Thanks

Nice list, thanks for sharing your experience.

no weird distros. no arches, no gentoos, no immutable thisisthefuture shit. (…) fedora for newest hardware, mint for ancient stuff, ubuntu for everything else

Do you have an opinion on opensuse?

separate your system stuff from your applications as much as possible. purge all user-facing apps, like firefox and media players and such from the system’s package manager (apt or dnf) and reinstall them from flatpak. that was a headache a few years ago, nowadays almost everything works OOB on wayland. the apps include everything they need to work, the setup is easy to maintain and recreate, upgrades are better (no reboots necessary) and all your settings and data are in one place.

Not sure I get this. When did you need reboots for upgrading user-facing apps?

Where are those settings and data for flatpaks? Is there no separation between default settings (systemwide) and user-defined (in $HOME)?

Does flatpak work well on Ubuntu and is it easy to get rid of snap?

Okay, but khtml was part of KDE, so I guess it wasn’t developed by a company that needed to make money from it, was it?

And neither is chrome. Google doesn’t need it to create revenue. They need it to control the channel with which people access their main product - advertising on the web. And for that goal it is beneficial to have it as widespread as possible, even in the form of derivatives.

Building a free (as in beer) engine for others to build great browsers on, is a pretty thankless task. Individuals may take pride in such a task, but for a company that needs to pay their staff, it’s a fruitless endeavor. I assume it’s much harder to earn money, if people are not using your software itself, but the forks that add all the cool stuff.

What’s so great about Tumbleweed’s KDE? Honestly asking, because I am using it, but don’t see a ton of a difference as compared to Kubuntu. Not that I am actively looking for differences.

Since you are narrowing down on Tumbleweed, here are my 2¢: After more than 15 years of Kubuntu I installed Tumbleweed a few years (two?) ago, because it offers a rolling release, system snapshots and KDE.

Having a job and a family, I do not have the time to tinker anymore, so I expect things to work smoothly out-of-the-box nowadays.

Tumbleweed let me down in this respect.

Once I had to completely reinstall the system because the snapshots filled the system partition during an update, which made it unable to start KDE. I could roll back from the terminal to the previous snapshot, but couldn’t figure out how to remedy the problem, except for using a greater partition and reinstalling.

And just a few days ago KDE (and many applications, when used in LXDE) wouldn’t start, because of version mismatches (caused by an incomplete update?) that broke the linkage of qt libraries. To resolve it I had to make a decision between two packages (tlp vs tuned) to finish the update, even though I hadn’t installed those manually and didn’t know anything about them.

Besides those problems I find the administration suboptimal, with the divide between the Interfaces of Yast and the KDE settings. I didn’t manage to get my Brother network printer to work (except via direct USB connection), which worked out of the box with my android phone.

Great answers already, I’ll not repeat them. One thing I want to mention though is the interoperability of the Linux applications. Things work together well. With Windows (up to 10 at least, I haven’t used windows much in the last years) applications are mostly their own silo. In KDE it’s quite fluent. E.g. gwenview, the image viewer offers to open an image in krita, gimp, etc. It also offers an option to add a folder to the “places” list in dolphin (the file manager). Dolphin lets you quickly (F4) open and close a terminal at the current folder within its window. Small things like these make the system feel coherent.

The other big thing for me is the plethora of great apps you have out of the box. And the ease to install new ones without worrying whether you are the product.

Some spontaneous thoughts Linux:

• Awesome development environment
• Awesome software management (apt, zypper, etc)
• Great choice of desktop environments
• Gazillions of distros (comes with need to make a choice) Windows
• Great support for Nvidia drivers
• Great subsystem for Linux

The one in the image gallery app that comes preinstalled with the phone. On my current one it’s an app by Google, on the one before it was some app by Sony.

It’s a great player, but I prefer smplayer on the desktop and the default player on android. Somehow the interface is a bit clunky

I love it. But I configured away all the gui features (menus, graphical tab & scroll bars, etc)

Analogous to the Krita post, I am surprised nobody seems to know KolourPaint. It’s similar to MS paint. I use it, when I need to make a quick sketch, whiteboard style, e.g. when sharing my screen with a coworker.

Otherwise, I really must have Dolphin and Okular.

I love dolphin’s split mode (quickly toggled with F3) and its ability to seamlessly navigate all kinds of protocols for my NAS, webdav for nextcloud storage, MTP for the phone…

Okular has annotations which have been super useful to me. And it’s so easy to switch between viewing single page, two-page and multi-page. Which is great for skimming text documents and presentations. The auto reload ability is great when iterating on a document (e.g. latex doc or matplotlib chart).

Otherwise, of course firefox and thunderbird, not much to say here Please don’t use chrome. It’s market share makes Google the de-facto owner of www technology. But I guess I’d be preaching to the choir here.

+1 for vim. Although I usually use a stripped down gvim.

Didn’t know ncdu, will try.

I prefer btop to htop, the interface is much nicer.

For the terminal (and within vim) another must-have is fzf.

The partition running full did prevent me from updating the system. That surely can be somehow fixed. But with time and skill being limited resources in my life, it doesn’t mean that it is unimportant.

KolourPaint works very well for me.

Yeah, those are the same reasons I chose tumbleweed. Plus the rolling release.

I hope you made your system partition large enough. I had about 20G for / (excluding /home), which used to be enough for kubuntu, but quickly ran out of space on tumbleweed. I assume because of the Btrfs snapshots.

I reinstalled tumbleweed on a larger partition. Then couldn’t install the proprietary codecs, because of an error I couldn’t resolve.

Installed it a third time recently, now it runs smoothly.