buy and large Europeans are much more racist than Americans. in america it is not at all uncommon to have a ton of different races (I’m from a small town in Texas and we had a lot of Mexicans, black people, and a couple different Asian races (yes there are different ones)). that’s not to say every European is racist and it’s not to say that none of us are, but European countries tend to be much more homogeneous than the us and as a result tend to be more racist.

cuddle with big dog

I’ll check that out as well

I’ll check it out

pretty much all of them are in “desktop effects” along with some other similar stuff.

fair enough

I’m on tuxedo os so it is flatpak and distro package by default.

the settings could definitely use some reorganization. the fact that it’s searchable helps but you can definitely tell a lot of that layout predates the current function of some of the settings.

I’ve looked at that, but I decided against it because I prefer to have apps not allowed to have focus unless I choose them. I also keep kde’s focus stealing prevention on medium.

well my distro (tuxedo os) is mostly rolling release except for the Ubuntu base, but I haven’t really looked into it’s documentation. generally if I need documentation the Ubuntu stuff works (obviously because it’s Ubuntu based).

I’d still recommend trying kde. on my system it idles at around 3.7 GB of ram without steam and discord running, and 6-7 GB with them. gnome people like to pretend other things don’t run very well but the truth is that their lack of certain features does not make them any faster, the setup of a particular system does.

download a virtual machine app (I’d recommend virtual box, boxes is great too but iirc its Linux only), download the .iso file (this is the installer) for the distro you want to try from the official website, in your app of choice create a virtual machine and select the file you downloaded. from there you just follow the installer. it may help to look up how to use the app you chose bc VMs can be a little iffy. if you’ve ever used an emulator, it’s a similar process but with ISOs instead of roms.

in my experience plasma 6 and gnome (idk what the newest one is but I’ve tried the newest in the last couple days on a couple distros) both boot just as quick and use about the same amount of resources.

if you ever feel like trying it, Linux is easy to try in a virtual machine or on real hardware (do not install it to your main machine when you first try it except in a vm, which does not change your system). I’d recommend trying fedora workstation and fedora kde because they are decent examples of the best two desktop environments. mint exists as well, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it. btw, there is no “best” distro, just find one that works for you and ignore the tribalism.

kde kinda just comes like that, taskbar and important apps (system stuff, browser, etc.) only. I’ve added some stuff but only things I use or anticipate using.

I don’t have anything I could back up to rn bc dorms, but setting up something like that is definitely in the plans and the way kde’s built in backup stuff works it should be pretty easy when I get around to it.

what’s the compose key? never heard of it but any excuse to not waste a key on caps lock sounds great.

extensions (in my testing, typically in a VM of fedora or openSUSE) are a pain in the ass to use. it’s also difficult to find the one that I’m looking for because there’s generally several with the same name. something like a system tray (iirc the extension is “app indicators”) or having the dock always visible on the desktop (idk what the extension is called) are features that most people who don’t already use gnome rely on to some degree. these things are core functionality of most desktops precisely because most people use and like these features, and adding a few of the most popular features won’t add enough extra data to really be bloat.

quick sidenote, while typing this I realized the way I have been phrasing things may sound a little aggressive. it's not meant to, this is meant to be more of a breakdown of why I think what I do about gnome as a desktop. I'm not sure how to rephrase this to be less aggressive, so I'm leaving this bit right where I noticed it instead.

I personally am very big on having all the customization I can get (kde user, obviously) but I actually did almost stick with gnome once. I tried vanilla is because orchid has just come out and while I was messing with it I found out that it had the dock extension available by default (was new to Linux at the time and didn’t know how to actually use extensions yet) and with that dock extension I didn’t mind gnome as much. the thing with gnome is that it has a lot of good ideas but it ruins a lot of them by only half-implementing what everyone else is already doing. most people would probably find it a lot more usable if it just had features that have been standard since literally the beginning of GUIs, and used to be standard in gnome.

my thoughts on that are centered around school shootings because that’s the reason schools are adding fences. to address the points you mentioned though, during my senior year when we had a fully constructed fence people still skipped school all the time (same people that always were) so the fence did not help. the whole custody thing is better solved by the parent that should have custody letting the school know about the situation at which point the school will have a legal obligation to ensure the child’s safety. shootings aside, this leaves only making kids feel like prisoners for potential changes the fence could make.

most of the things in gnome extensions should be built in and available from the settings. that being said there’s nothing stopping me from just using something else, hence why I use kde.