Lucia [she/her]

I am thinking of moving to Epiphany (gnome-web) some day, but I may start missing the vim-like interaction with qutebrowser.

There’s a WebKitGTK-based web browser called Luakit. Pretty good from my experience, although webkit can be problematic at times.

Fluxbox or IceWM as a more standard, familiar floating WMs (both are pretty customizable too).

WindowMaker is my goto for standalone window managers, it’s look based on NeXTSTeP OS from 90s, so it doesn’t look like yet another ripoff from windows or macos (both are ugly IMHO), so it’s pretty unique.

If you want minimal and keyboard-oriented, cwm is THE wm for you. The main problem is that default keyboard shortcuts are really bad (openbsd fanatics will say otherways, but when shortcuts are spread around ctrl+, alt+, and ctrl+alt+, it’s really far from good), so I recommend tweak them or to find someone’s config.

If you want a desktop-agnostic file manager for these wms, I’d recommend xfe - it’s somewhat obscure for some reason, but it’s really, really good. Can’t recommend more.

As to install, all of these should be in your distro’s repo. Fluxbox may come as two packages (fluxbox2 and fluxbox3), the first one is the last official version and the second is the “community edition” - a fork, basically.

At least on Void Window Maker package is called WindowMaker, with capitalisation. Since Void sticks to official naming, other distros may have the same name.

edit: Also, it’s worth to mention most of recommendation on this thread are tiling window managers (awesomewm, i3, hyprland, etc.)

Do you want a tiling or a stacking wm?

I’m not really into security-focused distros, but heard good things about QubesOS. Also, what about OpenBSD?

It may speed up your boot time, at least it happened to me on Void (maybe the reason is how minimal this distro is though). I personally prefer runit over systemd in how it handles services, but honestly you most probably won’t notice a much difference - definetely not worth reinstalling whole system.

Ubuntu fonts works pretty good for me as a general UI font tbh. In text editors I prefer mononoki over monospace, it’s a bit prettier IMO, although in terminal I use terminus because pixel fonts are cool.

Cool. Good luck on your linux journey!

Mint is great, my brother used it as his first distro and had no issues whatsoever while I suffered with Fedora.

I’d personally recommend trying fedora 1st

Fedora is even slower though. In my experience Fedora on hdd loads as slow as win10. MX is great though, as well as antiX

I doubt they need the latest kernel, their machine is ancient…

True

FIFY

Thanks, somehow messed it up.

Good to know! I will also check it out soon. Infinity was my only reason to use reddit actually.

So, I have a few options. (kinda in order)

Linux Mint is the easiest one from the list, but all of them except Solus are fine. I personally recommend Mint or Debian, Debian Sid if you want latest kernel.

KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)

KDE should work fine, maybe with a bit of tweaking?

XFCE - LXDE - LXQT (because of “lightweightness”)

I daily drive Xfce and even on a beefy PC this DE is really great. It may not look cool by default, but it’s very customizable and powerful. And Thunar (xfce file manager) is really good now.

Cinnamon

Another good option

it’s because of Infinity for reddit.

There’s a fork of infinity for Lemmy, called Eternity. Not sure if it’s usable now though.

Woah, didn’t know that! I remember searching for older messages in Matrix be really bad. I only use IM software for 1to1 conversations, so I probably don’t know the worst of the protocol.

Dendrite solves this by asking matrix.org for everyone else’s keys by default.

Sounds a bit too centralized for me

That isn’t even a Thunar issue anymore, it was fixed in the last version half a year ago. It’s more about stable release distros provide inferior experience yet again.

I assumed Xubuntu to have the latest xfce version since Linux Mint updated their not so long ago, but it seems they did it on their own.

4.18 is a really good update for xfce and especially Thunar - search for files in subdirectories is as simple as to press ctrl+F and start typing. I really hope Xubuntu will get it soon.

Since xfce 4.18 Thunar can search files w/o catfish perfectly fine btw. Do Xubuntu still uses the previous version?

Sounds like matrix client should be the least of your concerns actually. My RAM usage rarely goes beyond 2gb with xfce and firefox. Switching to NetSurf like above comment pointed out is a bit of overreaction actually, Firefox with Ublock Origin and a handful of tabs open will do just well

Better native client support for the most part, but xmpp servers also show themselves better (faster, more stable…) than matrix.org I think more matrix users should consider using smaller instances tbh

Have you tried Nheko? I switched to XMPP some time ago, but when I used matrix Nheko was my goto. Also gomuks is another choice, runs in terminal

Void linux became my second nature. It’s design is great, runit and xbps are just awesome. Can’t recomend more. P.S. I also switched to Void from Fedora