The Dash Berlin ASOT 600 set (specifically Sofia) got me through my dissertation writing. Even now, if I sit down with a coffee and turn on the set, within the couple minutes I am completely in the zone for working. It’s like a brain hack for me.

I also like the Music for programming site (specifically RITES) which is also good for some focus music.

I’ve tried to get some folks to post their dissertation writing music and form a massive playlist, as it seems really common to have some certain song or album. I’m sure it’s similar for other intense work flows too.

Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.

Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. 2-in-1 from dell.

Touch mostly worked fine. Xournalpp detected pen fine too. When I flipped the screen all the way back, things get wonky though and I have to reset the Wacom drivers. Sometimes it’s fine. I also had to write a xrandr script to rotate the screen to portrait.

In general, it’s mostly alright. I hear that Wayland is much better but I haven’t tried it yet. I do use the stylus quite often for marking up PDFs though and it works well.

It’s been getting absolutely worse and worse with hardware as they shovel crap at you and then also expect you to buy subscriptions to make it usable. Keysight/agilent/ whoever they are had been really annoying about this.

We have a piece of test equipment that runs windows 2000. It has to be quarantined on its own subnet isolated from the rest of the network.

Not OP, but I’m excited about the baked in tiling. Nervous about Wayland as I think I have some stuff that will break, but we’ll see.

I completely agree. I bought one in the preorder days and was a bit nervous. It came in, and it was so much better than I thought. It works and it works well, and is fun to use. I’ve connected to a tv and done “real” work on it to boot. It is some hardware I highly recommend to anyone if they can afford it. The other cool thing is my whole library of steam games are there and still playable.

Plasma. It’s the most customizable and you can dive in and shape it. It feels much more natural for me to jump into.

I put xfce on older hardware.

Distro wise I tend to go with Ubuntu flavors most because they seem to have better compatibility for various software and stuff I need, but I haven’t really shopped around too hard in years. Work is RHEL (and clones) and they make me sad.

I can’t comment on specifics. I’m back in linux after several years away in mac land. The snap experience is awful, and confusing. I have not had the same experience with flatpaks. They seem to act more like regular apps that you update. The issue with snap is that firefox will say the snap needs to update, and that the update is pending warning my I only have days (or hours) to use it, but no way to actually do the upgrade. Then it will say its upgrading, but nothing happens. I just keep using firefox, and every once in a while it may say something like the update failed (I honestly can’t remember, since I just ignore any notification with the word ‘snap’ in it since they’re all meaningless). Eventually, when I quit firefox, it might update and quit pestering me. But how knows? Maybe it won’t upgrade, and then I’ll open it again and it won’t be upgraded.

Flatpaks, I can just update in the package GUI (Discover for me, since KDE) alongside other updates, and we roll on.

Distro-wise, I dunno :/ I like ubuntu cause its more standardized in terms of software availability — most things will support an ubuntu package. However, I’m really considering just jumping into debian and going with the rolling releases.