I started with Slackware in the nineties, have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed.
I could use anything really but these days my focus have moved; I kinda just want functional and well configured up front. Using Pop!_OS 24 alpha on my gaming/dev laptop, it works well/is well put together and I’m having fun writing COSMIC apps. I’m using Ubuntu on a few servers, I picked it many years ago and they’ve been through a number of painless upgrades.
GIMP 3.0 makes it a lot easier for devs to add functionality and they're starting a UX working group.
But I find it usable, I've been using it weekly for a very long time. I'm happy to see development picking up though with more people joining.
It's certainly safer though one can probably still do some damage in /etc, if determined.
There are some other differences, for example Pop!_OS while on a LTS base still gets regular updates of kernel, Mesa and Nvidia drivers which is nice.
I believe the EU redirected open source funding to LLM/"AI". Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund on the other hand had its budget increased.
You always have to consider the sources of such whispers, otherwise it means very little. The devs, who are few and works on evenings because they have day jobs, a well-know open source issue for many projects, were clear about when they started in earnest on getting 3.0 done, less than 3 years ago. Until then they've spent most of their time adding features to 2.10 and the 2.9 branch was more of a long lived testing ground with occational test releases that cause talk sometimes. The aim was RC primo or medio this year, they're only slightly late.
But I get the feeling more devs are starting to contribute now it's near 3.0, maybe because the new architecture actually makes it easier. So there's hope a lot will start to happen. There's even a UI working group.
I'm running the 2.9 nightly, it's better in a multitude of little ways as well as having a number of new features.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83.
And one less thing to waste time on for experienced users.
Yay! Something that isn’t proprietary and resembles Obsidian!
I've been using Joplin for many years, it looks like this, works on most platforms and has [optionally encrypted] cloud support.
For a while for me it took over from drawing rectangles on the desktop.
I dunno, a lot of CEO's are probably laughing all the way to the bank.
Yeah, GuildWars2, Valheim, Pathfinder WotR, etc. those sort of games.. So I’m a bit niche, some gamers have more issues than I.
I got a gnome-session installed for games that have problems with COSMIC but fortunately haven’t needed it for a while now.