I wish the thing about tags was ironic

Concerning the rest of your points: Icons are one of the few things I never had an issue with in Gnome. ;-)

Concerning automated setups, the only system I care fore is Linux and am forced to use macOS. For my use cases, I don’t care about the tooling/possibilities for companies to install crap on my machine (my company does that). Using Ansible to automate my setup for macOS is theoretically possible, but such a crappy experience compared to Linux, that I don’t bother. Not to mention no unified installation/update system on macOS and the shitty default apps like Finder, Window management etc. The solution which sucks the least for me is using macOS as dump VPN driver for my virtual Linux box, so I can get shit done.

… no need to argue about bad Gnome defaults, it is trivial to disable all animations and the shell is fast enough even on my netbook. :-)

Wait - Gnome user here (heavily modified and with multiple extensions) …

macOS window management and trying to using it via keyboard is a totally miserable experience (forced to use it at work :-/ ) … at the same time, Apple thinks their users are smart enough to use tags, while Gnome developers think the user are too dump to use tags. I still happily prefer Gnome over macOS on my desktop for literally everything, macOS has no proper software management, all apps try to up-sell me on their shitty i-cloud offerings, setup cannot be properly automated, the ‘auto features’ totally suck and do everything I do not want them to do and macOS feels too slow for the hardware it runs on…

Gnome sucks, but it sucks less for me than all other alternatives on the desktop at the moment…

My biggest reason to stick with Gnome are Wayland, Evolution/Online Accounts and that I can automatically configure Gnome to something usable with dconf/gsettings. I am not holding my breath that KDE ever gets their KMail story under control, stability as in zero crashes and being fully configurable via Ansible. The very moment this happens, I’ll happily jump ship. (Of course also waiting for Wayland support for Xfce :-P)

It sounds really strange, that you end up with the problems you described given your usage.

My systems are heavily modified/tweaked, so one would expect I would experience the problems you describe.

Given your usage, using an immutable distro sounds like a no-brainer to me, immutable Linux was created with your usage scenarios in mind.

In your shoes I would still try to pin point the root cause of the error, because in theory™ your usage should not be a problem for any of the mainstream Linux distros and we don’t know if an immutable distro solves your trouble.

Given your 6 montish circle it sounds like some kind of accumulation? If the computer runs stable for several month, IMHO you can rule out hardware problems, unless you have a kernel update every 6 months… :-P

Can you be more specific about your hardware, laptop model and Ubuntu version you are using?

If you ever figure out what happened, or if you try out an immutable distro and it runs for a year for you, give us an update! :-)

IMHO you should first figure out what exactly happens/goes wrong with your Ubuntu installations.

Immutable distros might or might not be a solution, but if the core of the problem is really the quality of the Ubuntu updates for example, you could try to run Debian (stable).

But again, the suggestion to use Debian is throwing a solution in the room which might not fit your problem.

Just as a reference point: I am running Debian stable on Laptops, Netbooks, Raspberry Pis and in virtual machines (AMD64/AArch64) and have no weird bugs, everything works for years now and runs smooth.

Concerning the Steamdeck… I love them, they run perfectly fine, but unless you are tweaking them/do more than run games, you cannot really compare them to what happens on your desktop.

Vivaldi is a great Blink-engine based browser, my fallback in cases Firefox fails to render a page I really need.

Outstanding are the official flatpaks for amd64 and Aarch64.

(I do not understand why it is impossible for Mozilla to provide an official Aarch64 flatpak.)

Awesome, @hades@hades@lemm.ee . Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction! :-)

Tried GIMP, Firefox and Chrome - does not work.

Thanks for your suggestions, added the output to the original question!

Thanks for your answer, I guess fair enough. ;-)

Good luck for your survey!

Sorry, but how are a lot of the questions relevant for this community?

Especially concerning the (family) income, age, being neurodivergent etc. These are sensitive information and seem more fitting for a market survey/selling ads.

What is your goal with the answers? What are your research questions? How will the answers help this community?

Good points, and I mostly agree with you, especially with feedback loops!

Still, I never argued for waterfall. This is a false dichotomy which - again - comes from the agile BS crowd. The waterfall UML diagram upfront, model driven and other attempts of the 90s/early 20s were and are BS, which was obvious for most of us developers, even back then.

Very obviously requirements can change because of various reasons, things sometimes have to be tried out etc. I keep my point, that there has to exist requirements and a plan first, so one can actually find meaningful feedback loops, incorporate feedback meaningfully and understand what needs to be adapted/changed and what ripple effects some changes will have.

Call it an iterative process with a focus on understanding/learning. I refuse to call this in any way agile. :-P

… I cannot count the number of times at my different workplaces where we had an agile process, dailies and everything else of the agile BS for projects which where either trivial or not solvable. No worries, the managers, product owners and agile coaches made money and felt good, we developers went for greener pastures…

Agile is a scam, nothing they do is based on any facts and when you challenge agile coaches / other people which profit it is always ‘I believe’ or ‘proven by anecdote’.

Combine this with the low quality of people in the average software projects and you have a receipt for failure.

Writing the requirements first at least forces people to think trough a project (even if only superficial), so I am not surprised the success rates for this projects goes up.

This. I really don’t understand the down-votes - using the correct words makes life easier for everyone, including the OP.

Because we are men/gals of culture! :-P Hadouken! ;-)

Nice, I love Yakuza, really very special in the world of gaming! :-)

• Street Fighter 2 Turbo (Arcade)
• Chrono Trigger (SNES)
• Contra (NES)
• Dark Souls
• Warcrat 3 TFT (non remaster)
• OpenXCom with X-COM data
• XCom
• Slay the Spire
• OlliOlli
• Mark of the Ninja
• Yakuza0
• Horizon Chase Turbo

(No order, might be not exactly 10 :-P)

Source

So Firefox Nightly for Linux on top of Arm64 hardware, like Apples, Lenovos, a whole bunch of Chromebooks etc.

Wow, only took them … years!

If perhaps pretty please Mozilla realizes that an official ARM64 Flatpak is the perfect distribution channel for their nightly (and hopefully soon stable) ARM64, I’ll be happy and they did a great service to the Linux community. (Especially regarding Fedora Atomic Desktops / Aeon.)

I wonder, if you are asking two different questions:

1. Why don’t you receive notifications about updated packages?
2. Two: Security and bugfixes

For 1. it depends which desktop environment you use, Gnome/KDE have this update notifications out of the box, for other DEs (Xfce, LXDE, etc.) you might need to enable this with the installation of synaptic or similar.

For 2. Debian stable does not ship bugfixes but Debian stable ships security fixes. I highly recommend to subscribe to Debians Security mailing list, especially for security fixes concerning browsers and other stuff.

Edit: I have enabled automatic updates and I still receive regular notifications via Gnome Software, at least once per week.