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Title: Linux
Date: May 27, 2024

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 So, I was sitting here for a while, thinking about a few things, and ended up
installing Fedora 40 on my Dell Lattitude E6430 again. The KDE spin, because I
really don't like GNOME, and other Wayland desktops don't interest me. I poked
around with it for a while, but never felt fully..."comfortable" using it. I
honestly don't know what it is, but I just couldn't bring myself to continue
using it after a few minutes, even after fully updating and *not* seeing the
GRUB rescue screen show up after a reboot.[^0]

 Here's the thing. I put away that laptop, turned to my MacBook Pro, and for
some reason, decided to launch my Debian VM with Trinity Desktop[0]. It's the
continuation of KDE3, and that's the desktop I "grew up" with when it came to
Linux, starting with Mandrake back in the early 2000s. I used it with Kubuntu,
Knoppix, Kanotix, Slackware, Slax, OpenSuSE, Gentoo... The list is huge, and I
absolutely loved that environment.

 In fact, I still do. I felt "at home" in the VM, even with only a single core
and 4GB of memory. It was snappy, it ran pretty much flawlessly, and everything
I wanted to do /just worked/. I set up mail and RSS in Kontact (KMail and
Akregator respectively), newsgroups in KNode, some IRC stuff in Konversation,
XMPP stuff in Kopete... Before I knew it, outside of a web browser, I had my
old setup from my early Linux days back up and running, and I was *happy* with
it. The browser was Pale Moon, for the record.

 I don't like most modern GUI options. The flatness hurts my eyes, and many
applications seem to punish the user for trying to customize things to their
desires. KDE doesn't really have any problems with the latter, but it can still
feel like the more modern applications aren't happy with custom themes and the
like, so it's hard for me to fully feel comfortable with KDE5 and KDE6, at
least in comparison to KDE3/TDE. And I don't really know why that is.

 On fully modern GUI Linux systems, I'll typically *just* use TUI/CLI
applications for everything: lynx, mutt, slrn, cmus, modplug-tools, newsboat,
wordgrinder, neoleo, weechat + bitlbee, $EDITOR[^1], mc... About the only thing
GUI I use are image applications (Krita/GIMP, DigiKam) and a web browser (Pale
Moon or SeaMonkey), and a PDF viewer when needed (Okular or Xpdf). Not so on my
Debian VM, though.

 It's just unsettling that I can't get into modern KDE, even though I honestly
love being around that community. Maybe I need more time with a more stable
distro---thinking about dropping Debian onto it and seeing if I can get Optimus
working properly---but there's also Trinity... Maybe I'll drop TDE on there in
place of KDE. We'll see.

 For now, I think I need some time to kick back and relax...or sleep. Sleep
might be good.

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[0]: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

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[^0]: This laptop is particularly grumpy after updates, because for multiple
     months, GRUB would fail to update the OS listing properly, resulting in
     an unbootable system.
[^1]: What, do you think I'm crazy enough to admit what I use for a text editor
     on Linux?

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