Here to follow content related to Star Trek, Linux, open-source software, and anything else I like that happens to have a substantial Lemmy community for it.

Main fediverse account: @[email protected]

  • 4 Posts
  • 87 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle



  • I’d say they all offer different types of customization. It’s less a matter of how much you can do, and more a matter of what you want to do and how much time you’re willing to spend working on it. KDE is for people who want to customize their desktop, and want it to be easy to do so. GNOME is for people who just want something that works, but it still offers a lot of customization, it’s just not as well-supported (their philosophy is “if theming breaks an app, it’s not our fault”).

    KDE doesn’t support full CSS customization on its own, but there are theming engines like Kvantum and QtCurve that address the limitations that arise from this. I’d say it’s on almost equal footing with GNOME in that regard, since both GTK4+libadwaita and Qt6+KF6 are designed for color scheme customization, but require various workarounds and obscure settings for anything more than that. If anything the workarounds are easier in KDE.

    Similarly, KDE supports layout customization through widgets and graphical menus. GNOME also supports layout customization, but through extensions instead.

    And then you can do all of the above and more if you use a window manager, or an LXDE/LXQt-style desktop that lets you disable or replace all its components in settings - just mix and match components like panels, file managers, display managers, polkit agents, etc. You can basically build your own DE that way, and it doesn’t get much more customizable than that. But maybe you don’t want to spend your time choosing every component of your custom DE. That’s what something like KDE is for.














  • I’m not averse to trying new foods, but I have strong aversions to certain foods that I have tried. If I have a bad experience with one food, I will not be willing to try it again for a very long time, possibly ever. And if I have a good experience with one food, and it is easily available to me, it will remain in regular rotation for a very long time.



  • I’m against a megathread. That would be too busy and I think there will be more than enough to discuss about each episode.

    For entirely selfish reasons, I’d like individual discussion threads for each episode that come out one or two a day, since that’s the pace I expect to be watching it (optimistically).

    Though, I think the best option for everyone might be five-episode blocks. That would allow both bingewatchers and slower viewers to enjoy the conversation without spamming the feed, and will match up well enough with the “parts” it would have been split into if it aired on Nickelodeon that both broad and individual episode discussions will make sense.



  • The major tradeoff with zRAM is that programs are much more likely to crash due to running out of memory, but will run faster when memory is running low and freezes are less likely. You can think of it as offloading the pressure that traditional swap puts onto your disk, onto the (much faster) CPU. There will be an impact on CPU usage, but not enough to cause noticeable slowdown; in my experience running Linux, the CPU is almost never the reason something is slow, and is only going to be under significant pressure if you’re running a 3D game in software rendering, compiling a large program, or another complex CPU-bound task.

    I wouldn’t recommend making the switch unless you often encounter system freezes or slowness while running tasks that use a lot of RAM (like web browsing on certain sites, or gaming), but it will improve things in that case.


  • You can install an antivirus, but you really don’t need to. Malware for Linux is rare, and malware that targets desktop Linux users is extremely rare (to the point that it’s a newsworthy story every time it does appear). Most distros have ClamAV and the frontend ClamTk in their repos, but it’s primarily used to scan servers for Windows malware before it reaches its intended target. Some Windows malware can still be harmful if run with Wine/Proton, but unless you’re downloading and running a lot of Windows software from unofficial sources (which you shouldn’t have any reason to) that won’t be a risk.