I’ve been liking vanilla Debian more and more lately. It takes a bit of time to set up properly, and there are some drawbacks for certain software stacks. But in general, rock stable, no muss, barely any fuss.

Once it’s set up, it’s awesome for workhorse servers.

And as long as you don’t need anything cutting edge, it’s not bad as a desktop OS. I used Debian12 with the Plasma DE for a while at a job I had and it was very usable. A few weird issues, but nothing terrible.

All we want is a really good FOSS browser and email client…

“A great commander secures his victory before entering into battle. A poor commander first rushes into battle, then searches for victory.”

~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If I want simple and super stable, Cinnamon. If I want sexy, custom, and slightly less stable, Plasma.

Ooh yeah, that is better 🤌

Slopilot

“Old men keep dreaming up battles for young men to fight.”

Daggers - The Chariot

President of peace, eh MAGAts?

I use a bunch of different ones depending on the use case. But the one I’ve been coming back to for all my general purpose applications is Mint.

It just works, and the Cinnamon DE is the most stable one in my experience, I’ve almost never experienced any crashes in years on a bunch of different devices.

Waterfox might have just got a new convert here.

One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️

Tailscale, Netbird, or Pangolin. Foss overlay networks have completely eliminated traditional VPN setups for my self-hosting needs.

The only thing missing is full fishnet tights with a girdle for Gentoo.

Not necessarily morons, although many are, just sociopaths. They are so rich and powerful and removed from normal society, they don’t have to care.

They don’t have to work hard, they don’t have to think critically, they don’t have to compromise, they don’t have to worry.

It’s like the monarchs and aristocracy of old, so far removed from society, most things we consider virtues are considered insulting to them.

Remember when Bill Gates “worked” for a few hours at a Dairy Queen scooping ice cream? It’s a demonstration of elitism, they can choose to play working class for an afternoon, like an outfit they try on.

Oh how quaint, the little workers going about their day scooping ice cream and making fries! Mummy, I want to try to be an ice cream worker today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuxPIPKMjXI

Yeah, that’s some interesting framing to say the least.

I just tested this on my dual monitor setup, Nobara Linux, KDE Plasma version 6.5.2 running Wayland and it worked no problem.

Set my main monitor to 150% scaling and left my side one to 100%.

Now on my setup, both monitors are 1080p, although my side one is oriented vertically, so Idk if it would act different if I had one at a completely different resolution.

Edit -

I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.

Pay for your FOSS! I’ve paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.

If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.

Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.

And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-dystopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.

Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.

Folks, let’s treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.

To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️

I’m alright with this as long as the controller is easy to repair, which Valve has been pretty good about with the Steam Deck.

If swapping batteries is a fast 5-10 minute process I have to do every 5 or so years, and the batteries are widely available and reasonably priced, that’s a win in my book.

You ain’t getting one then lol.