however, it seems running JUST plasma-shell is mildly broken.

the way you set a different WM on plasma x11 sadly doesn't work on wayland, unless i'm misunderstanding how to get it to run.

so now, i need to basically know either A: how to run start-plasma-wayland with a custom WM instead of KWin or B: what other components need to be launched for the plasma shell to work properly so i can manually launch them all using the custom init script.

I'm *specifically* looking to tinker around with plasma with different wayland window managers, i'm not looking to try out Karousel or Khronkite or make other modifications to KWin. I get that as a practical solution, those are likely a lot easier and safer than what i'm doing, but this won't be my daily driver and it's honestly mostly to try stuff and have fun doing it. we're not going for practical, we're going for "can it be done", followed by "can i make it reliable/stable" if the answer is "yes".

i'm not afraid of tinkering around and writing custom scripting/configs, my whole system has proper backups and snapshots so if i do bung something up, i can recover without any problems and i'm pretty familiar with these kinds of things, just not KDE specifically.

Hi everyone, i'm Den, i'm an IT professional and general linux nerd. I've also spent the last 5 years guiding people through their first destiny raids.

I've been spending the last while answering questions here and in r/linuxquestions, and eventually, i got tired of repeating the same advice about picking a distro over and over again so i made this guide.

I was thinking, what other topics would be helpful to have a guide on for new users? i'd imagine proton and proton troubleshooting would be a good one, maybe the basics of docker so people can use containers, a dual-booting guide, what else?

whether you're a newbie struggling to find info on a topic or a 10+ year linux veteran that happens to know about a great topic that newbies should know, sound off in the replies!

to start with, not a new user, not even going to install fedora on my own device, my primary usecase is that all the different spins are *really nice* ways to show off/test different desktops and window managers in a live environment, so they're all going on a ventoy.

I am attempting to download one copy of each AMD64-architecture fedora spin, so i can place them all on a ventoy. the problem is: i'm not able to actually finish my downloads, all of them go *really* slow and fail after about 2/3rds of the progress bar.

my current internet speed is: 900Mbps down (measured), 3ms ping (to speedtest servers, measured), 900Mbps up (measured), using fiberoptics to the home and cat6e with an opnsense router to handle routing and gigabit switches.

i'm downloading to an internal NVME SSD that can easily write over a gigabit/second sequential, so this should not be an issue.

I have a static ip and i'm in western europe.

i've managed to download the ISO's one at a time by sitting there and keeping an eye on it and clicking the "try again" button every 3-5 minutes until after about an hour and a half it finally finishes. However, you can imagine that if your goal is to download *every* fedora spin, that will take a while.

is this expected behaviour for the site? is there a better place to go obtain the official fedora ISO's? is there anything i can check that i'm doing wrong? i don't have the problem on any other sites.

So, I'm running MangoWM with DankMaterial Shell, and DMS handles automatic theming.

since today, i've had the problem that some of my GTK4-based applications, specifically the ones that use libadwaita, do not adhere to the theme mode setting (light/dark)

the DMS auto-theme *does* get applied properly, and as i can verify with dconf-editor and the gsettings command, org.gnome.desktop.interface.color-scheme is set to prefer-dark and gtk-theme is set to adw-gtk3-dark

when i open, for example, nautilus with the GTK debugger, i do find that under objecs > properties > GTKSettings the gtk-interface-color-scheme value is set to *light* with the label "source:application", this same setting can be found under global > settings > system color theme, setting either to dark produces the correct dark theme.

i also get the following error despite this not being set in my gtk4 settings.ini file

Using GtkSettings:gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme with libadwaita is unsupported. Please use AdwStyleManager:color-scheme instead

i cannot find this setting *anywhere*, nor where it sets to light theme on an application level for all adwaita applications.

every place where i *can* set the theme to dark, i've set it to dark, yet for some reason, it falls back to light theme and continues giving that error when it isn't set in *any* of the ini files it loads (as far as i can tell via strace)

i've been trying to troubleshoot this for the past 9 or so hours now, i can literally see the setting and verify that toggling it works, i just *cannot* find where this setting is being overwritten from and why it doesn't respect the global theme settings i can see in dconf.

i've tried lots of googling, but kept finding things that werent relevant. i also tried asking an LLM but of course, it was of absolutely no help whatshowever.

i'm primarily just hitting a dead end because i need to know what is A: causing those errors when nautilus is started and B: causes libadwaita GTK applications to hard-default to light mode.

i'm *thinking* these may be related?

