My monitor had a bright blue power LED smack in the middle of the lower bezel. I took it apart on day one and brutally ripped out the LED, only then did I ever connect it to my computer.

Maybe a bit niche, but in higher level math courses, instructional material often seems out-of-touch, written by professionals for professionals. Inconsistent notation between authors and unexplained symbols in equations are also royal pains in the ass.

Chicago95 XFCE on Debian is my daily driver. Having been a Windows 2000 fanboy, it makes me feel right at home.

The Raleigh GTK theme ported to GTK 3 on XFCE is also a quick and dirty way to get a 90s-esque look: https://github.com/thesquash/gtk-theme-raleigh

For an entire distro, there’s Hot Dog Linux: https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG

Many of them are single-issue Linux users and don’t concern themselves with FOSS philosophy

In my experience, KDE can run just fine, but it is seemingly pickier about drivers and hardware (I’ve had a loose DisplayPort connection crash it several times) than other desktop environments.

Customizations, especially theming, at the system level. Or just learning to modify system files on an atomic distro, in general.

I’m sure it’s doable and I am genuinely interested in moving to atomic/immutable distros. But more for the security aspect than reliability as I’ve yet to break my install of Linux in a way that takes more than an hour to recover from. I’ve enjoyed the predictability of Debian and my very particular taste in UI makes for additional baggage just reinstalling, let alone moving to a very different distro.

• 180 MB /efi (if needed)
• 384 MB /boot (for LUKS compatibility)
• Remainder / (usually btrfs)

It is evident from the current top-level comments that more education is needed.

It’s certainly doable and something like that was my setup for a few years. There isn’t much in the way of distros or software packages that provide such a ‘personal multiseat’ configuration out of the box.

I’d suggest starting with anything graphically intensive running on bare metal and setting up a VM with virt-manager / Virtualbox / etc. for the NAS part. Get a couple of disks specifically to pass through to the NAS VM, forward its ports to LAN, and connect to them on the host as you would any other machine. For a desk further away, you may be able to get away with a KVM extender, but I can’t say I’ve any experience with them.

If you try to virtualize everything like I did, there’s a couple of hurdles:

• Much time and manual configuration in the command line is needed
• Atrocious graphical and input latency on remote connections
• Very high RAM usage
• Input glitches and general slowness on the VM with GPU passthrough, remained unresolved despite scouring tutorials from people who somehow managed to get buttery-smooth gaming in a VM
• Lots of bandwidth used while updating all of the VMs. Probably optimizable, but not out of the box.

Go for AMD if you can, but NVIDIA hasn’t given me much trouble either. Make sure to install the driver from your distro’s repo, not NVIDIA’s website. IMO, this is less of an issue if you decide to pass through the GPU to a VM since any NVIDIA driver shenanigans will be contained to the VM.

Debian stable:

• Works on all of my devices, none of which are newer than 2019
• Compatibility with all of the software that I use day to day
• I like my system set up in a very particular way and the stability makes upkeep simple
• I was a holdout on older Windows versions before I moved to Linux, so getting new features at all is already exciting

This thread is kind of depressing to read. What a privilege it is to have supportive parents.

Makes me realize that I shouldn’t put off having a quality phone call with my parents so much. There will always be more work, but there won’t always be more quality time with them.

Lovely day of volunteering. Not sure how to tackle the mountain of work waiting for me on Monday though.

Electric kettles with plastic parts that touch boiling water, particularly the removable mesh thing. It’s like a microplastic infuser that’s good for about 300 liters, after which it falls apart. Then the kettle doesn’t know when to stop automatically and you can’t buy a replacement mesh piece because they discontinued that model of kettle last year.

I now have a kettle that doesn’t have the funny mesh, but if you don’t open the lid while pouring, the scalding hot water just runs down the side.

The old fridge had condenser coils out in the open and you’d just dust them. The new fridge has them under the unit and I can see quite a bit of dust accumulating on them. But I’ve no clue how to clean them without tipping the entire fridge over.

Also, the newfangled rice cookers. The nonstick coating in them chips off much easier than in regular pots and pans. Then there’s 3 or so gaskets, one of which is impossible to remove without breaking the lid. I really hate cleaning rubber gaskets, especially if there’s a perfectly fine way to design something without them.

I’ve also wondered about this too. In my opinion, at least several layers, but not more than 25. No good reason, it just feels right to me.

There’s probably worse, but off the top of my head, a Sandisk Curzer Fit USB 3.0 drive. It would overheat about 15 seconds into a file transfer and throttle to well below USB 2.0 speeds, perhaps even USB 1.1. I tried to alleviate the issue by using it through a USB 2.0 extender (thereby ruining its entire appeal to compactness), but it developed bad sectors soon enough. It was satisfying smashing it to bits with a hammer though.

Happened to me with a laptop case. Made me nauseous and suspicious of anything made from neoprene since.

Is there sarcasm I didn’t pick up on?

Volume control for the ears, with equalizer, decibel normalizer, and active noise cancelling.

Bugs, pests, and animals, at least where I live. Unless you build a green house, clear the yard of all other foliage, or somehow fortify your garden, only produce with natural defenses like peppers will make it to harvest. However, I am jealous of my friends on the west coast, who don’t really have to worry about bugs or other critters eating from their fruit trees just passively growing in their yard.

There’s always some number of browser tabs, old apps, or miscellaneous files that accumulate on my phone. I like to clean those up during otherwise wasted time like waiting in line or while on public transport.