Switch pro worked without any tweaks as well.

I use kde6+Wayland. I do like the simplicity of Cinnamon, but it runs games slower than kde, even though mangohud claims they run at the same speed. For example, in Cinnamon it’ll say 60fps when it’s clearly in the 30s-40s, and kde actually runs the same thing at 60fps. This is with every tweak i could find, and yes, including turning on the setting to turn off compositing during games.

Kde6 is still quite buggy at times, but I’m really enjoying Wayland’s smoother general behavior over x11, even with x11 stuff like wine/proton. This is on arch + AMD rx 6600 xt. I used old gnome 2, then mate, then Cinnamon for years, but if KDE can clean itself up a little bit (no judgment tho, i get it) it may be my permanent DE. Generally when i go to report a bug, it’s already reported by someone else…

I say this a lot, but “nomacs” image viewer/editor. I take a lot of time lapse videos and I have directories of like, 50000 identically-sized images each on a smb server over gigabit ethernet and nomacs can open from a directory and quickly cycle through the photos using the arrow keys, without resetting the current pan/zoom setting (important for me), without any trouble. It takes about as long to open the directory of photos as it takes for my samba client to download the directory data.

It also has a lot of cool little quality of life features, including lots of shortcut keys for overlaying metadata and such. It has basic image editing capability as well. The only other image viewer I use is digikam, which is more for organizing personal photos. Otherwise it’s all nomacs, baby.

My favorite general image viewer is nomacs.

Less relaxing if you know that it has actual goals. There’s no actual repercussions if you fail, you just don’t get patted on the back as much. If you have that perfectionistic, completionist attitude, there’s still a tiny bit of stress. I wish the game had 0 expectations, but it’s still mostly relaxing.

I would argue that MS Office feels like it’s from the last century as well. Even the newest versions of it feel like it was made by people who have never had to use it.

I mainly use kdenlive, but blender has some advanced filters and features that kdenlive doesn’t yet, so I have to use both.

nomacs

Portal basically is an interface/backend for flatpaks to interface with toolkits & DEs. If you don’t use flatpak, xdg-desktop-portal and associated backends should be removable. Even if you do, try removing the gtk and gnome backends w/apt. Hopefully it won’t try to remove a ton of stuff due to dependencies. Then, reboot and see if the slow loading problem goes away. If it does, you can try re-adding one or the other and see if it comes back.

Does logging in take forever as well?

Also after some cursory research, some people have had problems with portal on Mint after updates as well, just like on Arch. So… definitely try it.

Random shot, because it’s probably not an issue on Mint like it was on Arch a few months ago, but xdg-desktop-portal problems can cause apps to take forever to load, but run fine once loaded.

edit: Try removing xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and/or xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Have you tried a running a different distro live f/usb or something like that? Doesn’t seem likely that it would help, but who knows…

It’s unlikely the kernel or other low-level code is the problem on 10 year old Intel hardware, though. I’ve run numerous distros on numerous different machines, many of which were Intel-based, over the last couple decades, and never had this kind of basic, low-level problem with SATA before without it being the cable or controller. Oh, I just remembered: check the PSU as well if you can. A faulty PSU could have a bad rail or wire or something that leads to these problems. If you have a known-good one lying around, depending on the motherboard, you could try temporarily hooking it up to the board and drive and see if it changes anything.

To eliminate Linux as a potential culprit, you could try to install Windows (7, 8, 10, whatever) and see if it exhibits similar problems.

Can you be more specific when you say “plays videos”?

Like in vlc, or YouTube, or something else? What videos? Like, 4k hevc videos, or literally anything?

If you are getting actual hardware/sata errors on the host (not sure if that’s exactly what’s happening from your description), and multiple drives have had a similar problem, I’d suspect the sata cable or controller/mobo. Intel had a lot of weird sata issues on their older chipsets, so I’d also recommend making sure it has the latest bios update. Could you be more specific on what kind of hardware errors are showing up? Like, maybe parts of the logs.

Still no html composing, right? It would be a serious contender for many people if it just had that feature… Even though, from my experience, most personal email doesn’t really use html…

I agree. I’m very grateful to OSS developers. I use almost exclusively OSS software every day at this point, and it wouldn’t be possible without the countless people devoting countless hours of their valuable time to these projects.

So, a question to devs, especially for smaller, more approachable projects: I have a minor (plus a bit more) in CS, a lifetime of casual coding, but never really built anything larger-scale than a C-based sh-like shell in one of my CS courses, or many years ago an IRC front-end for a chatbot engine. Mostly I just write scripts (sometimes kinda complex), or small C/C++ projects. I would try to contribute to a project directly, but I don’t want to step on toes, and most projects have people who are deeply intertwined in the code of the project. It feels impossible to get involved in any way other than testing without possibly just annoying people who have been doing it for years. I’ve known enough intimidating grizzled *nix guru people to make me paranoid that I’ll just get in the way.

How do you get a foothold in a project? Should I just start with creating my own OSS project, and once I get somewhere where I’m familiar with the flow and project management and such, then I can consider contributing more to other projects?

Or is it really more helpful to the community to just test stuff, create documentation, answer questions, etc? Would becoming another dev be more helpful to OSS, or would working on supporting projects in these other ways be more helpful?

It’s a little more than that, but not much more. It installs common packages that someone might need for a functioning GUI and has some helpers specific to EndeavourOS installed as well. It basically makes it trivial to install “Arch”.

Only significant issue that I’ve had with EndeavourOS/Arch is when I had a laptop with it installed and didn’t update for like 6 months because I rarely needed it. When I went to do a full update, it really messed multiple things up. There were just too many massive changes at once. I just shrugged and reinstalled with the newest ISO, but if I had heavily customized it or something, I would have been pretty annoyed. Ever since then I usually install it with BTRFS and auto pacman snapshots.

Also, never perform partial upgrades unless you know what you are doing. That’s apparently the fastest way to mess things up. I played with this before and it definitely will break things.

I like discreet launcher. So many oss launchers don’t support installing web apps from browsers, but it does, and it keeps my home screen clean. Only thing i don’t like is that it flows icons as a list, so if you, say, remove an app early on the list, it moves all the apps after it back one.

You really should. It can save your butt, and it’s only a few shell commands.

Also easy to install with auto btrfs snapshots so that updates can never really break anything.