Does LMDE do wayland? If not, I wouldn’t bother.

Bazzite or some other Fedora variant. Nobara has some tweaks for nVidia, full codec support, and specifically supports programs like daVinci Resolve, KDenlive and OBS Studio in the Welcome screen. Not an immutable distro like Bazzite though, which depending on how you like to install stuff, might not be a bad thing.

Fedora/Nobara.

I always thought the more developers you added the higher the likelihood of stalling.

Good. Redhat seemed like it was going the other direction given it’s dropping of Plasma from the RHEL packages. They certainly support Gnome with money and developers, maybe we’ll see some of that support extend to KDE going forward.

You might want to look at BlendOS. It’s not up to NixOS’s level of complexity, but it gets you atomic rollbacks. It might meet your time constraints better than the learning curve on NixOS.

Having pulled a toilet out to fix something more than once, the bathtub is exactly where you want to put it while you work.

Burn Snap out of there and I’m in.

Edit: looks like they’re not putting much towards snaps, it’s mostly Flatpak and systemd-sysext. I’m good with that.

Because I don’t want a direct link to payment information and my search history stored and sold later.

Defaults are working fine, I might have added one or two.

Not if it runs the queries it sends out via a VPN where it mingles with thousands of other requests. An API call doesn’t have the disadvantages of browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc that are used to build a background of a user browsing to your search engine and track their searches. Also, there is no feedback to the search engine about which result you choose to use. If you allow outside users, it would further muddy the waters.

Ideally, you’d have it run random searches when not being used to further obfuscate the source.

Yes, that’s the purpose of the VPN. It’s out there mixed in with everyone else that’s using that exit node.

Honestly, it’s not too much of a concern to me, I’m not doing anything illegal or naughty, it’s just making sure I’m not part of the dataset.

Its all calls to other engines, that you can choose and tune. So its making those calls and filtering out shit like AI results, and then ranking it to return back to you. Seems to do a good job.

Self host it, it’s nothing to set up.

Been rocking self-hosted Searxng for the last 3 weeks now as my default search engine; it’s as good or better than DDG and certainly better than Google. Results I need are usually within the first three items, no extraneous shit.

I thought I’d just try it out, but it’s staying. The ability to tune the background engines is awesome. My search history is private (though I wasn’t that worried about DDG, there was no way in fuck I was using Kagi) since it’s running it’s searches via a VPN and returning me results locally.

Plasma.

When I try Gnome, within a couple minutes I encounter the Save dialog that defaults the cursor to the Search field instead of the Filename field, and the top of my head goes spinning across the room, and I uninstall it.

Carry it printed on a sign behind your back until he pops up, then whip it out after the first question. Then walk away after he’s read it, while conspicuously taking handwritten notes and looking back over your shoulder.

You forgot -XNG

I see what my friends have with their kids and grandkids now, and really wish I had people that care for me that much. Honestly, it’s kinda gotten to where I don’t want to go to events because it just reminds me of how that chance is lost now.

This thread indicates you might have a bit of a strange quark.

I wish we had. I’m regretting it more as I get older.