I finally decided to start daily driving linux again after nearly a whole year since we last gave it a honest shot
and so far its been great aside from some mild issues(but I'll get to those later)
I've been running debian with lxqt as my de of choice(with alot of themeing)
<img src="/ftp/de.png">img of my current setup</img>
theming is alot more annoying then reskinning windows with ms styles but honestly part of thats probably just how long we've been using windows for,once I actually sat down and learned the general utils and started getting used to what goes were and how to deal with some of the minor things,like termenal's not being 1 to 1 to windows and needing to find good replacements for some of the built in apps I've gotten used to over the years(like wmp)
and once I sat down and learnt how things are done,which de to use for my hardware and found a desktop I liked and found the right programs to install and configs to change it only took around a hour to get it looking nice
compared to the madness that is dealing with resource hacker and registry keys its a nice change
its also been so much lighter on ram and cpu,no debloating needed which wasnt unexpected but still yet another small thing that made a difference
<img src="/ftp/htoponcheets.png">img</img>
and add it the fact that theres just one unified way to start tasks and it makes it trivial to see whats using your cpu



noww for the issues
alot of desktop envirments(kde and gnome) are way to resource intensive by default and without decent hardware or alot of tweaking there basicly unusable,but this isn't that bad,just pick a lighter one
the bigger issues are mostly hardware related,stuff like trackpads acting weird(ended up manually editing xorg.conf and messing with xinput before getting something good enough),and having to write a <a href="/ftp/utils/dock.sh">script</a> to detect when the laptops docked and fix the display config,as theres no great way to do this by default,along with needing to find drivers for my drawing tablet(still looking for some that work) and figuring out whats up with the default print manager
but all of that was fairly mild
the biggest issue so far was pipewire,it just completly died randomly and I had to go purge all of its configs,then uninstall it,and pulse audio,and purge all of alsa's configs,then reinstall pulseaudio before the audio came back,so that was fun,still so far I've been happy with linux,and its been really nice to set alias for frequantly used programs or scripts,I might actually leave some of these on the ftp at some point if someone else wants to use them