I have had an excellent experience with KDE on Fedora. Has been stable despite being on the forefront of updates, familiar UI approach for Windows refugees while still offering plenty of customisation options for those who seek it.
To those saying it doesn't look good, why not make the dots like levels?
Say you have only 5 colors: green, blue, orange, purple, red.
1st year: green
2nd year: replace the green dot with blue
3rd year: replace the blue dot with orange
4th year: replace the orange dot with purple
5th year: replace the purple dot with red
6th year: red + add green dot
7th year: red + replace the green dot with blue
Even if you use a box for 10 years, you will have max two dots. Sure, granularity is only yearly. An alternative refinement is to continue with the current system but collapse all the 1st year dots with a single next year's dot.
Because you need to do something yearly which is tedious and so a task you are likely to postpone. Does it really matter if the green dot on the box is from this year or 10 years ago? The important signal is the box with the red dot hasn't been touched in 9 years so if you need some space that is a candidate for getting rid of.
> In the early 2000s we desperately tried to get our governments to be less dependent on Microsoft and we completely failed
You didn't have the great unifying dislike of the orange man as a motivating factor then. Now you do and I would wager there is significant public support behind getting away from reliance on the US.
>What a great way to summarize LLM behaviour in 2026
Well they have been trained on words spoken by humans and that has been a human behaviour since time immemorial. E.g.: "I do not agree with you that you were wrong. I do apologize for my strong disagreement but we actually do need your continued guidance desperately."
Don't get me started on that. Outlook PWA is so stupid that I can't delete invitations without sending a decline response. Run all rules on the inbox? Tough luck, no such option. I use a Linux VM at work and the only Microsoft thing I am forced to run on my Windows PC is Outlook. That PC is basically the VM launcher at this point because everything else I need to run is on KDE inside the VM and I couldn't be happier that I get to use KDE both at office and home. Microsoft deserves every ounce of hate that it gets and much more.
> I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).
Buying a Windows laptop is a default even for a lot of Linux users because the alternatives are mostly too US-centric. In Asia, Framework only delivers to Taiwan - which is astounding given the technically advanced population of consumers in South East Asia. I'm not aware of System76 etc having any sales channels and after sales service setup in Asia either.
Until Asahi becomes a stable choice on Macs, if you want to run Linux on a laptop of a reputable brand, a Windows laptop is basically the only option (even though you may just wipe it). I kept mine dual boot not because I actually use Windows at home but because I paid for the bloody license, even though against my wishes.
On Linux, I have my backup script that syncs the data to two local disks + Cloudflare R2. I run it when I want to even though I can schedule it to run automatically. I also use Syncthing which syncs the important files between my main computer and phone. So I have 4 copies of the data and I'm paying only for R2 (which I deliberately opted for). The setup works exactly as per my wishes and my needs. I am so grateful that Linux has given me that freedom.
Particularly KDE. They have had some ups and downs but finally they have built a great foundation with Plasma and Plasma dark mode with Breeze is such a great balance of flexibility and fairly consistent look and feel. I stuck around with Gnome for too long in the name of simplicity but once you appreciate that Plasma gets out of your way once things are exactly how you want it, I have come to appreciate not having to install extensions for everyday "normal" things a lot more.
they tried to do something with remembering "how you left things" between sessions, and even when disabled things are still weird...
Also some power management related hooks are not working as well as before. Like if you put the computer to sleep at night, and wake it up in the morning, the automatic dark-to-light theme switch doesn't trigger. at least not always.
Wow that takes me back. I used to lurk on unix.com when I was starting with bash and perl and would see CFAJohnson's terse one-liners all the time. I enjoyed trying my own approaches to compare performance, conciseness and readability - mainly for learning. Some of the awk stuff was quite illuminating in my understanding of how powerful awk could be. I remember trying different approaches to process large files at first with awk and then with Perl. Then we discovered Oracle's external tables which turned out to be clear winner. We have a lot more options now with fantastic performance.
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