I think everything's delayed, rather than weekly releases, but I'm not 100% sure. Either way, in theory this gives them more time to catch any major bugs and hold those packages, though in practice I don't believe that happens much at all considering how short the delay is.

You make some good points - I don't think anyone can reasonably argue linux is in a state where a 'regular' user will find it more productive than windows. But, statements like these make as many assumptions about an individual's use case and workflow as saying 'everyone should use linux because xyz':

If you live in a bubble where you don't have to collaborate with anyone else

There are annoyances from time to time, sure, but they're way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you've to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive desktop experience on Linux

If you buy a Windows license and spend the time you would've spent dealing with Linux compatibility issues doing your actual job you'll, most likely, get a better ROI.

Again, it's certainly not reasonable to say linux is universally (or even generally) better for productivity. But neither is it reasonable to say it always isn't. Operating systems are tools, which one to use depends entirely on the situation.

The biggest reason is instability - packages in its main repo are held back two weeks, while the same isn't true of anything from the AUR, meaning potential dependency version mismatch. It's kinda rare for this to be an issue, but it happens enough to make it a subpar choice for long-term usage. More info here

Titles like this annoy me. If you have something interesting to say - which is the case here - say what it is. No need to obfuscate the topic. It wastes time for everyone.

Anyway, it’s kinda hilarious that the only way to make a proper circle in PDFs is with line caps. What a bizarre format. I hope it’s succeeded by something better sooner rather than later, I can’t think of any time they haven’t been a pain to work with.

I’m surprised there aren’t more distros that come packaged with it. If someone’s used a graphical text editor in the past decade, then they know how to use micro. The only distro I know of that has it by default is Garuda.

I was referring to the unnecessary header text on the sidebar, squeezing everything else up there. I am aware there are different display modes lol

Well the dark mode screenshot makes less efficient use of space so it must be the modern one.

You’d rather not have the tools at all than use them through a CLI?

I believe in you Budgie! You can do it!

That or holding ctrl. Or dragging and selecting with a box.

Fwiw it does have a ‘Lite’ edition that doesn’t include any theming.

Personally I’ve had good experiences with Garuda lite (despite the terrible looking website). Btrfs + snapper built in with GRUB integration, vanilla KDE by default, plus a few GUI utilities for basic functions. Nothing you can’t do yourself but it’s quick and easy to set up and has some some nice bits and bobs.

Wow, this seems really useful! What a neat feature.

I’d personally recommend Garuda, as that’s what I’ve mostly settled with. It’s everything I like about arch, but with lots of little changes and utilities that make it both easy to tweak and easy to just use. The built-in btrfs/snapper is particularly nice. I get the whole toy thing though, it doesn’t give off the most trustworthy vibes. But if you can look past that it’s a great distro. Take a look at the lite edition, it comes without theming and most of the bloat.

I had to solder something on mine, though I don’t think that’s true of all chromebooks; depends on the model.

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

To be clear, you need it to cost more than $400?

That makes sense. Though I prefer the customizability of Plasma I really liked Budgie’s default experience when I last played around with it. Combined with the intuitive package manager, I can definitely see the potential - the current major simple / beginner-friendly distros feel a bit dated and/or have some frustrating design choices so I’m happy to have Solus as a competitor in that niche. I hope they’re able to make the move to Wayland and expand their package repo.

I’m glad it’s back, but I don’t really see a reason to switch. What does it offer that alternatives don’t?

Not just you, it isn’t working for me either.