Comment by ssl-3

You know, I think you're right. I set up Void Linux on my desktop a couple of years ago, using the plainest base image. I chose that path because ZFS is important to me, and systemd is ugly to me.

I determined that this minimal start was the right confluence of those two preferences with the howto documentation available at the time, so that's what I did.

So I'm going along in rolling releases for years, and even playing games fine (except GTA:V online). Things are fine until there's some weird flickering-window bug that rolls down the pipe and apparently only affects nVidia users who use xfce4. It's an awful and particularly jarring bug.

The workaround is to disable vsync in xfce4, which solves that problem but always causes tearing for me. Even in YouTube videos. (Who knew how reliant we'd become on rote frame synchronization? Why, it seems like just yesterday when I was streaming potato-quality RealVideo episodes of South Park over dialup on a K6-2 box while marveling that any of it worked at all.)

I don't know which party is responsible for that problem, but nVidia has supposedly fixed it on their end in recent weeks. Which is cool, but this distro isn't shipping that version yet. And I'm reluctant to go off-script -- I loathe the idea of letting the nVidia installer do whatever it wants, and I'm not too keen on building my own package for xbps to handle (hopefully with better grace), either.

It was time to fix it anyway.

And I wanted to give Wayland a shot because there's a limitation with SDL that causes the clipboard method used by Factorio to fail to work with large blueprints under X11, so change was already in the air.

And so it began.

KDE Plasma: I couldn't get it to work. With both X11 and Wayland, parts of it would just die without leaving any traces I could find. It was unusable. I spent hours troubleshooting it and only a few minutes of actually using it, which is a terrible ratio. It had to go.

Gnome: It actually worked OK with Wayland. But when I say "worked OK", I mean that it acted like a touchscreen interface -- for toddlers. It didn't crash in mysterious and buried ways, which is good, but it I found it to be an affront to my sensibilities in ways that I simply could not tolerate. I won't apologize for hating it or for feeling insulted by it. That iteration of Gnome is dead to me.

So working down the list of non-ancient desktop environments: Cinnamon? It works. It's alright. It took some kicking to get sound to work because the mixer it comes with makes it impossible to set up default outputs in a way that behaves here and it reverts the system to its own broken ideas every time it runs, but it responded to my kicks without much of a fight and it works. The xfce4 volume mixer is on the taskbar instead, and I removed all traces of the Cinnamon mixer like it was a cancerous tumor, but with that done: Sound works. Regular X stuff works. It's good enough.

I haven't tried it with Wayland yet to see I can work around the SDL+Factorio SNAFU, but it's been behaving itself with X11 for a week or more.

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Now, that may sound awful. And to be clear, it wasn't fun at all. But at least it's not like my Windows laptop. I've got stories about that, for sure.

One of things that sticks out right now is when that laptop would deplete its battery just sitting in my bag in the car. That was weird, but it became more urgent to fix it when I got the machine out of the bag and it was hot.

The cause for that was an HP printer driver (for a rather old color printer that I don't even own -- I do use it sometimes, but it's 25 miles away) that was periodically waking the machine from hibernation to check that printer's supply status, so it could try to sell me more stuff.

This task was so completely buried in Windows that it took hours to find it, and it was configured by its installer to wake the machine from hibernation -- including, specifically, while on battery. Because that's obviously what every user of any printer needs: Computers that turn themselves on using battery power to sell toner cartridges while hidden unseen inside of a bag in the back of a car.

It didn't have to be that way, but it was this way anyway. I consider that kind of thing to be deliberate in a fashion that extends beyond mere maliciousness: It is instead simply fucking evil.

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So yeah, Linux is a great desktop.

I'd like to propose a new slogan: "Linux. At least it's not deliberately evil. Usually."