#DesktopFriday #Niri #NixOS #DankMaterialShell

From last #Friday; #Morning #Coffee and catching up on some #RSS feed reading.

I've really fallen in love fast with #Niri, so much so that it has actively replaced #GNOME on all my devices almost overnight — and, contrary to what a loud minority might think of it, I have always enjoyed using GNOME, and still prefer to use various GNOME and GNOME-related apps.

Niri is the first tiling (and, importantly, scrollable) window manager that has really clicked for me. Combined with the rather unfortunately named #DankMaterialShell, it really offers a fantastic setup that mostly just works for me.

I like having a GUI for some of the common tasks (like switching audio outputs, connecting to WiFi, toggling Bluetooth, etc.), and #DMS provides pretty much all of that. So the pair really ends up allowing me to just enjoy using my computer(s).

With this change in desktop environment, I've also decided to switch from #Fedora to #Debian. While some things feel a little less smooth or "desktop user nice" out of the box, it's a very nice and familiar feeling to be able to use something I've basically always used for my server needs, now in a desktop setting too.

There's nothing wrong with Fedora of course, I really feel that it's one of the best choices for a great out-of-the-box experience —with the exception of video decoding and if you're unfortunate enough to have picked Nvidia hardware, those two require a few manual steps— but I just want to try something that's a bit more... boring in the right way?

That, and I'm secretly keeping my fingers crossed that Debian will make some smart(er) decisions with regards to LLM/AI adoption. But given where everything is going in the tech world these days, that's probably a fool's errand on my part.