See if flatpak has some sort of export format that would let you install everything the same on the other machine. Some package managers have that.

Do they? Bad UI and bad notifications is something that everybody constantly complains about with Apple. But do they act on it or do they rest secure knowing they've got a captive audience and can simply be tone-deaf and forge on?

I can come up with lots of other bad UI examples btw those aren't singular. The security code input pad is atrocious. The 3D touch fiasco etc.

Yeah let me know when Apple figure out notifications. They're light years away from what you can do on Android to customize them.

Or UI navigation. Apple's insistence on not having an OS "back" feature has led to each app implementing their own. Sometimes it's a button, good luck finding it and figuring out how it looks, sometimes it's a gesture or something else.

I really wish I could find iPhones sufficient. It sounds nice to just don't care and let the phone do what it will.

Unfortunately I'd be missing out on:

• Ability to install apps from 3rd parties (or my own).
• Ability to install older versions of apps and to backup and restore apps myself.
• Ability to use third party or self-hosted services.
• Features like conversation recording (on my own terms).
• Payments without paying the Apple tax or Google tax. etc.

It's also cheap. Not free but their lowest plan is something like $12/year.

They also let you make unlimited aliases and even wildcard aliases which are great for making up addresses on the fly so you never use the same address with two websites, and fighting spam.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59qgzzSD1tk

Don't blink.

Well we could be using passkeys right now if Big Tech weren't trying to tie them to their own platforms! 🤷

SMS 2FA is still better than no 2FA.

You can get your own domain and host email on a decent provider who offers a way to make aliases (and doesn't nickel and dime you for it).

apps written explicitly for libadwaita will not be usable on generic GTK.

When an app targets a platform-specific library like Adwaita it explicitly forgoes supporting generic, cross-platform GTK.

Will an app dependent on libadwaita be usable on linux without gnome? Like xfce, or xmonad?

Depends what you mean by "usable".

Will it run, yes, most likely. But the UI will be full of Gnome-y things that make little sense on other DE's, among which the theme is just one. Could be other stuff, like accessibility, features etc.

As long as none of the shortcomings are deal-breakers for you I guess you can call it "usable".

At the end of the day there's always going to be DE's that expand their UI features, and apps that take advantage of those. Cosmic, Plasma, Granite etc. are all examples of such platform-specific UI libs. Even in a cross-platform library like GTK or Qt there's no guarantee that they're compatible with each other. Bottom line is, when you mix and match apps made for different toolkits there's always going to be variations.

It was nice for a while having common themes that could target both GTK and Qt and having unified-looking desktops. I guess that era is over. Back to each app having its own incompatible theming and the only common point being that they're all "light-ish" or "dark-ish".

Lol was it written for DOS?

In The Waiting Line

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What do you recommend I do about disk partitions?

I usually put the OS on a separate partition from /home/user, so if I want to reinstall I can do it without losing my home stuff. Once you've settled into a distro you may want to keep /var separate too, in case it ever gets filled up it won't affect your root.

A desktop distro will take up more disk space than a server one, where you can typically fit a server into 20 GB you might want to set aside at least 50-60 GB for a desktop. And that's just software and package caches, not counting games and such. If you split root and /var then 30/30GB would do.

Yes Windows can occasionally mess with your bootloaders if it's installed on the same drive.

Linux distros will typically recognize each other and add each other to the grub boot menu. Also typically you get a choice of whether you want them to do this during install so you should be able to refuse this from secondary distros and re-generate the menu on your main distro to pick up the others.

Is cloud storage sync straightforward?

I think Dropbox is the only one that has an actively maintained desktop client. But rclone will deal with almost anything else.

Should I just use apt to install software?

No, but be careful what you use, and about apt too. The dependency tree can develop issues if you add 3rd party .deb repos that overwrite native packages. Some repos are curteous (Docker is one of them) and publish packages under distinct names, most are not.

Debian native packages can grow long in the tooth because Debian only releases stuff once every two years (next one in 2025). This is where something like Flatpak comes in; the Flathub offer is tiny (under 3k packages) but it's chock-full of useful desktop apps, in case you need a more recent version of anything. Steam or Firefox will be a strong candidates for Flatpak installation, for example.

I use the normal Firefox btw. Never saw a compelling enough argument for the clones and all kinds of downsides.

If you want a package manager learn to use aptitude on the CLI. It has a menu and everything, just takes a bit getting used to. It's the best there is.

Any other pearls of wisdom?

If you want to keep things tidy I would strongly recommend sticking to native packages for all important stuff like system things, desktop environments, drivers. Avoid 3rd party repos if not well-behaved. For anything you're missing or not new enough try Flatpak first. For CLI, programming languages, servers etc. I would strongly recommend installing Docker from their official repo (it's well-behaved) and installing stuff in Docker containers.

You need a swap but it doesn't have to be a partition. You can make it a file on /. You can also use zram and make it a compressed, dynamically sized piece of RAM and then forget about it. Check out the package systemd-zram-generator.

Which brings up the question, where is the alternative software that's dedicated to people keeping in touch, to events, and communities?

It used to be called group ware, now it would be a good time to resurrect.

It's been dead for a decade, even if it were forked it would still be 10 year old code. There's plenty of good CLI clients like irssi and weechat still under active development.

PPAs are a nice idea but a terrible design. They work well as long as they are kept up to date and they don't overwrite distro packages. But in practice as you've noticed they tend to be abandoned after a while, and they don't respect the rule to not supersede original packages. Together these two faults lead to terrible consequences, as time passes they corrupt your Debian/Ubuntu dependencies and lead to unsolvable situations. Basically your system reaches a dead-end where it cannot upgrade anymore (or only partially, which makes things even worse).

Aptitude has a very smart and determinate dependecy solver that can recover a system from this kind of situation but it usually involves uprooting most of it by removing and reinstalling a huge amount of packages, some of which are essential. It takes a long time, if anything goes wrong you're screwed, and you may end up with older packages than what you had installed, which may cause your user data for those apps to not be understood anymore, leading to malfunctions or crashes. So yeah it can be done but at that point you might as well do a clean reinstall.

Pianoteq for virtual piano emulation with MIDI keyboards.

Doom gets ported because it has extremely efficient code written in low-level language so it's easy to port and runs well even on potatoes.

There literally no point to put in all the work to port Winamp to a completely different sound system and to have none of its plugins work, when there are Linux clones that already work, have their own plugin ecosystem, and can use Winamp skins.

If they use a FOSS license there's a non-zero chance someone will bother in spite of all that, just for fun. But if it's not FOSS that takes all the fun out of it.