SDDM is still X11 based, no matter which desktop you run with it. I have tried enabling Wayland on it, but it’s been… Unstable to say the least.

Spotify is CEF, I think, and it works pretty well.

No OS is perfect, as you likely do have to use a proprietary modem and some proprietary apps, but CalyxOS works well for me on my Fairphone 4. I like the base install being as free as realistically possible on a modern Android phone, especially replacing Google apps with microG. Just don’t enable SafetyNet if you don’t want it to run (sandboxed) Google blobs. That API is deprecated anyways.

The experience is smooth, free and I get a repairable phone without having generative “”“AI”“” shoved down my throat. A win on all fronts in my opinion.

Also, SafetyNet is deprecated, and Google has said that app developers shouldn’t use it for a long time before that, so I’ve never had to use it. My experience of a blob-free microG has been really good, and I trust FOSS code a hell of a lot more than sandboxed proprietary code, because I can’t be sure what it does with the data I inevitably do provide it.

MicroG has also been very clear IMO about SafetyNet not being a reimplementation, but rather a sandbox when it was relevant.

Swaylock?

I like Sway, it obviously needs a bit of configuration to be useful, but that’s partly what I like about it, and using a distro like Guix (Nix configured with Lisp) makes it easy to have the same settings on multiple PCs. Otherwise I like GNOME; it’s well supported and has many good apps. Touch/touchpad support is really good as well.

I agree with the other commenter recommending to migrate as soon as possible while the kernel still does support, but that does seem like a workable strategy if you can’t for the foreseeable future.

Use an old kernel version (if yours doesn’t still support it) and something like btrfs-convert to get a maintained filesystem instead. Works pretty well in my experience with converting other filesystems to btrfs.

OpenGamepadUI works well as a FOSS alternative to Steam if you’d like that as well.

I’ve really wanted to try bhyve but the lack of hardware passthrough support (PCIe GPU passthrough in my case) compared to KVM keeps me from it as of right now. Looks really good though.

I used this trick on my old laptop, which my dad now uses as a light gaming PC. Works well for StarCraft and Rocket League! Even DOOM (2016) works well on low/medium settings. Don’t remember which GPU but it wasn’t very high powered even when it came out in 2014.

Same, on my Debian machines I barely even think about if packages are debs or flatpaks because it’s so seamless.

Also, F-Droid recently committed to more transparency with their anti-features and many newer (and updated older) apps show a message about what the anti-feature actually entails on that particular app.

Debian also has LTS, for at least 5 years, after which an organization or company can step up to provide further updates. For example, the previous release will be maintained until 2026 and the one before that is being maintained until next year by the LTS team.

Mull’s good

I like bash, it’s very standard. If you need better autocomplete I’d absolutely recommend ble.sh, which gives you an experience more similar to fish, without having to relearn the entire shell.

Look, I’ve been a fish user for years and still use it on some machines, but there are always cases where I cannot install fish, or fish is incompatible with a program I use (even via bass) or a feature I use in bash scripting works differently. Of course, I can always fix it, but it’s always faster to just drop into a bash shell. I’m also much more familiar with configuring bash than zsh and therefore that’s what I use. That’s why bash is a staple on all my systems, even my BSD machines.

I think different shells are interesting and provide unique takes on what a shell can do, but telling people to stop using something that’s so ubiquitous and useful to learn comes off as grandstanding to me.

Chiming in to say that my Fairphone 4 worked well with Ubuntu Touch, though I have since come to the conclusion that Waydroid doesn’t really work for my usage due to many social apps not integrating well with notifications, as well as missing AGPS support, so I am back on Android with CalyxOS. If you find that GNU/Linux is not daily-driveable for you, I can definitely recommend that.

I’ve had a bunch of issues with my GTX 1080 before I switched to an AMD RX 5700 XT. I love it, but I recently put the 1080 back in use for a headless game streaming server for my brother. It’s been working really well, handling both rendering and encoding at 1080p without issue, so I guess I’ve arrived at the same conclusion. They don’t really care about desktop usage, but once you’re not directly interacting with a display server on an Nvidia GPU, it’s fine.

Yeah, I get that. I was daily driving Guix for quite a long time and really enjoyed it. As I understand it shares a lot of code with Nix. It’s just been a bit hard to integrate with a lot of the software I run due to it not being compatible with the traditional filesystem hierarchy. This is obviously a selling point for Nix/Guix as it frees it to try new ideas, but makes it harder for me to run my music production software for example, which I can’t run in flatpak officially and since it Just Works™ on Debian, I’m happy with it. Maybe I’ll get into it sometime again as the community seems to have grown a lot, and I’ve looked into running Nix on top of my Debian install.

Debian is rock-solid! A very low maintenance and comfy system in my opinion