NumberOneSpinelApologist pretends to be as Linux savvy as Spinel. Alternate title: comedy gold

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Title.
I thought some people here might find it entertaining as I flail around to prepare to make my move from pop os after ~5 years to a different distro.
I hate change so I will be struggling.
This kind of stuff should probably go on like, idk, a website or personal blog but I don't have any, so I will inflict it on bulba for now...shucks.

My requirements for the new distro:
lmms, audacity, krita must work well.
Scarlett audio interface and huion tablet must be possible to get running without me like, writing the drivers myself idk. (I dont know how to do that, the only thing I know about assembly is that it exists LOL.) ideally, plug and play

Click assist and making the fonts and icons readable for me is a hard requirement too.
Workrave must work.

I already got some great recommendations from here and mastodon and will be testing them out slowly.
Feel free to laugh with me (possibly at me), and ask questions about WTF I am trying to do here. Or WTF I am talking about.

I am bored, as I am now trying to boot live opensuse tumbleweed from my ventoy thumbdrive and the kernel is loading forever lol
Edit: half an hour later IT IS STILL LOADING. Idk if I messed something up or if it reallynis that slow XD

Edit edit
First hilarious thing of the day:
apparently if you have a NVIDIA card you need to add nomodeset parameter to the kernel so the installer does not bork itself?
The proper installer did not even start for me.
I'm gonna try in virtualbox after all first to see if I even know how to install it
Edit edit
Yeah added nomodeset in the VM and it actually started doing something


Yesterday I booted up cachy in a virtual box but could not check some stuff I wanted so I will be booting a couple distros from live media

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

I wish I could make 2 polls in one thread.
What DE do you think Spinel would use?
I think he would be using a tiling manager, but which one LOL?

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Spoiler: installing suse in virtual box: a live blog

i love this look lol

woahh choices

always like this silly creature. almost looks like a pokemon /j

another hilarity:
it seems that tumbleeed is not a live distro, so good i am trying in VM after all...but that means i willl have to figure out how to do hardware passthough, never did that before

it suggests a partitioning scheme by itself, nice

i went to the custom partioning and ughh..
tbh i i forgot what the deal was with LVM but it sounds like it is cool if i want /home separately, and i do? This is a VM so it does not matter but uhh idk
my brain fries itself when thinking about the different filesystems. should i go btrfs, or the tried and true ext4 in my final install? argh

oh gods i have the equivalent of the blank page syndrome now

nvm gonna go with the defaults for now

The install is taking forever. good that i should be taking this slow and mostly resting anyway lol, this is resource intensive and i don't mean my computer processors, i mean my foggy brain

Edit:
around an hour later it still has not installed in the VM, idk what's up, i think i gave it enough space

haha nice

edit edit:
yay! it installed!

t maybe i gave too did not because now i have a black screen.
...or maybe i messed up something, but still, not a good sign. I will be moving on to test others for now

 

[recommendation_fluid]

I am bored, as I am now trying to boot live opensuse tumbleweed from my ventoy thumbdrive and the kernel is loading forever lol

that behavior is sorta why i used to change linux distros a lot back then lol (now I just test them within a virtual machine)

apparently if you have a NVIDIA card you need to add nomodeset parameter to the kernel so the installer does not bork itself?

this is one of the annoying things of testing a new distro with an NVIDIA GPU (pretty sure it's because some distros have to compile the NVIDIA drivers from scratch), and it's why I resort to VMs now whenever it's those few times I test a new distro

What DE do you think Spinel would use?

probably GNOME or KDE because he's too busy doing villian stuff

should i go btrfs, or the tried and true ext4 in my final install? argh

btrfs is a little slower but has extra features like same-disk snapshotting, while ext4 is the most stable and has the fastest performance

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

probably GNOME or KDE because he's too busy doing villian stuff

hmm yeah probably does not have time to do a lot of rice-ing, but probably KDE with a tiling addon, after all, he has to do a lot of multitasking, stalking the RVTs, hacking stuff and designing other evil plans, all at the same time

btrfs is a little slower but has extra features like same-disk snapshotting, while ext4 is the most stable and has the fastest performance

yeah, seems like it...i was on ext4 before, so i might stick to that since i don't really have special snapshotting needs

NVIDIA drivers

yep, nvidia, the bane of all new linux installs (exaggeration). One of the reasons i liked pop was that it already had nvidia drivers in the live image completely ready...

