not planned, sorry

also now that I think about it, doing this sort of theme is not really a thing I'd want to be involved in (was never into "ricing" type stuff tbh), though I might just make myself do it if I really wanted to see that sight come from my own Linux install instead of OP's

that's an interesting way to say "absolutely goddamn incredible"

dotfiles?

would be willing to actually set this up for myself on some device, this almost looks perfect besides the icons on the desktop being a bit too far apart than they are on XP for real

I mean, to be fair, user groups and services really aren't a thing that a "normie" would be messing with on any platform under most circumstances, and if they would be then there'd be some understanding that it'd involve some sort of "hackerman tooling" as one might call it, whether it's Windows's service manager or the magic black window with a blinking cursor in it.

I, for one, had no idea what svchost.exe on Windows did (thought it was just M$ bloat, really) until after I started using Linux and had already made several systemd units on there and realized that Windows kinda-sorta-but-also-not-really-sometimes has that as well.

A bigger problem imo is how Linux always seems to have a point-and-click way to do most of everything that your "average computer user" needs to do... but then somebody (cough Canonical and their snapd stuff cough) fucks it up and makes it so that you can't just say "you can install everything using the app store", which results in encounters like this one.

Oh, and your "why is this even an issue anymore" things like (shameless plug) this. Seriously.

don't worry though, it's meh-ish on all distros, and nobody automatically sets it up for you (as easy as I made it out to be on NixOS, it's not, and it was only "easy" because I'd already dealt with the driver before... in fact I had to carry over my old systemd suspend/hibernate restart script for it because it doesn't really cooperate with waking up from sleep)...

...unless your reader just isn't supported at all, in which case yeah nope

This only really works for people who have hardware whose fingerprint readers are supported by upstream fprintd; would be interesting if they (or another distro; haven't seen anybody implement this yet) add a "just works" option for installing and setting up e.g. libfprint-tod-vfs0090 or python-validity (which I use on two of my machines actually), similar to how some distros (Mint included I believe, but haven't dealt with it in a while) give you an option for installing Nvidia proprietary drivers (or just make it work out of the box).

However these drivers are extremely sketch at times so... I guess there's some good out of it not being preconfigured for people (because you have to look into it yourself and realize just how terrifying they are, both security and stability wise, python-validity especially)...

(though now I'm on NixOS where I have it pretty much "just work" through not that much effort, at least not as much as on Arch, and definitely not as much as on Mint which was painful because PPA fuckery)

I had a 128GB USB "3.0" (one of the cheaper ones so might have actually be slower than 2.x max speeds) stick fail on me right after installing Mint onto it and booting into it once or twice, so yes this is indeed a thing that can happen

what's better then, web.archive.org is fucking dreadful to actually use because of how sssssllllllooooowwwww it is (for downloading big stuff off of there you can use an external download manager thing to max out your connection to make it come through faster (which is a weird concept but for some reason it does work), but websites? nah), and also... paywalled stuff

a lot of apps on the flathub website say "Unverified"

Those are usually either wrappers for proprietary stuff, for example the Chrome flatpak is unverified because it's not from Google themselves but rather somebody grabbing the official deb/rpm and rebuilding it into a flatpak (this is also how a lot of e.g. AUR packages on Arch work, basically), or open source stuff for which the dev/packager simply didn't care enough to do the verification stuff that Flathub wants you to do (doesn't actually seem that hard, but one might simply not have been aware of it or something).

Don't recall people particularly complaining about the unverified badges before Mint started hiding unverified flatpaks by default, though; suddenly after that "everybody" started noticing them.

curl -L matchctl.sh | sudo bash

yeah screw that, I'm not piping curl into bash and root bash at that

I mean I have to wipe out my ~ relatively frequently on some machines at times but that's for "actual" "reasons", LLM hallucinations not involved

Ok, now stop doing whatever it is that they're doing to the cursor layer that makes it feel like garbage (wlroots is especially bad, KDE less so but not as good as either Xorg or Windows, GNOME too but has other cursor issues so...) and then I'll finally consider daily driving any of this stuff

will try again with a photodiode instead, since it's known to be a valid way to measure stuff like this, and it seems precise enough at that

if it isn't this, then I'll probably have to dig into libinput or something

You gotta do the measurements. It's probably not even that hard, all you need is a USB mouse emulator (any microcontroller with USB peripheral support can do this and there are tons of examples) and a photodiode.

will absolutely do this, the microcontroller and mouse emulation part is solved for me already so I just need to get an appropriate photodiode and... profit