Quick question: is Aurora dev desktop plus dev stuff, or less desktop stuff?

The good, the bad, and the ugly . Tapas or hamburger.

Not being able to say “I run Arch BTW” is a dealbreaker.

Slackware was my first distro, in the 90s, installed from diskettes, downloaded with a 9600 baud modem, FUN! (actually it was, wizard stuff at the time). I moved to Mandrake I think, then RH or another, and whenever I took a look at Slackware, it felt ancient when compared with these “glitzy”, for the time, distros. Maybe I should take a look again.

You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part,

OFC, That’s what I implied in my post. That I don’t want to tinker more than necessary. I’ve been doing Linux things since the 90s, installing from diskettes, spending hours and hours on the CLI, compiling shit on a 40Mhz 486… Right now I want something that mainly just works, mainly being the key word here. I don’t mind doing the odd tweak here and there, I just don’t want the tweaking to be a main feature.

The only problem I have with Mint is that they are super conservative, which translates to stability, which in turn makes it less up todate in certain applications. While based on Ubuntu it un-shittifies by using flats instead of snaps, for example. I have not noticed any shennanigans like Ubuntus

I know SUSE’s been around since forever, but how is package availability?

Ubuntu was very good, changed a lot of people’s perception of Linux, and made the user experience much nicer. It still is very good, but many have caught up, or are surpassing Ubuntu in user experience. The issue with Ubuntu is the progressive enshittification.

Mint is, so far, the un-enshittified Ubuntu alternative. Plus it’s main DEs. Cinnamon and MATE provide a fairly Windows like experience for those landing from the Windows world.

I doubt that. I’m going to guess that Google is going towards a sort of “P2P AI”

I’m genuinely curious. I’ve learnt to never trust Microsoft when they do something “nice”. In my experience they work the long con. I have learnt to never trust them initially. Free windows licenses?, fairly decent Windows 10 initially? This is the last windows 10 version, we’ll keep improving? History can be a bitch.

Your entitlement is Karen level.

Does Microsoft contribute to Linux in no evil ways?

Oh, when you try Arch, please tell us about it!

If you carry three laptops around you are definitely doing things wrong. There is no real world scenario where doing what you say you do needs 3 physical computers, and if you have a 9-5 AND teach night classes , you don’t have extra minutes to use your “personal” laptop that day, which leads me to call bull on the carry 3 laptops thing

Have you told your therapist?

I want my windows anywhere I want them, and in Cinnamon I can snap windows to corners, o top, or bottom… Being forced to work tiled is backwards.

If as someone mentioned in Cosmic you can toggle it off and on ( and the toggle is esasily accesible, not buried in settings) I’m fine with that

Picasa? That’s been google-bandoned for a while now. What does she use it for? Plenty of photo management tools in Linux. Darktable, Digikam…

If the office alternatives in linux don’t cut it, and she uses Office 365, you can run it in Linux as a PWA

Can’t you run timeshift from a live usb? Never tried, but i believe its possible. Obviously more time consuming and bothersome, but possible.

Two days ago my Mint system got borked by a kernel update. I booted from the grub menu with the prior kernel, and rolled back with Timeshift. Pretty painless. You don’t need Atomic/immutable distros for that sort of reliability.

I’m playing with kinoite in a VM, though.

“Generally” is the key word. I’m a linux user since slackware on diskettes. My daily driver is Mint, because lazy. I have 2 VMs with kali and kinoite.

A couple of days ago a kernel update borked my install. A problem with the Ryzen graphics driver.

For me it was trivial. Boot into the previous kernel, timeshift roll back, and back in business, but I can see how a newbie woul go into panic.

A satisfied “customer” will recommend you to a friend. A pissed off one will tell 10.