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Spoiler: ahoy, ventoy adventure! (not really)

Cachy and MX linux simply did not want to boot from ventoy.
Elementary OS graphic installer booted, caused a horrific gory glitch with my screen.then started flashing. I'm glad my light sensitivity is just that, not epilepsy because oh boy, that was horrible. I had to quickly enter ctrl alt f5 into terminal 5 because that is what i default to, lol. and shutdown from the command line. The user was named elementary, and had no password.
So anyway it seems that it does not like my screen/does not have the drivers. It could be maybe possible to install it without a graphical installer and add the correct drivers... but that still feels like a bad sign for me. Maybe non-ventoy drive would work better, idk.
I might try testing just normal debian later too. See how it goes. But a big part of me wants something radical, a rolling distro, so i don't have to do reinstalls over and over again, just update when i need to.
I proceeded to burn Cachy to a thumb drive properly , since it worked well enough in my VM, . And to test the stuff i want to test properly.

Spoiler: the good: some stuff worked

Tablet and krita were plug and play on the live cachy iso.
Scarlett was recognized immediately by the system.
Audacity complained and did not want to be installed from the repo, but the appimage works.

Spoiler: the bad: ACCESIBILITY

all of the above is well and good, but means nothing if i cant use the software that makes it possible for me to use my computer in the long term. The two functions are essential for me for my chronic pain and fatigue, i simply cannot use the computer without those.
Click assist - i tried getting mousetweaks and kmousetool to work, to no avail. So no click assist for me.
Workrave: It did not work at all, the program did not start.
If anyone with kde or cachy is reading this i would greatly appreciate it if you tested for me if the programs can work under kde/cachy at all. maybe it just does not work on a live distro? I cannot find anything on the internet about troubleshooting this at all.

 

[recommendation_fluid]

The two functions are essential for me for my chronic pain and fatigue, i simply cannot use the computer without those.

sorry that you go through that, but curious question: I wonder how click assist and workrave helps you in your computing experience?

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

sorry that you go through that, but curious question: I wonder how click assist and workrave helps you in your computing experience?

They help me reduce chronic pain and fatigue. Clicking the mouse gives me pain, so having it click for me is a godsend LOL. and workrave periodically forcing me to stop working by blocking inputs reduces my fatigue and pain. Taking short breaks frequently is essential for the pain and fatigue. I have a bad sense of time and when i get focused I have trouble with stopping myself from working. Workrave solves that for me.

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Spoiler: :( what I've learned until now, accesibility rant

For better or for worse, I've learned that Wayland is the problem here. Especially regarding workrave and similar programs.
I've been suggested some potential solutions but none are ideal from what I've understood.

KDE kind of is the problem here too, since it just does not have the click assist preinstalled unlike the gnome version I had.

And yet everyone claims that wayland is so great and the future.
Disabled people are getting left behind, again. Some of them at least. I can only speak for myself, but I imagine this function is useful to not only people with pain and fatigue, but with people with motor disabilities, different limbs, etc. It is also an RSI prevention tool for people without those disabilities.
When asking for desktop and system reccs people told me that the options I need probably"should work". Yeah it should. But what should and what is unfortunately frequently do not align.
And it's not like I can install windows, last time I used it and last time I checked it also does not really have what I need. And well, disabled people deserve to have systems that don't spy on them too, right?

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Spoiler: desperate Debian stable+gnome live image

In my desperation, I burned Debian stable with gnome to a thumbdrive. Funny that just doing cp is enough, no etcher or other commands really needed.
And.look and behold:
It has the accessibility built in. In the live image already, no installing anything needed. It even has something similar tonworkrave (but slightly worse) also built in and readynto turn on with one click..workrave opened but it is difficult to fins its settings, you have to right click on a tiny white space next to the icons

Tablet is recognized but the pressure sensitivity is weird. I need to press much harder than on cachy and on pop. I guess it can be configured? Krita appimage did not open XD XD Xd
Krita from repository opened.

