Imagine it becomes easier to run Windows x86 programs on Linux, than on Windows. And I won’t be surprised at all if performance is better.

Imagine if THAT becomes Linux’ killer feature.

A more lightweight system without the crazy system requirements, certain systems more stable and easier to get into for gaming, no ads and no spyware out of the box, no extra cruft nobody needs out of the box, and better support for x86 emulation on ARM.

Now THAT is a checklist to getting people interested.

There is also the free of charge aspect, but I’m not sure how appealing that would be, with Windows being bundled in.

Anything else I missed, feel free to let me know.

10k for a company making millions annually is nothing, 1% or less. But split between some of these projects, especially the less appreciated or funded ones, can be life changing.

But you’re unfortunately right

Things like this make me wish I was a tech CEO. I’d totally be the guy ensuring we give back to projects if I was.

I’ve heard so many good things about Bazzite that when they release a COSMIC version (I’m a tiling WM user), I’m at least trying it out, and switching if I like it.

Exactly. That’s Windows’ secret. Give us a control center where it’s easy to control NetworkManager, Pipewire, systemd, and other parts of the OS, and give them not-so-technical names. That’s one of the keys to Windows’ success. Others involve EEE and anticompetitive practices but we don’t want Linux going that way now, do we?

It’s not that Windows isn’t complicated, it’s just that there’s a GUI for everything.

Never heard of Spiral, and I’ve heard of a lot of distros, so I’d steer clear of projects like it, that are new and/or niche, as there will be lower reliability and support available. Aurora is also pretty new, but it (and Fedora Atomic, and uBlue in general) has a strong community, so I’m more likely to trust them.

PopOS and Linux Mint get a thumbs up from me.

They are wrong.

The sad truth. Enough said. Linux is still not there, as much as we’d like to pretend it is. And it’s especially not there for dumb users.

So much potential there. If only the UI was more minimal, like Vivaldi or Qutebrowser, I’d switch immediately.

Fair enough. I basically gave you a large chunk of vim so it will feel super overwhelming. The trick is to do one command or combo at a time. For example, I started with dd. Then I added yanking. Then I added visual mode. Then I added “o” (which I think I forgot to mention: o creates a newline under the current one and puts you in insert mode. Capital O does the same but above the current line). The real trick is going little by little. And to be honest, there are some commands I still rarely use or forget to mention. I’ve never used f instead of t. And in terms of forgetting to mention, there’s the x command which deletes the single character under the cursor rn.

Also, I’m sure someone will find this list helpful, so on top of this, I’ll also add this video (and hope that Piped bot will appear): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSlrxE21l_k

It contains some things I haven’t mentioned.

As for learning all this, I’m repeating myself for the third time. Do it little by little. And when a command is already a thing you do almost without thinking about it, you’re ready to add more.

I’m mentally checking out

Why? dw is delete word, c5b change 5 words backwards, and those are the most complicated commands you’ll ever get to use, unless you start adding cuatom keybinds.

But I digress. If you don’t want to learn it, it’s fine.

Not even Basic Command-Count-motion like c3w aka change 3 words after cursor, or d3b delete 3 words before the cursor?

To that, you add the D aka delete command C for change Y for yank (copy)

So yy to yank line, or dd to delete line.

Also p for paste

Also, i sends you before the cursor, a sends you after. Capital I is insert at beginning of line, Capital A is insert at end of line (append).

I terms of motions and moving around, you need: hjkl, C-d and C-u (half page jumps down and up), and within the line: 0 or ^ for beginning of line, $ for end (taken from regex), w for moving by word forwards, b for moving by word backwards. That’s pretty much all you need imo. There is also t and f. Where t goes forwards (think 'till aka until). Like dtc delete until the c character. F is the same but goes backwards in the line rather than forwards. Remember you can use these with xommands, so d$ deletes until the end of the line. Or “dt.” deletes till the “.” so… yeahI know there’s more, but that’s all you need for Normal and Insert mode imo.

For Visual mode, you only need to know how the Visual modes work. Visual (v), Visual Line (Shift-v) and Visual Block (Ctrl-V).

Also, for visual mode, it might be helpful to learn how to use V-Block to comment out multiple lines at once. Can’t be bothered to go into it.

But I’d argue that’s all there is to learn about vim keys in terms of getting work done.

