My onboarding experience — praise with some feedback sauce

Desktop Environments Plasma
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Hey, I just felt like writing this today. Hopefully it’s at least a bit motivating for the developers in this community — and if my small bit of feedback helps too, then all the better!

My previous Linux experience:
I tried switching about 3 years ago but couldn’t keep with it — remote work during COVID took priority and I didn’t get my Citrix remote work portal working properly on Linux, so I went back to Windows.

From my previous Linux adventures I at least understood the basics: terminal basics, what a swap file is, etc.

For context: I’m running EndeavourOS + KDE Plasma 6 on a desktop PC (Ryzen 5 5600X + AMD Radeon 7900 XT).

This time already shaped up with a good start:

  • Install was clean and without problems.
    Sure, it was an easy bar to clear with a fresh SSD as a target, but still, smooth.
  • The EndeavourOS welcome page was good and well-rounded help, with one big caveat (Endeavour devs, that one’s for you:
    The section about switching display managers felt like a suggestion that I should change it. After clicking through that I had to reboot 4 times just to find my KDE desktop again, because KDE/SDDM was the last option in the list — not very user-friendly.)

Very happy with the default settings.
I was able to find almost everything easily, thanks to the good and fast search function.
Global hotkeys — chef’s kiss!

Printer setup was easy, monitor off and sleep settings were sensibly configured out of the box and working properly — awesome.

Taskbar configurability:
At first it felt very clunky how the UX is designed, but that clunkiness is more than made up for by the options and flexibility.

Half a KDE feature:
Being able to easily write a script, then work it into KDE as a button on my taskbar to switch between 2 audio drivers — and then have it bound to a global hotkey too — very satisfying.

Had to do nothing to have my AMD CPU and GPU working (except maybe choosing the right version of Steam — there were a lot of options in pacman/yay).

Special shoutout:
Some language AI was a big help (or more accurately, a fast help), but of course I’m aware that all that info it has was scraped from user-filled forums and boards — so shoutout to all of you too!
PS: i posted this on KDE’s Forums as well, i hope that isn’t seen as spam, not sure how much those two user groups intersect, but i wanted to let both dev teams know my praise.
I did let this text be checked over by that evil AI too, but just for spell and grammar check, the words are 100% my own. English is a close second to my native german.

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Hello and welcome,

I would also just give an extra warning about relying on one of those language models. They have no concept of ‘correctness’ and that information it scraped could very well be dated or for a different distribution even if it would otherwise technically be accurate .. which is already a bit of a hurdle to be completely honest.

This is even worse if you get down to ‘coding’. These things cannot do basic arithmetic, so I would not rely on them for creating a script recipe or writing your bash functions.

Pointers or summaries of information .. maybe. Like defining a thing. But even then to be sure you will have to check it against good sources of information. Which would kinda defeat the purpose of using the ‘AI’ in the first place.

Dont take this as some sort of hyper critique. I just dont want you to ‘sudo rm -rf /’ just because it read enough ishposts claiming its a command to ‘make computer faster’. Yes it now requires ‘–no-preserve-root’ which I chose not to include, but it was not required at the time.*

(This is based on a real world wallpaper and an acquaintance I had that followed the writing. See the 11th line in this image: https://imgur.com/rymW8Jt)

Take care and happy penguining. :penguin:

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Yeah, is see what you mean, while the linux stuff was helpful, as a Pathfinder 2e GM, i noticed it pulling shit from pf1 pf2 pf2 remaster willy nilly, actually cautioned my players to double check and don’t give me chatgpt interpretations of rules

Lol, had also a good laugh and saved that wallpaper anyway =P