2023-07-08
So yeah, I distrohopped again.
With two entries already entirely dedicated to distrohopping, this blog might end up being just a log of my distrohopping journey.
Gladly, Debian (hopefully) has put my distrohopping journey to an end.
Yep, good old stable Debian 12 Xfce, without much change to theming. In terms of appearance, what i changed are only the panels and the wallpaper and replaced the old application menu with the whiskermenu.
It does what needs to be done, while using very low resources and storage (psst, yes storage is still an issue as my laptop only has a 128gb emmc storage).
The text editor is great that it is usable and fast, and fast to load. I also changed the font of the text editor to Jetbrains Mono. I even changed the font used in the system to it. So yeah, most, if not all, are monospaced.
Also found out that catfish (the file search utility) is no longer necessary as Thunar (the file manager) now has a built in search tool.
As I am too dumb to make use of a tiling window manager, and find it unapplicable to my workflow to have multiple workspaces that I can't see which workspace has which software running, the traditional workflow used in Xfce is what suits me best.
But still out of this, I made good use of tiling to the left and right side of screen. Just edited the shortcut in the settings and voila.
Oopsie daisy, just fucked up kind of a big time. Somehow sound is not sent to the tv when connected through hdmi. Debian 12 Xfce uses pulseaudio, so being a braindead person, i spent around 30 mins just searching for solution. When I can't find one that works in my case, I distrohopped. To Debian 12 KDE.
And Debian 12 KDE still uses pulseaudio, so same problem. No choice, go to slow Gnome. Turns out not to be that slow anymore, or just how Gnome is packaged and set in Debian 12. Last time I used Gnome, it was slow in Fedora 38. But hey, at least now the audio is now being sent to the tv, and not just plays on the mediocre laptop speakers.
🤯️🤯️🤯️ So now I'm in Debian 12 Gnome. Fast enough for my use. Not that bloated. I already removed the gnome-games that come with it by default. (I know you can install just debian without any DE and just install debian-core or something, but somehow the wifi does not work after the base debian install even when it was working during installation.)
Yes, it consumes more than a gigabyte of ram on boot up, but luckily i upgraded my weakass celeron laptop to 8GB of RAM. And most of the time I spend on my laptop is just using a browser, file manager, and text editor. So yeah, definitely not very technology intensive (???m not sure with my words) doesn't need that much computing power.
I already knew that I am fucking dumb. But not this dumb. The answer was there all along. It was just put under a different settings tab. I mean why tf is it not in the output device and instead it is on the configuration tab?
But anyway, as my experience with Debian 12 Gnome was bad. The terminal is bad (can't explain this). The text editor is bad, its looks, the enormous spaces between lines of text, the functionality of remembering the last session open (I get why this can be useful but I didn't even bother turning it off).
Though I should give it some points as it renders the syntax highlighting of html just fine, especially when using the header tags. No idea why gedit, luna, mousepad, and xedit lags then just straight up lose syntax highlighting when typing a header tag, this problem doesn't exist when copy-pasting a complete heading tag with opening and close already.
The Nautilus File Manager or whatever it is called at the present is bad. It is slow. Its aesthetics doesn't suit my taste. I can configure it more specifically using the dconf-editor but it changes my preferred settings on new boot up, at least just the preferred way of sorting files and folders (according to type in list view).
The battery is worse but not overly much. I can get around 4.5 hours in GNOME while getting around 6 hours in Xfce, from 80% to around 20%.
Oh God, the browsers Firefox and Chrome have abysmal performance in GNOME. And oustanding performance in Xfce. Both browsers can only handle up to a few tabs in GNOME until it starts being sluggish. On Xfce on the other hand, I can comfortably open a dozen tabs of YouTube and have no problems with playback and freeezes.
As I am just a mortal who barely knows shit about linux and its desktop environments, I don't know if my problems and issues encountered in GNOME can be easily solved. I just can't handle the bothersome way of configuring GNOME when I can just comfortably use good old stable Xfce in good old stable Debian.
Really hoping that this is the last series of distrohopping that i will do for the next few years.