Audacity from repo opened
It noticed my Scarlett. Sound records too quiet, but records. Probably possible to fix.

There is no minimize window button ?XD XD XD and no always visible dock/app bar???? I need to pres the home key??? Urgh
goodness gracious I can't stand it. Gnome extension: Dash to dock exists it solves that problem, need to find what fixes the no.minimize. and maybe add some tiling extension

So it seems that gnome needs some radvanced configuring but has the accessibility tools for people with my disability... Yay?
After I install I need to remember to disable auto suspend and install all the gnome extension that fix everything I don't like about vanilla gnome

 

[recommendation_fluid]

I burned Debian stable with gnome to a thumbdrive.

yeah, GNOME is known for having really good accessibility but it stopped supporting Xorg in the latest version 50 (while Debian stable 13 is stuck with GNOME 48)

Gnome extension

the cool thing about GNOME is despite its rigid opinionated defaults, the extensions save you for those aspects of the desktop you don't like

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Good to know about the GNOME versions, i did not keep up with that. And yeah, extensions are life savers haha

Spoiler: break

I needed a break from all the distro testing, but i was thinking about computers and guis and desktops so i made myself some exceed and explorer themed wallpapers xD I imagine this would be one of the Exceed_OS default wallpapers:


and here is something based on Spinel's monitors lol:

The below might be a spoiler idk
I imagine the 3 pokemon icons would be for calling over his pokemon, he has been shown to control them with remotely with radios
And the structure of laqurium, a terastal crystal, and a program for analyzing their interactions

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Funny thing.

Tried out cachyos plus gnome, it complained a lot and does not want extensions to be installed on it...but the accessibility stuff works.
But I can't live without the minimize button lool
Also apparently repos are having some kind of problem now idk, so that might be a factor.

Tried out a KDE x11 session, the accessibility setting still dont work properly on KDE...so it is not even just a Wayland issue.

TLDR: Linux got enshittified because of multiple factors, like Wayland, and devs prioritizing ..idk even what they are prioritizing but certainly not usability for disabled users.

Frustrating. It's not like other OSs are much better though LOL.

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

This was sent to me

Interim Install Guide: KDE Neon User Edition for a professional digital painter workstation

www.davidrevoy.com

And it seems it really has become harder to get a decent distro....
Quote from article:

Spoiler

. Requirements

I had to find a distro with these requirements:

KDE Plasma 6.5.4 or above: For fixes in the tablet interface and color management in symbioses with Krita (src: Plasma changelog, Krita 6 prerelease).
A Kernel enabling BPF: For installing udev-hid-bpf, with drivers for many drawing tablets.
Stability: It's for a workstation: setup once, then get update for security or bug-fix release.
User oriented: A distro that care for the users: nice installer, drivers, firmware, and a large ecosystem of package selection.
Ethic: A project that has a Code of Conduct, not centered on X, LinkedIn, Github, or Discord servers and a LLM/AI ban policy, or not forcing a tech (eg. Snap) on user.

B. A long phase of testing

Unfortunately, on the landscape right now, I couldn't find something 100% compliant with my list... I tested:

Debian-Testing KDE: Stability issues, a too crude installer and webpage, and a long post-install process (eg. replacing Firefox ESR, install Flatpak, etc...), nothing came ready out of the box. No real AI ban Policy.
Kubuntu 26.04 LTS: Snap centric imposed, openly advertise AI usage.
Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS: Idem, snap centric imposed, openly advertise AI usage.
Fedora KDE: 6 month semi-rolling, break things and move fast philosophy, openly advertise AI usage.
KDE Linux: Rolling but immutable, alpha installer/webpage, every user apps have to be Flatpak. No real AI ban Policy.

 

[Archaic]

I wonder if one of the Universal Blue images (based on Fedora Atomic) would work for you? Even the non-gaming ones are known for working well with Nvidia.

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

I wonder if one of the Universal Blue images (based on Fedora Atomic) would work for you? Even the non-gaming ones are known for working well with Nvidia.

interesting, thanks, I can test some maybe after i take a break from the current bout of testing...it was fun at first, but quickly became tiring to be honest.
Most of my problems were unfortunately rooted on the window manager/DE level though.