I used PaperWM for some years in the past, it was great. But then came compatibility issues and I couldn’t just live with plain Gnome. I forked catwm and used this as a classic tiling wm. Then wayland came and I wanted smooth animations. By then the PaperWM situation did not improve and I settled on default Gnome.

I followed with interest what Niri was doing. I tried it some months ago and realized that my waybar and niri config needs a lot of improvement to be good enough for me. I went straight back to Gnome, because I did not want to invest the time.

I am currently sort of happy with the useless gap extension for Gnome. I am not sure whether I should give PaperWM another go and whether it is available for Gnome 48. What I like about Gnome is the complete ecosystem and how GDM is part of it. I would loose some of its functionality when I do invest the time to configure niri and all the little tools that mimic gnome-shell.

I have used a combination of rsync and borg to backup to an external drive. Then I was feeling adventurous and tried borgbackup2. It was a mistake. Then I learned of rdiff-backup. Easy to setup, but even incremental backups of my home dir took many hours to complete. This is no solution to have regular backups for me.

I decided to go with btrfs snapshots instead. I recently reinstalled everything and I have finally btrfs. I bought a new external NVME drive for my backups where all the snapshots will go. Btrfs has even a parent-option to copy incremental snapshots to another filesystem (the parent snapshots being on both filesystems).

I did not finish my setup, so I cannot share any scripts yet.

Or the current Debian testing, which will become stable soon. If you have experience with a Ubuntu from 10 years ago, you might know about apt already. If not, the package manager is already integrated into gnome-software. Additionally you can easily enable Flathub for flatpak and install packages using gnome-software afterwards.

And yes, I would avoid Ubuntu on the desktop because of snap and other weird choices for defaults.

On the server however my experiences with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 were not bad. But if it were my choice I would go Debian stable for servers.

If you want to do less maintenance, Fedora has good defaults and will have major updates twice a year. But, if you don’t want to get custom to new things on your machine that often, Debian is my recommendation.

Only if you have too much time, try Gentoo. I’ve used it for more than 15 years on the desktop besides Debian on Raspberries.

I would say, that Fedora and Debian are mostly care-free if you go with the defaults. Fedora can enable Flatpak as part of the installation and for Debian the installation guide can be found on Flathub. In both cases you can then install packages using gnome-software.

I have edited videos with Blender, it has a video editor built-in which is very intuitive. And you can explore compositing with it later. Text and graphics for videos I created with Inkscape (export them to PNGs). The graphics are just linked, so if you need to correct a spelling mistake in Inkscape you can overwrite the original PNG and Blender will pick it up. I think with Blender you can use all video codecs that are supported by ffmpeg.

For music you can have a look at Ardour. I did not use it in a long time, but previous version were enough for me to master a track.

Games: Just install Steam through Flatpak (gnome-software). But it depends mostly on the game whether it will be playable on Linux; check protondb.

You could try Debian testing. It currently has linux-6.12 on it and works flawlessly with my 6700xt.

When I am not on the terminal, I use list/detail view all the time. In the details most of the time only last modification date is relevant to me. I always make the list icons one step smaller as the default and sort directories before files in Nautilus.

I don’t need thumbnails. When I need to see pictures, I open them with the now new image viewer in Gnome and use the arrow keys to go through, if I am unsure what I am searching for. I most cases I go by file name.

ls -shit which is (iirc, guessing from memory): block size, human readable sizes, inodes, sort by time.

I just moved to Debian trixie (soon to be stable) because I needed an upgrade after ~15 years of Gentoo.

I was a proud Gentoo user. I learned a lot about systemd and kernel configuration. Many advances in portage made it possible to find the time to maintain my Gentoo setup. On my laptop I gave up Gentoo even earlier, because updating my system was just too time consuming. I actually learned less and less about the software I was using, because I was trapped in dependency conflict management. The new binary repos did save some compile time, but the actual time sinks are decision for your systems, use flags and the forementioned dependencies.

So, I installed Debian on my main workstation (two days ago). I am already using Debian on on my Raspberry Pis. I did choose a more challenging way using debootstrap, because I want to use systemd-boot, encrypted btrfs and have working hibernation. I am still busy with configuring everything.

One could argue, that I could’ve used the time on Gentoo to solve my current python_targets_python3_13 issues and do a proper world update. No, this is a future investment. I want the time to configure new stuff, not wait for dependency resolution or waste time solving blocking packages.

The main reason to switch from Gentoo to Debian is being able to install security updates fast without blocking packages in the same slot.

Kind of sad that it needs political tention to help Linux/GNU/systemd succeed.