I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.

Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It’s dull and predicable, but really, really solid.

Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I’d tried in about 20 years that I didn’t mess up in a week or so.

Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)

For some reason, Mint doesn’t provide access to the power profiles out of the box… no idea why. I just install a Cinnamon applet called “Power Profiles” and it gives me the same systray switcher as Fedora.

Fresh install of Mint was giving me about 2 hours battery life. By switching to Power Saver profile, I can get up to about 6-8 hours. I mostly only need to go to Balanced or Performance when gaming.

No idea if it’s related, but I see similar behaviour (the not loading, rather than the error message) whenever Firefox requires a restart for an update. It doesn’t make it clear this is what is happening, it just stops loading web pages in existing tabs. Only if I open a new tab does it show the “Restart to keep using” message.

I’ve spent far too much time diagnosing network issues without realising I just needed a restart :)

Clowns who think like this need to fuck all the way off… and, honestly, it’s up to older folk like me to make that clear. Younger folks are going to be fooled or scared into thinking like this and be unable or unwilling to speak up. We who have less pressing concerns need to have their backs.

I love and hate the feeling in Animal Crossing that the world has just continued existing without you for the last 18 months that you haven’t booted it up. Feels like visiting old friends… but old friends that thought you were dead or something.

Yeah, it really was amazing to play blind. We especially enjoyed the DLC… when we first realised what it was all about, it nearly blew our minds!

Yep. Even when clicking the single checkbox captchas, I try really hard to click it “just like a human would”. Which is weird, because I am a human. I think.

It can be made to work in largely the same way. You just need to install the extra plugin (and associated extra component). I have a similar number of profiles as you and I haven’t had to change how I work.

The article comments reference Multi-Account Containers, but I’m not sure I could make them work. I need different bookmarks for each profile, and I like the separation of a new window.

I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox as part of an ongoing de-Google effort… and, honestly, I found it fairly easy. The two things I missed and found solutions for were:

1. Profiles - I just use the built in profiles with the Profile Switcher extension
2. Casting to Chromecast - I use the fx_cast extension and actually find it more reliable than Chrome’s casting!

Other than those, I’ve found it to be a very comfortable, familiar experience.

I use it for work. Other than having to think for a second to find weirdly hidden menu items, it’s fine. At least for my purposes, as a .NET dev. One thing I love about it is Windows Sandbox… really wish Linux would could up something similar.

Yeah, it’s weird. I’d been trying it on and off since 1997, and always bounced off because of some annoyance or other. Now… nothing. It’s very low friction.

It’s interesting how far Linux desktop has progressed recently… I don’t hate Windows, in fact I think it’s a great OS for most purposes. But I happened to try Linux Mint a few years ago in a fit of pique about being excluded from the Win11 upgrade for spurious reasons… and it just kind of stuck.

Two years later and I am full on Linux now. Don’t even have a Windows partition (though I do keep a VM). And I’m about to buy a new laptop that I intend to buy without an OS, it will never be touched by Windows, there’s just no need.

For my purposes, Linux does everything now. OS, software, the games I want to play… I never even think about it. Also, everywhere I look, I see Linux - my Steamdeck, my MiSTer, my Pis, my Miyoo Mini. It’s everywhere…

Phew… I was starting to think I was the only docked Steamdeck gamer in the whole universe!

I’m endlessly fascinated by game room pics and tours :)

Do you find that you play physical systems still? I’ve mostly replaced all of mine with a MiSTer FGPA, and I don’t really miss the overloaded power sockets and scart switchers. I still keep the games on display though, because sometimes I get just as much nostalgic buzz from looking at them as I do playing them.

Well, my problem is partly that I play docked, so every issue is magnified up to 50 inches… so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

I managed to get it to run at a fairly stable 30fps, but the settings were so low that everything looked pretty muddy and basic. You can turn off the FSR to get it to look less blurry at 800p, but it still looked pretty bad. Generally, everything just looked a bit unstable, you know? Hair was pixelated, lines were jaggy everything felt jumpy and gritty. I’m sure it would look better on the SD screen itself.

I also read that Act 3 onwards takes a further hit to performance… so at that point I decided to cut my losses. Shame… it’s the first game where I’ve genuinely felt the SD isn’t up to it.

I’m looking forward to it! I bought it on Steamdeck, but had to refund because I couldn’t get it to run decently… felt I would be doing it a disservice with all the compromises. So I’m not waiting for the PS5 release…

Pretty good. It’s my default morning scroll, at least.

I’ve got a lot more comfortable with it since using Alexandrite on desktop and Sync on mobile.

The only thing really missing at the moment is content. It tends to be good for the high profile stuff, but a bit lacking for the niche stuff. I still sneak back to the other place on occasion to catch up on smaller communities… hopefully that will come with time.

You know, I’ve been using Mastodon for 10 months and I’d never noticed the Explore link! My interface even has the fresh, dismissable help text at the top of that column! :D

All of the ones in this post, plus a Java version on phones, and various re-releases on modern consoles and retro compilations.