And to counter the old saying of it lacking a decent editor, there’s always evil-mode.

uBlue is good, but only if you follow the official templates. I was following some other thing which did things very differently and my custom iso ended up broken i.e Anaconda was crashing and installation was impossible.

Edit: the thing is called Bluebuild. I’d recommend to steer clear of Bluebuild and just using the official template on Github. I’m still yet to do that myself but it seems like it might actually work, unlike Bluebuild.

I’m genuinely curious about it. I don’t like snaps, but it seems like an interesting concept.

Same. Except that one time I forgot to charge my laptop and my battery decided it will go to 0% during a kernel update. Charge, Reboot into live iso, arch-chroot, do update. Reboot into normal system, all good. A 5 minute job, but it’s the most serious issue I’ve had to deal with, alongside the keyring issues once which were solved by an Erik Dubois video, a 15-minute fix incuding the video runtime.

That’s like the picture of a normal dude with Nano, a large Vim dude, a larger buff Emacs dude and an ever larger massive Ed dude.

Yeah, but I want to distance myself from it so bad, specifically because of Vaxry. Can’t wait for RiverWM 0.4.0 or Qtile with SceneFX, or COSMIC when it gets there, or when DWL gets mature enough and gets all these features as stable patches, or just… anything.

Iced is the GUI toolkit. Smithay is good for diversity, so it isn’t just wlroots.

You don’t need a compatibility layer. It just runs. Now for the theming, getting GTK themed is built-in under Theming->Experimental while QT theming is not there yet.

I don’t completely disagree with him on some points. Here’s what I have to say:

Cosmic is not my direct competitor

Okay, I know what I just said but I completely disagree with this. COSMIC has tiling (sort of), has pretty much all the features of a tiling wm, is more user friendly to configure than Hyprland, is on Wayland so “modern”, and has animations, rounded corners, etc so it’s in direct competition with the main thing Hyprland brings to the table.

My first impressions with COSMIC were terrible

Umm… alpha much? Or should I remind you of the sorry mess Hyprland was in its own early days?

I’ve seen a few posts / videos that criticize Cosmic get downvoted and bullied to hell, especially on Reddit.

It’s Reddit. It’s either tribalism or hivemind. Pick your poison. Eather way, the result is as you describe.

All those quotes (and those are just a few) are at best running on “hopes and prayers” and not the actual experience.

Man, I kinda wish nobody believed in Hyprland now. Those same points could have been applied to Hyprland but people believed and here we are. It almost sounds as if you’re jealous of the team, or resources, or pace of development they have?

Someone might say “oh what are we supposed to say then”, to which I say: simple. Say what you see. Claiming this is the next coming of God will hurt it more than help it.

Okay, I kinda agree. I think it’s important not to be brutal to them. They have written not just a WM like you, they’ve written an f-ing Desktop! Apps, settings, and even the entire GUI library it’s all written on, and based it on a completely new Compositor library, smithay, which they’ve also had to heavily contribute to. What you did can be done by any one person with enough drive, motivation and knowledge (except the independence rewrite, that would take an absolute doofus who can’t simply apologise and treat humans normally. I often find myself hating people too, but I still give them the benefit of the doubt and a basic level of respect until they lose it. Maybe Hyprland could have been a leading force, a representative for tiling WMs in wlroots, pushing innovation forward and providing another point of view, but you fucking blew it. But I digress.)

Where do you go Cosmic? And why would you want to? So far, all I can see is three reasons: Rust, Tiling, “We’ll implement what GNOME won’t”

Is that any different to why other DEs exist? GNOME exists cuz simple, default, polished, GTK. KDE Plasma is powerful, modern, QT. Cinnamon is simple, more customisable, GTK. XFCE is minimal, customisable, GTK. COSMIC is Rust, Iced, Smithay, Tiling, customisable, Wayland-only (and thus Wayland-first), “We’ll implement what GNOME won’t”. The way I see it, COSMIC has a lot going for it. But even if it didn’t, wouldn’t Tiling, A new voice for Wayland, and the first Wayland-only DE be enough?

Okay, I think I’ll end it here, because I’m devolving into cheap bickering and personal insults. But what I see is that Vaxry is likely jealous and is trying to undermine what COSMIC has achieved.

Now how do I do Server side decorations?