Very frequently, when a new or aspiring linux user asks "what distribution do i use?", they are met with a bunch of people telling them "use <distro i'm using>, it's the best one"

this isnt always the case and can lead to someone trying a distro that doesn't match the experience they're looking for, potentially cutting this person's linux journey short.

So instead, here's a guide for new users to pick their linux distribution themselves. This should be applicable to basically all new users with limited prior experience. this guide does not apply to enthusiasts, developers and general tech nerds.

what is a distro?

linux itself is just a kernel. In order to get a fully functional system, you need a bunch of other components around that kernel. For every component, there's various options, which you get to pick from.

Obviously, picking each component yourself would be an extremely tedious process that not many people would want to go through. imagine wanting to buy a car and finding out you have to buy the engine block and then buy every other component separately and put it together yourself.

this is what distributions are for. distributions are a pre-made selection of components that provides you with a functional system of some type.

Different distributions contain different sets of components, and may be aimed at different use-cases (for example, ubuntu server doesn't have a desktop environment at all, because it's meant for server use.)

for daily use, you'll want to get a desktop distro.

tier 1 vs tier 2 distro's

there are different "tiers" of distro's, this is generally used to talk about the distro's relation to other distro's. a tier 2 distro is based on a tier 1 distro, a tier 3 distro is based on a tier 2 distro.

this can also be used to categorize distro's into "families". for example, EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Garuda Linux and steamOS are all tier 2 distro's based on Arch Linux, so i'd call them "arch-family distro's"

the big three families

broadly, most popular linux distributions fall within one of three families, being based on one of three different distribution families. For new users, i'd highly recommend picking something from the big three simply because you'll find significantly more community support and resources when you need help.

the three families are:

• fedora
• arch linux
• debian/ubuntu

debian/ubuntu is a bit special, as ubuntu is a tier 2 distro based on debian but because most popular distro's in this family are based on ubuntu rather than debian directly, some people effectively count ubuntu as a tier 1 distro with its derivations being tier 2. hence why they're mentioned together. technically all children of ubuntu are also just debian family.

what components you should actually care about

out of all of those components you need, most of them don't really matter for a new user. You can trust that any desktop distro will come with all the needed core components, and whether you're using for example ufw or firewalld as your firewall doesn't really matter, as long as you have a firewall.

the two that do are:

• software installation
• desktop environment

software installation

software installation is a bit of an umbrella term here, because it's not just about how you install software, but also what software is available and what versions.

this is generally split by family, as all distributions in the same family use the same package manager and are generally able to use repositories from any distro in that family.

• Ubuntu/Debian - these distro's generally favor stability, having a smaller list of available software by default and with slightly out-of-date versions, but the available software is rock-solid stable.
• arch linux - these distro's favor getting the latest and greatest, you get updates for software basically immediately and have access to the largest amount of software, but you may end up being the test driver for some of it.
• fedora - the middle ground. fedora releases updates a bit slower than arch, verifying stability first, but still a lot faster than ubuntu/debian. weeks instead of months. Fedora does have less available software than arch, focusing on more mature projects.

pick one of these three, then move on to the next section.

desktop environment

you can get any of these desktops on any of the big 3 families.

your desktop environment will determine basically 95% of your experience, as such, i actually recommend picking and trying a couple.

here's some recommendations for popular desktops:

• KDE plasma - windows-like by default with high customizability
• GNOME - android/mac style desktop
• cinnamon - windows 7-like
• XFCE - lightweight and simple
• cosmic - gnome-like desktop with auto-tiling

pick at least 3 to try.

trying distro's

trying a distro is actually very easy and recommended! many distributions come with a live environment for the installer, that means the installation software runs within a full version of the desktop, so you can try the desktop before you install it as well as verify that this distribution works correctly with your hardware.

the best way to do this is to make a USB stick into a ventoy. this allows you to then place ISO files on the USB stick, boot from the USB stick and select the ISO file to use. no flashing needed.

an easy way to try out various desktops is to use the fedora iso's for them, as they are each a separate iso file. cachyOS also offers all of the above desktops, but since cachyOS has a single iso, you can only try the KDE plasma environment before installing.

you can find the fedora spins here: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/
you can find fedora KDE here: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/
you can find fedora with GNOME here: https://fedoraproject.org/workstation/

for ubuntu/debian based distro's:
ubuntu flavours can be found here: https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors
linux mint (debian based) can be found here: https://linuxmint.com/download.php

for arch based distro's:
cachyOS list of desktop environments: https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/desktop_environments/

when trying the distro, make sure to do the following:

• check if your wifi, bluetooth, audio and camera are working
• check if the distro has the other features you want (like a GUI app store to install software from)
• check that configuring the distro is as easy as you would want it to be.
• check that the distro runs well on your device
• check that you like the defaults, or that you can tweak the settings of the desktop to something you like.

installing

once you've picked your desktop and which family of distro's you want to use, use the above resources to find a distro from that family with the desired desktop.

place the ISO on your ventoy and follow the install instructions. make sure to select the correct desktop if your distro of choice offers multiple

what if i cannot pick or change my mind?

if you change your mind on the distro family, you'll have to reinstall sadly.

