I went all in with my ‘daily driver’ laptop, an ASUS Zenbook Flip (UX461UN). I fired up the EndeavourOS installer and choose the option to ‘erase this hard drive’ and ultimately decided on Gnome. I have to admit I was a little nervous …
Less than 24 hours in and things are looking really good:
Graphics are set up with bumblebee and optirun support
Installed iio-sensor-proxy and tablet mode works nicely including screen rotation and keyboard switching
Bluetooth enabled and using wireless mouse - still have some audio tweaking to sort out plantronics headset and jabra elite 65 earbuds. I can connect them, but have trouble when switching between A2DP and HID modes. I am sure a little GoogleFu and I’ll get that sorted out.
Finally, I am currently booting with pcie_aspm=off kernel flag. If I don’t do this I get unexpected reboots when the power settings go to suspend. I think it might be a little more challenging to sort this one out.
So far so good, working pretty productively already and getting settled in with a nice clean setup! I’ll work on my two issues, but don’t be surprised if I end up having to create a topic or two to get help with those!
Then I tried Pop!_OS for about 4/5 months as my main distro, and I really grew to love it. It’s polished in a way that most other DEs aren’t, but the ultimate niggling factor for me was the lack of customisation outside of the need to install extensions to make the DE even work.
Very slick though when it does work, and I love the overview view. The animation in and out of that view is smooth as butter.
To be absolutely honest I don’t mind Gnome, I even like it’s default workflow, but the devs of it… pisses me off. As in seriously. On one hand I get it, they get so much s**t from people for “removing features”, but on the other hand many of them have the Steve Jobs approach to design: “We have the best looking AND ultimate workflow. IF you don’t like the default workflow it’s because you are an inferior human being”.
It doesn’t help that they both recommend Extensions AND deliberately break them. The official reddit is full of actual devs recommending this extension or that extension… then without a second thought break them completely two days later.
Plus my ultimate pet peeve: They have (since many versions ago now) removed the choice of default programs. Specifically the terminal. That is simply not acceptable to me: I want to use another terminal as default and the only way to do that is to actually break the system by linking the command for gnome terminal to another terminal.
