[tannhaeuser]

So what are you using or recommending? Recently switched to kubuntu from gnome-ubuntu, and while some pain points have gone away (lack of global menu can partially be kindof mitigated, didn't have to fiddle with touch acceleration like on 20.04), I'm not impressed: middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off, power mgmt tray is lagging badly behind power events, weird dock preview and not-so-great app switching, somewhat fiddly touch targeting at times, FF crashing, updates not smooth, insists on chromium as default browser, point-/tasteless Windows-y sounds and looks, ...

All the while there are ZERO GUI apps or other capabilities I'm using that I didn't already use 15 or 20 years ago.

Eying a return to Mac OS which at least doesn't feel like you're treated as guinea pig by dicks with attitudes. Linux notebooks seem barely good enough for uninspired enterprise work on bloated IDEs and Docker/other container crap only there because said dicks couldn't agree on a set of (really old) lib versions and gui toolkits.

[dotancohen]

  > middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off,

What do you mean by this? What happens when you middle click, that you don't want or expect to happen?

  > not-so-great app switching

How do you like your app switching? I agree that the default isn't great, but in System Settings you can tweak it beyond all reason. I can help if you tell me what you want.

  > FF crashing

I haven't had that happen. What addons do you have in Firefox?

  > insists on chromium as default browser

Again, System Settings. Or, from within the Firefox settings, there might be a way to set it as default.

  > apps or other capabilities I'm using that I didn't already use 15 or 20 years ago

What apps or capabilities do you feel are missing?

[tannhaeuser]

Half of the time I want to press right-click or even left-click on the touch pad it actually registers as middle-click which is very annoying as it means a window gets closed rather than focussed; don't want middle-click at all. Undesired Middle-click-paste also happens a lot.

When I click a link from Thunderbird (weirdly as it sounds when Thunderbird is a Mozilla app) it opens chromium; dialog to set FF as default doesn't change this.

I need to retest and maybe reconfigure app switching from a (vertical) dock as you say; just doesn't feel fluent as it is.

Occasional FF crashing should probably be addressed at Moz. Maybe it's because FF on gnome gets more usage and testing. Btw, does SuSE (or Manjaro) still have a global-menu patch for FF because kubuntu (understandably) doesn't maintain such patches?

[radlad]

I don't use KDE or Wayland - I use awesome-wm with X11. I don't get a lot of Firefox crashes but one odd behavior I have noticed is that sometimes, after closing all Firefox windows, the firefox process continues to run (unresponding) in the background.

When this occurs, clicking links results in no browser windows opening. At this point I run `killall -9 firefox` and oddly, in that very moment, the link I clicked will open up in Chromium.

No idea why this happens.

[LtWorf]

> Half of the time I want to press right-click or even left-click on the touch pad it actually registers as middle-click

That's a hardware issue. If I press Q I am sure it will not be registered as ctrl+alt+Y for example.

[dotancohen]

  > Half of the time I want to press right-click or even left-click on the
  > touch pad it actually registers as middle-click

Are you sure that's not a hardware issue? This doesn't happen in other OSes on the same hardware?

[tannhaeuser]

Thanks for these helpful comments guys!

I guess I can remap middle-click to left-click using the wayland equivalent of xinput from a shell script or something. The apparent-FF-crash story described by johnmaguire and eddyb sounds very much like another thing I believe is happening on my notebook. Between these fuckups and the general alienation going on in Linux land (wayland, snaps/flatpack, systemd) I've got to say I'm not enthusiastic to go through those chores and teething probs just to get the same-old gui apps like Inkscape and GIMP (plus FF/Thunderbird) running, so right now I'm leaning to go back to Mac OS more than ever (used Mac OS on and off from 2003 to 2016).

[tremon]

FF crashing

(note that the preferred abbreviation is Fx, not FF)

Firefox tends to very much like its shared memory buffers and crashes with SIGBUS if they run out: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1245239

How much shm is enough depends on both the browser's rendering engine and the display engine, but apparently 1.5GB shm use isn't out of the ordinary. You won't find any references to shared memory (or even general out of memory messages) if Firefox crashes in this way, so it's just another thing to keep an eye on.

[account42]

> note that the preferred abbreviation is Fx, not FF

Abbreviations is never something up to the original creator to dictate. And "fx" is alredy commonly used for effect.

Next you will tell us that it's actually called Plasma Desktop and not KDE.

[eitland]

I have had KDE Neon running on one or more devices the last 6 or so years.

It is built on an Ubuntu base and is almost like Kubuntu, except I think it is set up by people in the KDE community.

For me the difference felt enourmous.

[eddyb]

> So what are you using or recommending?

I am using KDE (aka Plasma5) in Wayland mode, on NixOS unstable.

I would not recommend NixOS, just like I mentioned, and I didn't really want to get into the weeds of why, but while Nix is something that more people should try out if they're already familiar with unfortunate asymmetries (e.g. "git's data model is really nice" vs "git's CLI has sharp edges and some workflows the data model implies are entirely unserviced") and/or like to play around with experimental unpolished software, I would maybe avoid it until they actually come up with a "more declarative"/"less computational" flavor for 99% of usecases.

I've used openSUSE in the past, and while YaST2 might be less relevant now, it was shocking how much similar things were outright lacking back then (a lot of this was pre-NetworkManager to be quite fair).

A lot of people like Arch, and if Debian/Ubuntu package management doesn't get in the way I suppose KDE Neon might be nice? (I keep forgetting KDE's Discover exists, it might also help with not dealing with package management directly)

---

> FF crashing

Quite ironically, if it is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144 that's technically a gtk limitation (not only does it lead to the FF main thread having to poll gtk often enough to keep the Wayland connection from breaking, but when it does break it calls `_exit` so Firefox can't even do crash reporting, and they refused a patch to address this), and it can also happen for Chrome (which also uses Wayland through gtk AIUI).

If you want to check if it is the case, you can look in the logs (e.g. through `journalctl -o with-unit -r`) for "error in client communication".

> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off

Are you talking about the feature controlled by System Settings -> Input Devices -> Mouse -> "Press left and right buttons for middle-click"? (that is, if you intentionally press both buttons, does it trigger middle-click?)

AFAIK that's off by default, but I am on a different distro and running KDE/Plasma 5.25.4 and maybe it changed at some point, or maybe it's specific to touchpads? (which I sadly can't test because I only have an older Nvidia laptop, that can't use the Wayland-compatible drivers, or rather I would have to switch to nouveau first and deal with that etc.)

> insists on chromium as default browser

I've had issues with this in the past, some apps provide their own configuration instead of going through XDG mechanisms, or at least have suboptimal defaults.

I would check the settings of the apps which cause chromium to start, and maybe play around with Flatpak/forcing the use of XDG Portal, but that might be too much to ask.