Only tangentially related, but this post made me think about how everyone historically sees the day when Windows stopped being built on top of DOS as an advancement. If that ever happened on Linux, where there was no longer a fully functional base Linux system without graphical system libraries, my entire reality would shatter beneath my feet.

Yeah, if you have spotty internet service or are using a minimal data plan, that can be an important deciding factor. You can leave an Arch system without updating too, as long as you don’t install a new package.

Don’t get me wrong, I used Mint for a year, it’s what helped me quit macOS for good. It’s a great distro, where you don’t have to delve into advanced Linux topics just to get things working, which is what kept me as just a visitor to Linux for years prior. But once I did get the hang of Linux, I was drawn to Arch’s philosophy of installing only what you want (* systemd being the glaring exception). Then I got converted to tiling WMs. So now there’s very little about LMDE that appeals to me. I’d still recommend it to anyone though.

You can install Cinnamon on Arch though.

The difference from Obtanium seems to be that it presents an app-store front end, so you can browse and search for packages. Obtanium requires manual setup for each repo you want to add.

DankMaterialShell’s screenlocker is the only one I know that has the normal input box. But I don’t know if there is a way to install/use it standalone. I think you have to pull in the entire dms-shell package. That pulls in quickshell and it’s dependencies at the very least.

DankMaterialShell

I also just verified it worked on my Arch install. But running the mitigation command and rebooting effectively blocked it, and I’m on the Arch LTS kernel. I think the disabled modules are related to IPSec, which most desktop users don’t really need.

I believe Rocky Linux is also a free clone of RHEL.

I know in zsh, fish, and nushell, you can press a key combo to jump into a text editor of your choice. You write your command there, with all the power and shortcuts in emacs, vim, nano (whatever you like to use). Then you save and exit, and it appears in your command line, ready to execute.