I have gnome installed and setup as a backup, plus I use its greeter, but I am another who does not really want a full DE and instead using Sway as my WM day to day.

I have two 32"@4k monitors so normal manual floating window management just annoys me, I greatly prefer tiling window management to auto sort my windows for me. Its extremely rare that I need to full screen anything on monitors this large to fit everything I want in width wise so I want multiple apps per monitor.

If all of this is managed dynamically for me, and I am not manually sizing or overlapping stuff, all the better. Couple that with easy use of multiple workspaces for different tasks (I typically use three per monitor), rarely do I have a need to manually resize anything. I have it setup to open my common apps on the right workspace for me, and each workspace set to the right layout for that set of apps, so much less faffing.

My (40%) keyboard(s) run QMK and are setup to enable most of my common combos, such as switching workspace, moving apps around are never more than two keys. The more I can do without moving my hands from the keyboard, the better for me.

Final thing is that Sway is wayland and for me extremely stable.

I’ve been using it for a while now, its been robust and extensible. I think its only real downside is that its too extensible as out of the the box not much comes as standard that you might expect if you coming from something like gnome, such as a control panel, auto tiling, a lock screen, or screen capture (although this release seems to fix setting that up now). This should be expected as its a WM not a DE.

Long time Kodi user, since it first came out on the original xbox.

Assuming you are a watch and delete person then for films you really do not need more that a seperate folder than you dump films AND only films into and make sure that the film name is correct AND it includes the accurate year for the film. Vast majority of downloads will already have this in place, I never have to bother to rename or move films about as they just go straight into my download folder that Kodi is looking for my watch and delete films. Older versions of Kodi used to be much more annoying for film scanning requiring proper spacing and so on. However its very very important that only films go into this directory otherwise it will fuck up if you start dumping TV programs into here.

TV is much more complex if Kodi is doing the metadata scanning as it normally relies on the top level folder name, and a proper season and episode numbering scheme. If you watching TV I would just switch to a managed downloader like sonarr, its a PITA to manually manage weekly show downloads anyway and sonarr will sort everything out for you.

I greatly prefer Debian and run it on my home servers, but I want something more cutting edge than Debian for my work PCs but not quite as bleeding edge as Arch that I have to pay more attention to for my daily updates in case it breaks. I kind of end stuck at Ubuntu as I don’t want something obscure and harder for me to fix due to a smaller user base to crib solutions to common problems from.

I just use it as a relatively up to date, tested and supported base as I run Sway instead of the packaged Gnome, I disable snaps and all the other Ubuntu pro type garbage, even my Firefox is via PPA. Could I roll my own or use something else? Sure, but would I have the same trust over its reliability on the PCs that I use to pay my bills?

I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible

I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.

However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.

I switched from Pop OS tiling that I had retro bolted onto stock ubuntu to Sway, massive step up and more importantly I get to keep my Ubuntu/Wayland base.

As with most add on WMs I had a bit of a learning curve sorting out the extra bits and pieces that just come stock as part of Ubuntus Gnome implementation such as a launcher (I use dmenu), a menu bar (swaybar for me), and even a lock screen (swayidle). Even doing things like wallpaper needed more effort.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

While at university I did a lot of work on the SPARCs and this lead to Unix development as an early career for me. I moved into the windows world after that and I missed Unix so I picked up Linux around 98. I installed it on my work laptop of all things and made everything I needed work. Never looked back since although I run Windows VM for office and testing stuff.

Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.

I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.

I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don’t want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.

I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)

I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.

Ha, love the audio tell of the resource stealing

One of my favourite wars was to open audio files on other people’s SPARCs, somebody had the loudest bag pipe music that usually ended things.

Access to the SPARCs was normally restricted to third year but if you knew the right person you could get an account created pretty easily. Had the fastest access to the internet at the time within the uni as well.

I did not know that about Zoom, but would make sense given how stubborn the Gnome lot are that such a terrible bodge is required rather than them working with others.

The one that got me with them was when they banned third party screenshot tools from using the default screenshotting hooks. They cited security concerns, which is valid as it stops malware from hijacking this, however rather than adding the ability to add to a user controlled allow list (or any other potential workaround) they just rejected working with anybody on fixing this issue. Instead it came off as a transparent attempt to push their own screenshotting tool.

I did an in place upgrade to testing about a month ago on my PIs after running Bookworm on x86 VMs since it came out. Worked fine for me but my usage is pretty light compared to some as they are headless servers for me and I can rebuild really quickly if I had needed to from backups.

Today I had a shed load of updates per PI, about 160 packages so I guessed it had gone live.

Ideally with the ability to transport cars and lorrys like LeShuttle.