Who told you that?

https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker

There is no GNOME 5. They are up to GNOME 48 now.

Strong recommendation of EndeavourOS over Manjaro.

That was it for me. I was actually a KDE user way back in the KDE 2 and 3 days. I found KDE 4 unusable. KDE 5 never won me over. But I have been using Plasma 6 on Wayland and am perfectly happy with it.

You really need to be on Plasma 6 if you use Wayland.

You are not wrong.

However, at this moment in history, there is another consideration.

Today, Cinnamon means X11 and KDE means Wayland. Xorg is becoming a second class citizen in KDE. Cinnamon is not there yet on Wayland.

In two years, you can be back to using either one as you prefer (on Wayland).

My preferred DE is XFCE. However, over the past few months, I have moved most of my work to a new distro and made the jump to Wayland. Both of these have landed me on KDE.

KDE has by far the most complete, and therefore painless, Wayland support.

KDE has been great to use honestly. I mostly do not think about it which is what I want in a DE these days. The configurations I need are there when I need them and not in the way when I don’t. KDE uses more memory than XFCE but not nearly as much as Firefox or Chrome.

I dislike modern GNOME but KDE has been great and, at this point, I feel like it is the best option on Wayland.

Tar is not a package manager, it is just a packaging format. AppImage has the same problem.

Flatpak is a bit of a crappy package manager but at least it is one. And, due to its use of container technology, it allows the same packages to run on any Linux kernel (any Linux distro). That is pretty useful.

Of the other package managers, apk 3 is my favourite but the only distro that uses it is Chimera Linux. Pacman is good. dnf / RPM is ok. apt / deb is in last place for me. The recent Ubuntu 25.04 launch snafu illustrates some of the problems with apt. The first Linus Tech Tips Linux challenge really highlighted the dangers of apt.

I only used snap briefly but instantly hated it. Fstab was a mess. It was slow. It was proprietary. I fled before I could form an educated opinion.

Flatpak does not install KDE by default. It is only required if you install a KDE app. You can hardly blame it if you do that.

What you are thinking of is not a package manager but a compiler.

Flatpak is a common way to install something newer than you can get in your repo. If you are using apt in Debian Stable, Flatpak is a miracle. This is even the reason Ubuntu installs Firefox as a snap (their version of Flatpak).

As an Arch user for many years, my question is when is Arch going to ditch pacman and upgrade to APK 3?

You can change the labels but the groups in them would remain the same. :)

AppImage is a package format, not a package manager. Same with tar.

So, I would say the primary complaint should be a lack of package management.

I agree.

Just recently, I used GIMP 3.0 to create what will become a sticker on the side of a dozen hockey helmets.

It was a small project but it probably went back and forth a dozen times as each version delivered sparked new ideas or new questions on what was possible. Layers, filters, alpha channel, Smart Selection, and working with text and font outlines were all essential.

I don’t do all this stuff all the time. There is no way I would ever pay for Photoshop. Yet, my standard Linux install had everything I needed to get it done. And it was not that hard.

Truly amazing when you think about it. We are all so entitled.

Agreed. They have a lot of the required plumbing now. There are some non-destructive editing workflows in GIMP.

I think holding back 3.0 for so long was a mistake. It no longer matters though. It is out now and it can be improved dramatically without such a long break between the dev version and stable.

We will see what the next couple of years brings.

Entry level at most jobs will be hit. If you basically exist to do grunt work that somebody else assigns and will “approve” before going out, AI may replace you. I would not want to be a junior marketing communications person.

I assume you, teaching as the profession that we have today is not at all safe.

It never occurred to me that when people talk about “wife factor”, they mean setup. I also thought they just meant use.

My wife uses Jellyfin and complains about it less than Netflix or Prime.

My wife is an iPhone and Mac user and asks me to set all her Apple stuff up. I get asked to fix things all the time.

Apparently neither Apple or Jellyfin have sufficient “wife factor” if we include setup.