I see that in some cases on Linux, for example JetBrains IDEs use paths like $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/JetBrains/Rider2024.1. I agree that it’s more common on Windows though!

There’s so many features that Opera had that still aren’t widespread in other browsers. The closest equivalent these days is Vivaldi, although I don’t like that it’s Chromium-based.

Often they were created before the XDG spec was widespread, and haven’t been changed for backwards compatibility reasons or because nobody’s been willing to change it.

Windows developers trying to follow best-practice-like-Microsoft-does

I think the best practices on Windows are pretty similar to Linux, other than Windows usually using title case whereas Linux usually using lowercase. There’s bad developers on both platforms :)

Windows equivalent to XDG_CONFIG_DIR is %appdata%, which is the roaming AppData directory.

I do wish there was a simpler, more paint.net-like editor rather than GIMP

Try Pinta, Krita, GNOME Drawing, and LazPaint.

Which dual boot issues? I’ve been dual booting Windows 10 and Fedora 41 for about eight months now, with no issues. Both are on the same drive. They’re both sharing the same EFI partition.

DE is short for desktop environment. Essentially it’s the type of GUI you use. GNOME and KDE are the most popular, but there’s many others.

GNOME is the most common, while KDE is more powerful, very customizable, and will feel more like Windows (for example, it has a taskbar similar to the Windows one).

I’d recommend looking at screenshots, then trying some live DVDs and seeing what you like best. A live DVD is a Linux system you can boot from a DVD and try out without installing it. IMO one of the best ways to try several desktop environments is by using Fedora, since they have a bunch of different desktop environments available (see https://fedoraproject.org/spins ).

For a brand new user, I’d recommend Linux Mint. It’s a good distro for beginners.

Newer Linux users will never have to endure the pain of fglrx.

I didn’t have any luck with PRIME. On my work laptop, I want to use Intel graphics when using the laptop screen, and Nvidia only when plugged in to external monitors. Couldn’t get it working properly at all - the external monitors only work properly when hybrid graphics is disabled in the BIOS.

N100 is two years old now. If you’re going to suggest a mini PC, at least suggest one with a current gen CPU.

For what it’s worth, I’m seeing fewer bugs in Wayland compared to X11 these days.

Nvidia have an open-source driver now too, but only for 20 series cards and newer, so I can’t use it with my 1080. I’m using it at work though - I have a 3080 in my work desktop PC and a 3050Ti in my work laptop. We’ll see if that improves the drivers significantly.

The way they open-sourced it is by moving a lot of stuff that used to be in the driver into the closed-source firmware. AMD does the same thing though.

I switched from Windows to Linux last year, after switching from Linux to Windows back in 2007 or so. I was happy to find that not only is the wobbly window effect still available, it’s available out-of-the-box on KDE without installing any other software. It has the cube effect and magic lamp effect when minimizing/unminimizing windows too.

It’s also interesting that AMD went from having the worst Linux graphics driver (fglrx) to the best one. I have some graphical issues with my work PC and laptop (with Nvidia GPUs) that I don’t have with my personal laptop (with AMD GPU).

Thanks for the info. I’m not very familiar with BSD.

How many people choose Xcode over other IDEs though? Or are there some things that you can only do in Xcode?

Nope. There’s a list here: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

As far as I know, BSD and Linux are “UNIX-like”, but only MacOS is actually UNIX.

I was just comparing it to MacOS, and using it as a reply to the comment that MacOS “runs major software and doesn’t force the user to spend half their life in the command line”, which I interpreted to mean an OS that a mainstream user would be comfortable with. Windows fits that description better than MacOS does. I’m not advocating for using Windows instead of Linux or anything like that.

runs major software

You’d probably want to go for Windows in that case? There’s plenty of software that doesn’t have a MacOS version.

MacOS is Unix though, not Linux.

(it’s the only non-mainframe OS that’s officially Unix certified)

I knew this song but didn’t know the original one!