Never been happier

[stowed4sea]

I'm kinda shocked about two things.

1. How helpful this community has been. It seems most forums these days just respond to the quick and easy questions users ask and when I try to ask something more difficult (to me at least), I rarely get a response. It has me so jaded, I almost didn't post anything here because I really didn't think I'd get any usable answers. I was surprised, and I shouldn't be such a sour grump with low expectations.

2. I have found KDE with kwin and khronkite to be the perfect mix of window manager and traditional desktop for me. I used to use Awesome WM, I loved the increased productivity it gave me, when it worked the way I wanted it to, but just didn't have the time to stick with it and get things setup the way I wanted and would switch back to gnome often. I saw the possibilities, where everything went where you wanted it to go and rarely had to leave the keyboard and use the stupid mouse.

But then, because I have 5 screens, 1 main curved larger resolution and 4 off to the side (so I could program and daytrade at the same time), it just caused problems when I went to run a steam game, It would launch full screen, and then when I added it to the exception list, it would launch on the wrong monitor, and I'd fix that and so on. It just kept having little thing after little thing and I got tired of fixing, so I found myself starting to go back to gnome just to get that thing done I wanted easy and fast, because I didn't always have the time to setup it up nice in Awesome, it just was a pain.

So then some things in PopOS started bothering me, I figured I need more productivity, may as well get one closer to debian and just use ubuntu. I found KDE and kubuntu and I started using it and saw kwin, it's a lot nicer and much more flexible with scripts than any other window manager I've seen included in a "standard" desktop environment. It's awesome! And it gave me the flexibility to use it 95% of the time, but when something happens that I need to make a script for or customize and don't have the time to set it up how I like, well, I'm already inside a KDE desktop, so I don't need to log out and back in as a different environment. It's really given me so much flexibility, and the default panel has so many options, It sure as heck beats setting one up in a window manager. I know some people may like the straight up window manager, light and nothing else needed than what they want and you can setup it up however you want, but for guys like me, that want like 95% window manager, and just doesn't have the time to setup all the minor custom tweaks I'd need/want, KDE is by far the best I've seen.

Anyway, well, that turned into a long novel about my life story, sorry, but just wanted to say thanks to all, I think after distro hopping a lot, I've finally found my long term home.

My linux journey has been an odd one. I started out coming from windows to using Arch. Just because I had to. I'm smart and had something to prove to myself I guess, that's just the way I am. I hated the idea of using one of the most popular distros like ubuntu that 'everyone' else used, even though that isn't really true, I just couldn't do it.

However, I'm getting older, and realizing that time with my wife is much better than time spent fiddling and fixing and customizing things. I still tinker from time to time, but I don't want to HAVE to tinker when I don't want to tinker, and for me, that really means ubuntu is the way to go. I don't know why it took me so long to try ubuntu. I went from Arch, then endeavor, then manjaro, then Arco for awhle, then Debian, then MX, then PopOS, then finally Kubuntu. Then I found how great support was in this thread and it just kinda sealed the deal for me. Anyway, wanted to say thanks again to all, as I turned a long story into an even longer story now, so I'll stop typing.

[Snowhog]

Geez! Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel!



Welcome to our world.

[jlittle]

I started out coming from windows to using Arch.

Impressive. Roughly when was that, I wonder?

[stowed4sea]

Impressive. Roughly when was that, I wonder?

I can't recall exactly, maybe around 2-4 years ago. I was talking with a co-worker just yesterday about what actually made me switch and I couldn't recall. I didn't do a dual boot or test install in a virtual machine, I just went to my bios, wiped my ssd so there was no going back to windows ever! lol.

The Arch wiki is what's impressive. It wasn't like I was doing it long ago where all I had was a terminal and man pages. I had the terminal and the arch wiki on my phone. It was just where everyone said not to start, so the contrarian in me said that's where I have to start. I really enjoyed it, and for someone like me that loves to figure things out, it was actually very beneficial. It was a lot of fun, but after several months running it, I realized I wanted to invest more time in being productive instead of fixing things.

The kicker was my trading software is the only one I know that releases an official linux version, but they release it as a .deb. I've used a few others through wine, even tried using that software through wine, but it just wasn't right. Actually I was using a windows only based software when I first started Arch for trading. It ran very well on Wine, but as I became more of a developed programmer, I realized it had a poor API, and just a scripting language, I wanted something more powerful so found MotiveWave where the SDK used Java, so that was powerful and awesome. It wasn't in the AUR then, I couldn't find anything more powerful than thinkorswim there, but that's not good enough for my needs and MotiveWave did have a .deb release. I did find a useful piece in the AUR called debtap which helped and worked, but really I didn't want to rely on that, and weekly software updates doing that became a pain and a time waste for a distro that caused a lot of other time investment for times when I just wanted to relax and play a quick game, or run a other piece of software, but had to spend an hour getting it working.

So that's what really drove me to something Debian eventually, but Debian had a lot of the same time-investment issues as Arch. I avoided Ubuntu and it's direct flavors because, I don't know, it had the stigma in my mind that it was for "beginners" and even though that's not true, I couldn't shake the feeling. I wanted to be different, I didn't want a popular distro, even though that's basically what PopOS was at the point I tried it. Eventually I realized that everything was forcing me towards Ubuntu so finally relented. I think a lot of it has to do with perception. I think too much about my self-image and wanted to tell my friends (who couldn't care less, and didn't even know what I was talking about) that I'm a cool Arch user, or I'm a cool random distro builder myself. Arco linux is awesome at that by the way, if anyone wants to go down the path of learning how to make their own distro. I learned a lot from using Arco and their different versions to basically make your own distro, there's so much info there.

Anyway, I don't know why, but Ubuntu still has that idea in my head I can't shake where I'm too cool for it or something. I don't know why I can't get rid of that thought. Experience has told me this is by far the best distro for me and my needs, and despite my happiness using it, that thought is still there. Oh well, I'm not switching again. I love it. I know I have problems

[jlittle]

The Arch wiki is what's impressive.

Yes, I consult it often. Can be very succinct, worth carefully reading every word.

The kicker was my trading software...

I'd have thought you'd be running lots of Python machine learning in containers. Then the distro becomes less relevant.

Anyway, I don't know why, but Ubuntu still has that idea in my head I can't shake where I'm too cool for it or something. I don't know why I can't get rid of that thought.

Peer (considered widely) pressure? No pain, no gain?

Sometimes the six month cadence has been inconvenient for me, in both directions. I was made to sorely regret not staying on 14.04 until 16.04, and I've needed to add repositories, or build from source, to get up to date software occasionally.

[kc1di]

They say with age comes wisdom. At my age I think I have forgotten much. But I do find Kubuntu good and solid and pretty much stick with the Long term releases now. So It's good to have you here and will look forward with your experience to seeing you around the forum. Glad Kubuntu is meeting your current needs. Enjoy and Happy New Year!