A bigger issue is that the Steam Deck touchpads don’t work without Steam being open
This is interesting, because the touchpads on the Steam Controller do work without Steam being open, at least on Linux, though without cursor acceleration. I wonder why the touchpads on the Deck were handled differently.
Not true about Proton. It’s Steam DRM that requires Steam running in the bg, same as on Windows.
It’s just more barebones than lots of other options, and distro hopping tends to be about exploration. There isn’t a whole lot to explore on Debian, because its purpose is stability and simplicity.
You find tons of Debian-derived distros exactly for this reason. They build on that stable core but add bells and whistles. Distros usually are defined by which bells and whistles they include by default.
That would be reported.
Friends don’t let friends be root.
Just to clarify: the “much smoother” is subjective and might be an oversimplification, but the “not using Gnome” part is correct.
Personally I don’t use any Gnome extensions and have much preferred Cosmic to the old Pop Shell. YMMV.
Linux user here. What’s a friend?
DE completely depends on your workflow. The way you do things directly impacts what DEs you’ll like and which ones you won’t.
I’m with you on KDE: I respect it and it clearly seems to be one of the most feature-rich DEs, but I’ve had trouble actually using it regularly.
I have been using Cosmic DE for the last 6 months or so. I love it because it seamlessly blends tiled and non-tiled workspaces in an effective way. Part of me really enjoys the simplicity of things like i3, but part of me just wants floating windows. It fully depends on what I’m working on and sometimes just my mood, so for me, the seamless blending in Cosmic has felt perfect.
But how important is DE? Tbh I think it is the most important part of a setup, because you interact with it more than any other piece of the system.
“Works on my machine”
I had those too, but they have gone away for me on 24.04.
Not the Steam client itself, but some games like to start minimized still. That’s a minor annoyance, but it is also completely fixed by simply launching everything in gamescope, which plays very nicely with COSMIC.
COSMIC now has a workspaces overview which is quite similar.
I’ve been daily driving COSMIC for about 6 months now. It has improved dramatically, and I (mostly) love it. Stable too. It’s kept me on Pop and I’m now on 24.04.
I have a triple monitor setup, and I like COSMIC’s tiling features and that I can very easily move around between windows and workspaces without the mouse. It’s similar to i3 in feel (not as lightweight of course), but with easier setup. I can set tiling on or off for specific workspaces, which is great for differing workloads. Numbered shortcuts work too (e.g. option+3 takes me to workspace 3). It is much, much, MUCH better than the tiling features they added for Pop Shell in earlier versions using Gnome.
There are a couple things I would like: the ability to pin specific apps to specific workspaces would be nice, and I wish workspace numbering could span monitors (at the moment, each monitor has its own set of numbers, but they overlap each other so you can’t jump to another display only with the number). But tbh I don’t care too much about these since everything else has been great.
I don’t really use the COSMIC apps (Files, text editor, etc), but that hasn’t mattered either.
Edit: if anyone finds it relevant, I’m running a 9700x with 64GB RAM and a 7800XT. Go Team Red.
Peggle. As a grown ass person I still play it at least once every couple of weeks. Stupid fun when you don’t want to pay too much attention.
I mean. It does make me feel better knowing I’m not actually alone.
In linguistics this is called “code switching”, and it is extremely common among native bilinguals.
Well now… TIL!
Fair – what I meant was more about the Teams binary kind of not being needed at all (you can use the web version without it). So having a Linux binary explicitly just seems a little weird, marketing aside.
I think MS assumes no one will use it. But having Linux builds of some of their software enhances their “MS loves Linux” marketing.
Teams is another example.
Kicad is up there with the paid options for electronic schematic drafting / PCB design. I don’t use a lot of KDE stuff since I also don’t use KDE, but Kicad is absolutely essential for me.
2026: “My LLM is female and conscious.”
2016: “My body pillow is female and prefers to be called Waifuchan”