However, if you change your mind on the desktop environment, you can always install a different one. you can even have multiple and pick between them!

hey, i want to run x software, i need a distro that can do that

generally, running specific pieces of software isn't really down to the distro, especially if you're intending to carry software over from windows.

the rule of thumb is that if the software has some kind of DRM protection system, anti-piracy system or kernel-level anti-cheat system, it simply will not run on linux.

if you can, find an alternative to the software. if the software itself is vital, then you simply cannot switch to linux.

what about gaming? i heard x distro was good for gaming

it really doesn't matter that much. some distro's come pre-optimized for gaming (like bazzite and cachyOS) but truth is those optimizations aren't that big of a deal and you shouldn't pick your distro based on that.

as for games and which ones run, generally, it either runs on linux or it doesnt. you may need a specific proton version or be running under a specific display server, but there isn't really a situation where a game will run on fedora but cannot be made to run on ubuntu.

for gaming in general, the best way to approach linux is the way you'd approach a console. "i have this console, so i have access to play these games". you're not on the "PC" platform together with windows users, you're on the "Linux" platform while they're on the "Windows" platform. and Windows does have a lot of exclusives.

for resources on this, check protondb and AreWeAnticheatYet. protonDB is a good overview of how well a game runs on linux and AreWeAnticheatYet follows linux compatibility for bigger multiplayer games that have some form of anticheat.

what about nvidia support?

nvidia support isn't as bad as it was 10 years ago, most distro's will work fine with modern nvidia cards, if you pick any distro within the big three families that isn't abandoned, you should at most have to run a single command to install the drivers for your GPU.

so what do you run?

in case anyone wants to know: i run cachyOS with mangoWM and DankMaterialShell on my main rig, Void Linux with the same setup on my laptop and ubuntu server on my servers.

i'm looking at potentially re-installing my Surface Go (1st gen) soon, its a 10in tablet laptop and while i'd normally spring for the same environment i use on my main laptop and desktop (mango + DMS + custom scripting), mangoWM doesnt really have good touch support atm.

but past touch *support*, i want to see if there's any desktops that are specifically really good for smaller, tablet-style devices with primarily touch input. i'm fine with tinkering, so i'm not *too* worried about having to work a bit to get touchscreen to work, i'm more so interested in the DE interface itself and how well it works as a touch-first interface.

from the DEs i've tried, i'd probably have to say gnome feels the best in terms of base layout on a tablet, very similar to an android or ipad-style experience, but i'm wondering if there's any DEs *specifically designed* for touch users first.

i do know my device has working touch drivers, since i currently still have hyprland with hyprgrass installed (which works pretty well), i'm aiming to switch off of hyprland though.

Inspired by another post on here asking about infinite canvas compositors, which i did not know existed until now.

I want to try various different types of window managers/compositors, but so far, most of what i've been able to find is either scrolling, tiling or floating.

The types i'm aware of are:

- kiosk (single program, EG gamescope or cage)
- manual tiling (eg sway)
- auto-tiling (eg hyprland) with various layouts (master, dwindle/BSP, monocle, fair, deck, grid)
- scrolling (eg niri)
- infinite canvas (eg driftWM)
- stacking (eg wayfire or Kwin) aka floating

What else is out there?

I've been wanting to try out a couple different window managers and build out some dotfiles for them because i've been enjoying the process of setting up dotfiles, i've originally had gnome + hyprland installed, and have since switched to using mangoWM.

What are the risks involved in having multiple window managers installed? i'm not planning on adding any other DEs, as i've heard those can cause significant issues if multiple are installed and i'm only interested in setting up WMs at the moment anyways. in theory as long as all non-universal autostarts are handled by the WM itself and there's no overlapping/conflicting dependencies, it should be fine right?

just wanting to check before i start installing other stuff to my device, i'd rather not cause things to become significantly less stable on my mangoWM setup.