Thank you OP for that, but… why should we prefer this over uBlue’s work on streamlining this process?

i’d like to try gnome or kde plasma

I’m surprised to see that no one has mentioned the following yet:

"KDE Edition

In continuation with what’s been done in the past, Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so.

I would like to thank Kubuntu for the amazing work they have done. The quality of Plasma 5 in Xenial made backports a necessity. The rapid pace of development upstream from the KDE project made this very challenging, yet they managed to provide a stable flow of updates for us and we were able to ship good KDE editions thanks to that. I don’t think this would have been possible without them.

KDE is a fantastic environment but it’s also a different world, one which evolves away from us and away from everything we focus on. Their apps, their ecosystem and the QT toolkit which is central there have very little in common with what we’re working on.

We’re not just shipping releases and distributing upstream software. We’re a product distribution and we see ourselves as a complete desktop operating system. We like to integrate solutions, develop what’s missing, adapt what’s not fitting perfectly, and we do a great deal of that not only around our own Cinnamon desktop environment but also thanks to cross-DE frameworks we put in place to support similar environments, such as MATE and Xfce.

When we work on tools like Xed, Blueberry, Mintlocale, the Slick Greeter, we’re developing features which benefit these 3 desktops, but unfortunately not KDE.

Users of the KDE edition represent a portion of our user base. I know from their feedback that they really enjoy it. They will be able to install KDE on top of Linux Mint 19 of course and I’m sure the Kubuntu PPA will continue to be available. They will be able to port Mint software to Kubuntu itself also, or they might want to trade a bit of stability away and move to to a bleeding edge distribution such as Arch to follow upstream KDE more closely.

Our own mission isn’t to diversify as much as possible in an effort to attract a bigger chunk of the Linux market, and it’s with a bit of sadness that we’re letting this edition go. We focus on things we do well and we love doing to get better and better at doing them. KDE is amazing but it’s not what we want to focus on.

With Linux Mint 18.3, we’ll release one more KDE edition. I wanted this announcement to come before the release. It will hurt its popularity of course, but I wanted to give users time, either to react right now or to take their time, upgrade and adapt to this later on. I’m sure this edition will be missed and I hope its users understand our decision."

From this Linux Mint blog post*.

Note that this doesn’t mean that you can’t use KDE Plasma (or GNOME for that matter). Though you have to be aware that you’ll be on your own whenever something breaks. And if you have to ask how to change Desktop Environment in the first place, then I think that you might not be ready yet for such a ride. Instead, consider using a distro that actually does offer GNOME and/or KDE Plasma editions of its distro; the likes of Fedora, openSUSE and Pop!_OS come to mind.

I’m so grateful for the time it took you to write this down. Thank you so much for your contributions in this conversation! I’ve greatly enjoyed reading every one of your replies. While I am currently not in the state to make any promises related to sticking to Neovim in the long run. I do think that I’m at least very interested to explore its possibilities. Have a good one! Cheers!

I appreciate your input. Thank you!

Also, there are too many plugins to serve the same purpose and I found it difficult (compared to neovim) to figure out the difference between them.

Interesting.

Finally, the level of customization was also less granular than what offers neovim.

Very interesting. I’d love to hear more about this. Could you elaborate?

I would add that neovim and emacs both have a steep learning curve but I personaly found the level of support and core and plugins documentation for neovim more accessible, readable, and better organized.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is in part attributable to the fact that Emacs is both an older project and is generally-speaking a bigger and/or more capable piece of software.

I completely share your vision about what an IDE should be doing. I’m old school and adhere to the “do one thing but do it right” philosophy. Also, I hate relying on one tool for several needs because if anything goes wrong it has multiple impacts.

I’ve often heard Emacs users pose the argument that Emacs as an Elisp interpreter does just one thing. It’s just that this single thing allows the myriad of functionality it offers. So in that sense comparing it to a terminal/console seems more apt than comparing it to a text editor. I wonder what you think of that argument.

As a side note, I use neomutt as my email client and you can nicely couple neovim to it to write your emails ;)

Hehe, that’s cool! Currently I’m really happy with Thunderbird so I don’t expect to move away anytime soon, but I’ll keep it in mind.

Hi!

I’ve briefly shared my experience with neo(vim) and emacs here.

Thanks for sharing that! I’ve just read through it and it was a very interesting read. Would you mind elaborating upon the following statement?

“the lack of uniformity across plugins coding which sometimes created some conflicts”

I think the main factor of choice would be to know if you prefer to build your own perfect tool with just what you need and expand as you go (i.e. neovim) or just have a do-it-all ready tool right out of the box (i.e. emacs).

That is indeed something that concerns me regarding Emacs. Like being able to surf on the internet or using it as a email client isn’t quite what I expect out of my IDE 😅. I guess the extensibility should allow ‘minimal’ installations, but this is something I should read more into. Thanks for pointing that out!

