Yeah, I agree. “Stuttering” doesn’t sound like a touchpad-specific issue. My guess is there’s something funny about Fedora, either drivers or kernel flags or default plasma settings, that just isn’t playing well with that specific device. I wouldn’t be surprised if another distro magically fixes it.

Edit: Or there’s a hardware issue. Gnome caused the device to grind to a halt?

The article states that you can’t link your phone to Linux Mint like you can on Windows or Mac.

Huh?

I mean, you don’t necessarily need a fresh Arch install; I’d wager you could just switch to Arch in place by editing your /etc/pacman.conf and /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist to Arch repos. You’d probably need to keep a Manjaro section at the bottom of pacman.conf to avoid breaking too many things at first. Is this a good idea? Probably not, but it’d be fun to try.

My wife wanted Linux on her tablet. She read online that Gnome was the preferred DE on touchscreens. I warned her that I personally dislike Gnome, but it’s not like I’m going to throw a minimal window manager at her, so I told her that’s fine and she should try it out.

Since I’m her tech support, I installed Garuda, a distro I already use. She played around with it, then asked if she could have desktop icons. It was stupid that she had to press a whole extra button just to see her “home screen”, she said. So I installed the desktop icons gnome extension, but it lacks basic features like either right click or drag, or maybe both. I can’t recall at the moment.

Then the onscreen keyboard wouldn’t appear automatically when using certain programs like Brave. And using the stylus to press the OSK would close it entirely. The stylus was really fidgety and oversensitive, too. I have zero touchscreen experience on Linux, so I was disappointed with gnome’s lack of GUI controls to fix these kinds of things.

She started to complain that Linux is too hard, then signed up for the 1 year extended Windows 10 support on her old laptop.

So I reinstalled Garuda with KDE this time, told her I tried something new, and she’s been happy with it so far. Turns out my wife just hates Gnome. And she expressed this hate completely unprompted.

That’s right, my love; fuck Gnome.

I’ve never been more proud.

Hold on. I’m as much a Linux fanboy as anyone else, but can you name one OSK that supports swiping to type?

I’ve never heard of librewolf preventing dark mode. Garuda’s firedragon browser was based on librewolf before switching to floorp, and it came with the darkreader extension by default.

Garuda. It’s even easier than Manjaro. The theming can be a bit much, though.

Aside from your preference for debian-based distros, you’re describing Garuda pretty well. But the chaotic-AUR is enabled by default, so you’d never need to hunt for .deb files in the first place. And the update script, “garuda-update”, has a bunch of nice features by default, like taking snapshots and running grub-update (which would have prevented the grub fiasco that hit the arch-based distros a while back).

The only pain points are 1.) If you don’t like Garuda’s theming, you’ll need to do some minor ricing to start, and 2.) Plasma 6 updates often enough that on a rolling release distro, something minor about your setup might break once every few months, e.g. KDE allows themes to set a minimum taskbar size and all of a sudden your taskbar increases in size, or your wallpaper gets reset for some reason.

KDE, because I’m too lazy to switch back to XFCE, which offered every feature I already use in KDE except without the stuttering, the bugs, and the update cycle that breaks things way, way too often on a rolling release distro.

Or openbox. My old laptop has openbox, but that’s more for screwing around with EWW than doing day-to-day things.

I don’t hate flatpaks, but flatpaks require more disk space than the same apps from traditional repositories, and they only support a handful of the most common default themes. Since I only ever use older and slower computers, my disk space is limited, and I like to rice my desktop, I personally avoid them. But your use-case may differ.

Disclaimer: I’m incredibly ignorant. Wouldn’t wireless necessarily mean high-latency?

It does not run well. You can’t see the performance difference between KDE and XFCE on neofetch, but you absolutely can on on old machine.

Source: I have an old computer.

Mabox!

Enable the chaotic AUR and you won’t even have to build from source.

Wait, are they actually doing development work, or are they just merging from downstream?

Linux is modular, not fragmented.

Except Gnome. Fuck Gnome.

Thank you for providing an actual answer. Most of the comments in this thread are condescending as hell.

This is a popular opinion outside of Lemmy. You won’t find many lowercase “l” libertarians here though.

How important is the Windows-style desktop? If the VM is designed for one thing and one thing only, I’d pick any minimal WM that can alt-tab, say JWM, and then just add Firefox and Thunderbird to the autostart file.

Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn’t install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don’t want to waste space on flatpaks.