Use something other than gnome and, while you're at it, you might as well use something other than ubuntu.
KDE is very hard to break, you can go wild with customization there.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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I also use KDE because I like customizing my DE, but I'm not sure I agree that it's hard to break. When I just switched from Xfce to KDE I downloaded several global themes using the built-it theme browser, and a few of those definitely messed things up. It's also happened more than once that I boot my computer and end up with only the desktop background (i.e. no panels or context menu) because KDE thought there was some wrong with the theme, which can be difficult to recover from for someone who doesn't know how to ctrl-alt-F3 and edit settings manually. Though it's ofc. more stable when not testing global themes, and only changing other appearance settings.
I've been using gnome for the past year on my laptop and on my desktop I've been using kde. I haven't used my desktop in a few months and I missed kde. I moved from silverblue to fedora kinoite on my laptop and I don't think that it's been two weeks but today I went back to gnome because the overview is much more polished than kde's. It just works. Gnome always breaks extensions when they update a major version but I've seen so many "extensions" on kde now which are all not updated anymore and break stuff that I might actually think that gnome's way is kind of good. Maybe it was just the fedora version which lead to so many bugs but the experience I had in the past week wasn't so good.
but other distributions are complex to install and besides, Ubuntu works out of the box on my laptop!! But thank you so much, I once tried KDE but Plasma felt very hard to understand.
Something like mint or fedora is just as easy to install and has less issues than ubuntu (snaps)
why do some people heavily dislike Snaps?? I don't see them when I install software, and it doesn't make Ubuntu slow.
Copied from another comment I wrote about that:
Because snaps are terrible. They constantly break parts of apps for no reason. If you have container issues with a flatpak, just use flatseal to punch a hole through the container. With snaps, people will tell you to install the non-snap version because that's easier than beating snap into submission. I learned that the hard way when I had a university project with kubernetes and docker was installed as a snap. I spent way too much time trying to make it work at all before giving up and switching to a VM on my work laptop where it went surprisingly smooth without snaps.
Flatpaks are better in every way and since this isn't about money, we should all just move on and use the best tool for the job.
But what does canonical think should happen when you run sudo apt install firefox and press Y?
That's right, you now have firefox as a snap. Have fun waiting for 5 seconds every time you start it.
Shit like that scares new users away from linux as a whole
The Firefox snap opens instantly for me. I don't think you've used snaps for a while.
Maybe they fixed that part, but that isn't a good thing. Now you can't feel whether something is installed as snap and will probably run into snap issues without a clue what could be causing them.
Do it's a problem if they don't perform well and it's a problem if they do lol
Oh, come on. You're saying that it's a problem that snaps don't have immediately obvious performance problems or bugs?
Let's not get silly about these things...
I disagree eight the other poster. Please use whatever distribution you feel most comfortable with!
With KDE Plasma you might want to wait for the upcoming 6 release, since they simplified a lot of stuff (and also Wayland per default iirc?). Kubuntu will take longer than Feodora to ship though.
I personally used Plasma a lot, and I understand the being overwhelmed. What I did was just working with it, and figuring stuff out along the way. I think KDE Plasma is awesome, especially for customization!
Use what distro you like, but most distros are very easy to install (some even easier than Ubuntu I would argue). KDE Neon would be a good starting point in that regard. What exactly is hard to understand about Plasma? I have heard this sometimes now but I really don’t get it, I find it to be very easy to understand as it integrates for example theming
Kvantum?
I just installed Fedora. The install process is as simple and straightforward as for Ubuntu.
What happened to your "Vanilla Challenge"?
I regret that!! I prefer to give it my own theme, what matters is customisation, but it's ok if you want to do the challenge!!
Why don't you chill out about your Linux setup a bit, and instead of doing stuff to your Linux system, do stuff with it.
Open Source software lives from the contributions of the users, and there's plenty to do everywhere.
You could use your free time to actually make a difference and help out other Linux users!
In short, it's difficult. You have to be careful to only use themes that are are tested to work with your version of GNOME. That's why while using GNOME, I'd stick with whatever stock theme variants come preinstalled. At least you get a few accent colors on Ubuntu. You can always change your wallpaper. 🥹
yes, thank you!! I can customise it as much as I'd like using GNOME Tweaks + preinstalled themes, like in Xfce, thank you!!
Don't get scared. Even when you f*ck up the most you can just wipe out the theme related files from your home folder and start from scratch. GNOME is probably the least customizable, among DEs KDE, XFCE, LXDE, MATE, they all work well, or you could also try tiling wms or classic wms like fvwm..
Have backups. Use something like Veeam Endpoint or a similar software that will image the entire system in a bootable state, and schedule it daily with incremental storage.
Every day stuff could potentially break something, updates out of your control could break something, hardware failures happen, etc..
As long as you do not use root privileges (indicated by sudo or that password promt pkexec) you cannot destroy the system in a way that can't be fixed by deleting a few files in the users home directory.