6

steamos is debian-based

This used to be the case until the launch of the Steam Deck, on which SteamOS (3) is actually based on Arch instead. However, SteamOS is a very special distro based on Arch due to ‘immutability’, how it achieves said ‘immutability’, the implications thereof, ‘freezing’ of packages, inability to install packages persistently without some hacking etc. So, SteamOS is not representative of how Arch works in general.

while popos is ubuntu-based

And Ubuntu is based on Debian.

is that the biggest part of how a distribution works, ie commands, etc.?

If we take your average (popular) distro, so the likes of Gentoo, NixOS etc are dismissed as they are very unique compared to the others, then arguably the most important differentiators would be: Model for updates, package manager and available packages. One might delve deeper into this and with the advent of stuff like Distrobox this becomes a lot more blurred, but traditionally speaking the aforementioned three things used to be the main differentiators. Beyond those, the end-user has the freedom to do whatever with their system. For example, Pop!_OS comes with GNOME + their own touches by default. However, the desktop mode of SteamOS comes with KDE. But you can install KDE on Pop!_OS and even customize it very closely to how it’s done over at SteamOS. This is not a special quality of Pop!_OS, but of Linux in general.

Good ui/ux is important for me so i should maybe use nitrux or deepin

It’s important to note that both of these are not unique in what they offer in terms of UI/UX. You can recreate 99% of it yourself, simply by installing the appropriate desktop environment; which constitutes most of the UI/UX. Nitrux has KDE as its desktop environment (with a touch of Maui), while deepin uses the Deepin desktop environment. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend any desktop environment beyond Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE and Xfce. Don’t be discouraged by this though, feel free to put Nitrux and deepin on a Live USB to get a feel for them. Regarding good UI/UX, your best bets are probs Kubuntu, Linux Mint, openSUSE and Pop!_OS. Honourable mention would be MX Linux, but I don’t recommend systemd-less distros to newer users.

that are debian-based

Sure, Nitrux is based on Debian. But it’s immutable, systemd-less and favors AppImages over Flatpak/Snap. It’s a cool project, but I find it hard to recommend to a newer user. While deepin is less unique by comparison, it’s far from a distro that’s known for its polish. I’d argue it’s mostly just eye-candy instead 😅.

or is it a bad idea to choose a less common distro for a amateur like me?

Bullseye! This isn’t a hard rule though. I started venturing into Linux through a somewhat obscure distro as well 😅. But, at the time, I researched for about a week which distro to install and why. Afterwards I spent another week on how I should install it and what should be considered for install. And then I installed it, after which I spent almost two weeks getting the system to a working state. It still wasn’t quite there yet, but after spending a month on it from start to finish I wanted to move on to something else 😅. I kept the install, don’t get me wrong. And it became my daily-driver. After some time I even ‘fell in love with it’. But like, I know that I can be stubborn about things like this and persevere where others might have preferred to hit their heads to the wall instead. So your mileage may vary…

Do you have any advice for me?

As you’ve correctly assessed, you are indeed lost 😅 . That’s fine, I think almost all of us have been lost at some point in time. Uhmm…, but honestly, I think you’re conflating two very distinct things. Pop!_OS is a general-use distro on which you can do whatever. And most distros that people talk about and engage with are similarly general-use distros. SteamOS, on the other hand, isn’t quite like that. Sure, you may hack your way and achieve some things with it. But it’s false to believe that you can find any distro that qualifies as SteamOS but on your laptop. Before giving you any recommendations, would you be so kind to answer the following:

• Your post is written in a way that implies that you want to forego Pop!_OS for another distro that’s more like SteamOS. Therefore my question would be:
  • What things from SteamOS did you prefer over Pop!_OS? Please be specific and elaborate*.

That’s good to know! And I’m sure it’s beneficial information for those that were unaware of that. However, (unless I’m wrong) the method you described requires you to be deliberate and precise in the placement of your own bang; i.e. bag of d holding or bag of holding d wouldn’t work. As I often just start typing whatever I want to search/look for and only notice midway/afterwards that I hadn’t specified where I would like to search, the built-in ‘bangs’ in Firefox/Chrome just wouldn’t cut it unless I would try to rewire my behavior.

DuckDuckGO for the bangs, with a custom !bang made for my favorite SearXNG instance; on which most of my ‘googling’ actually happens.

Somehow it looks veiny, black and kinda nsfw…

The very same ones when one compares Fedora Workstation to Fedora Silverblue. Which mostly come down to Bazzite offering more stability, improved security, reproducibility, atomic updates and a pinch of declarativity^[1] at the expense of relearning a thing or two and actually being limited in some (rather niche) actions that are currently not supported on Silverblue (and thus -by extension- Bazzite). Chances are rather slim that the average Nobara-user would delve into any of those unsupported actions. So if you ever happen to stumble upon something you’re not able to do/perfom on Silverblue/Bazzite/uBlue then it’s safe to assume that you’re not approaching it correctly and that a different approach would have resulted in the desired outcome.

1. Regular Silverblue is not very declarative, if at all. However, the toolkit that uBlue offers -and which is used by Bazzite to create its image- enables one to have some degree of declarativity. It’s by no means comparable to the likes of NixOS or Guix, but it’s only going to get better from here.