KDE? Lightweight? Even cinnamon is incredibly heavy next to xfce and lxde. Have you ever used a sub-4GB of memory machine?
I do second mint (LMDE) for a non gamer and non tech savy windows 10 refugee though, it’s debian so, stable, and cinnamon is an okay-ish middle ground between KDE usability and xfce weight.
My problem being quite package specific, it’s not impossible, the biggest offender being qt…
“User-friendly” and “updated” sadly sounds incompatible. In just slightly less than one year of using Fedora I’ve had 3 bad qt updates that broke kde’s softwares like kmail, 2 bad amd-gpu updates that made the gpu crash and 1 pipewire update that broke surround sound.
Those were all minor updates that were easy to revert though, just had to use the terminal for that and wait the next fixed version.
As someone in this category : wtf? I kept using the terminal all the time when I was still on windows. From 95’s dos to 11’s cmd.
I use kolour paint on kde, there are a lot of other similar FOSS softwares around too.
I switched full-time last year. Went from windows 11 to fedora kde.
The switch took a bit of getting used to, and getting to know the innards of the distro (broke my sound typing pulse-audio related commands then discovering that fedora uses pipewire, this kind of stuff…)
But I’m kinda cheating since I’ve been using linux on all my other machines since windows 8 (had a hunch about imminent enshitification, windows 10 didn’t contradict it and windows 11… ha!).
I’ve been using windows since the 9x days, windows 11 became unbearably shitty, despite my incredibly unbloated version (originaly a windows 7 install that got “upgraded” to 10 then 11), with unwanted features getting disabled as soon as they appeared. I had a windows 11 with a local account and no one-drive and they still disapointed me! (the last straw was copilot)
Now running linux full time is a real pleasure, some stuff break here and there but nothing unfixable (usually just downgrading the faulty package until it is fixed just works), games just work most of the time, the KDE desktop is the windows one but not shitty, from an alternate reality where desktop widgets took off, and where you are allowed to customise stuff. (had to wait years on windows 11 to finally get back the “display the window’s title on the taskbar” option as I’m used to since 95)
The only thing I’m missing though : system-wide autoscroll bound to the mousewheel.
You apparently didn’t even bother to read anyway so have a good day.
“The system” is physics. You can’t have tiny speakers embeded in a flat screen sound as good as a dedicated sound system due to how sound works. Same goes for phones camera, the tiny size just cannot compete against bigger, dedicated hardware due to how light works.
So go ahead and go fight the universe if you want, I’ll be here enjoying my audio on big ass speakers you can find in a thrift shop since those things existed for decades.
Pretty sure the “corporation” that made my speakers in the 70’s are well fed with the non-existant money I sent them.
Gotten? I never knew any TV set with at least respectable audio and I knew CRT TVs.
Always has been. 🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
I have a roughly 26 years old pentium III laptop still in working order. Those 256MB of memory are still going strong.
Splendid! but we’re facing a several years long DRAM shortage, just so you know.
Don’t forget to label the label machine, just in case.
My first “own” smartphone and not second hand from family members was a samsung galaxy s7 I bought in 2016, I kept using it until the battery nearly died (took a whooping… 15 minutes to go from 100% to 0%) in 2022 and I couldn’t simply change it due to the glass back being broken, the screen had severe burn-ins and the OS was no longer maintained so I ended up switching.
That first phone that lasted only 6 years was a valuable lesson, it shaped my wishlist for a “perfect” phone, which ironicaly enough was another samsung one, but xcover rather than S. Hoping that this one with no glass back, an amovible battery, no oled screen and that went from android 12 to 16 (and still going) will last longer.
I wish my old S7 could have any use beside paperweigh but I couldn’t find any sadly.
This used to be a thing, my first ever ubuntu install was made through such a tool (damn I might be getting old), a .exe that I ran on my windows 7 and that rebooted to a live ubuntu environnement.
Especialy nowadays with “features” like fast boot that removes the “press f# to access bios” prompt on startup to “speed-up the boot process”… Hell even when disabled (both OS and BIOS wide) some computers won’t ever show me the damn thing anyway.
What you are describing sounds like plain old debian. Stable thing that you can occasionnally update, perfect for all your server stuff. All my servers run CLI debian (probably won’t be your case as you mentionned some gaming on it too) and I tend to forget about updating them (or even having them to be honnest) due to how stable the damn thing is.
Isn’t it a hacky one person foss project? of course the thing is gonna be dodgy, I’m neither shocked nor worried about it.
Historically speaking, from what I’m reading is that gnome devs have a history of bad decisions birthing forks here and there “fine, I’ll do my own gnome, with blackjack and hookers” too, so I don’t know how much weigh such a decision can have to be perfectly honnest.
KDE is incredibly “windows like”, the “bloat” you might be refering to are options. The only criticism I agree with here is the footprint, KDE is indeed heavy and not recommanded for old machines.