I did the same as @UncleSpellbinder and went full Oxygen theme on my new build. I’m liking the window effects of the Oxygen theme, but I still prefer the window widgets of Klassy.
I got a great deal on a “refurb” (just box damage) Minisforum UM890. It’s dead quiet and an ideal workstation.
Decided to give Fedora a chance. Installation went well, only hicup was during installation of Nvidia driver when driver installed and even though MOK-key hassle went like it should, I got error at the boot for module not loading; solved this by uninstalling and then reinstalling driver and now everything works. I assume this is partly because I have hybrid graphics.
So far everything has worked and have not touched much of terminal. I can understand why this is considered solid one.
Monitor on the left is my new 4k one, running at 150% scaling, the left is my 1440p monitor at 100% scaling.
Recent Proton/Wine updates have meant I’m able to reliably run Guild Wars 2 at a normal UI size again, and WoW is even playing ball(ish) now at 4k!
Mind you I have to use Gnome for WoW, because KWin is still buggy when it comes to that game, causing it to freeze for about 5 secs before reloading the game assets every once in a while, and Mutter seems to be less troublesome.
The Wine update to allow full fractional scaling in games was a massive one, because I’d actually had to re-install Win11 just so I could play GW2 with a UI that was large enough to read. But now that’s fixed I’m back full time in Linux, THANK GOD.
Also installed Kew, which is the first time I’ve ever used a CLI-based music player, which seems nice. Didn’t realise quite how many soundtracks I owned in Steam. Needless to say they’ll all get dumped into my /music folder for listening
So yeah… having considered many options, I decided I would go back to Mint.
At this point, I don’t know if there’s a better option for an “emergency” OS.
Mint is really nice. My only issue is that on my laptop I currently have I never have been able to get systems own brightness control working. Had to install applet for that. My guess it’s because X11 and my hybrid graphics card (integrated AMD+NVIDIA). Maybe adoption of Wayland will fix that in the end.
Installed Artix lxde openrc on my main laptop. Of course I am running openbox wm on it with oxygen-icons, oxygen-cursors, Mikachu window border and my own “custom” menu. I find it faster than some (but not all) of the other Arch based distros that it is multibooted along side of.
Tinkering around with Niri & DMS. Essentially porting my current setup within KDE Plasma.
But that would need some more work.
I’ve to say - Niri does significantly reduce the workload on my machine and I’ve got the impression that it is snappier than KDE Plasma. Only my static tiled window placement might be not work as intended and might break the general approach how Niri is facilitating the tiling behaviour.