Merry Christmas!

 A very merry Christmas wish to all!

To all you heathen Leftists:  There is still time to repent and mend your ways.  God offers grace to all, if you sincerely repent, open your heart to Him, and behave decently.  Jesus Christ is hope.

Linux distros

 I've been playing around with Linux distros lately.  I've had an interest for years.  In fact, I bought a copy of Suse Linux in Germany 20 years ago.  Yes, the man pages were in German.  But with the advent of Windows 11 and the increasingly abhorrent nature of Microsux Windows, I went back to Linux looking for an alternative.

Wow, have things changed over the years.  There are so many different players on the field these days!  And so many different desktops!  And mixing and matching of all sorts lets you customize your experience.  And so many versions made expressly to welcome newcomers from the Microsux gulag.  I tried several out as virtual machines, then dusted off some old hard drives and slotted them in the external holder and got to installing multiple versions.  Here are my experiences on my 7 year old all-in-one computer with 16GB of ram with a dual core 2600MHz processor.

Open Suse:  Slow and annoying.

Fedora (formerly Red Hat) KDE:  Broken.  Terrible installer.  After installation it went into an infinite loop of failure, involving negative 1770 MB of updates.

KDE Neon Plasma:  Really good, if a touch slow.  KDE is definitely my favorite desktop environment, because it is so customizable.  I like being in control of my computer, not vice-versa.

Mint Cinnamon:  Excellent.  The Cinnamon desktop is my runner-up to KDE.  The feel is similar, but Mint just runs a bit smoother.

Peppermint:  No.  Just no.  Errors while installing.  Doesn't show newly installed programs without a reboot.  Do they think this is Windows?

Zorin:  Amazing.  This distro is expressly made for newbies, and is remarkably helpful.  When you're trying to do something, if it doesn't have what you're looking for, it can often recommend an alternative.  It offers hints about what it thinks you really meant to do, that are actually helpful.  The desktop layouts are limited, but they are really good.  The default desktop is more or less what I work to recreate with KDE.

Feren OS:  A remarkable work by one man.  Really very good.  It uses the KDE desktop on a Ubuntu base, with a healthy inspiration from Mint.  He really is taking the best of what he finds, and sewing them together into a beautiful and functional tapestry.  Privacy and anonymity are baked into everything, down to the custom browser installer app.

Pop OS:  It's good, if it's the only OS you're running.  Does not play well with others.

Manjaro XCFE:  Fast and well done, but not to my taste.  Manjaro, based on Arch, is a solid base to work with.

Manjaro Deepin:  Broken.  Windows are meant to move.

Manjaro Budgie:  Works well, but I just don't like it.

Manjaro KDE:  Excellent.  I like everything about it.

Garuda KDE Dr460nized:  This is the way.  It's based on Arch, and feels a lot like Manjaro, but with attitude and humor built in.  When I mess up typing my password, it insults me with movie and TV show quotes.  I really like the desktop layout, even if some of the widgets are a bit buggy.  The event calendar works properly when relocated to the bottom dock, for example.  It's running really well on a 128GB USB 3.1 flash drive.  Even the Grub boot screen is attractive, although secure boot doesn't recognize it.