I guess I'm going with GNOME rather than KDE based on looking at the current state of both on Google Image Search (possibly not an accurate source) and feeling less repulsion when I look at GNOME. I don't understand why the titlebar and the "dock" with the launcher icons are 2 different things in GNOME now. Couldnt u just put the launcher icons in the titlebar I only ever run 3 apps anyway

Last time I ran desktop linux was 2016, I tried to use a late beta of KDE Plasma and it never worked right

Ok so installation of Ubuntu was smooth and it seems fine now I'm inside. I'm experiencing one problem, and it is totally baffling: Both in the installer and in the OS itself, a giant banner pops up about once every three minutes saying there is no Internet. This despite the installer downloading from the Internet fine, me running Firefox without problems, etc.

EDIT: This is really irritating actually lol
EDIT 2: It's resolved. Apparently Ubuntu HATES intranets

UPDATE: I seem to have solved two problems at once as the fonts look a lot nicer in Chrome than in Firefox. Somewhere, RMS just felt a deep pain in his heart and does not know why.

This said, the Chrome fonts also have a problem with i looking like I. lIsten.tIdal.com

Big thank you to everyone who recommended I install Gnome "dash-to-panel" my screen now looks extremely Normal. This looks like a computer screen to me

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

Now if I can just I'll be good to go*

* Ready to start the horrible misery of figuring out if nvidia/wayland are working and if not why not

Minor complaints: I want to use the Compose key. In GNOME, if you go to the settings and look up the compose key, you will find a pane helpfully explaining that the compose key is set to the "layout default".

Thanks??! GNOME could you?! Could you possibly tell me what the default *is*!?

Anyway uhhh y'all have been very helpful so: Does anyone know, until I explicitly mapped the Compose key to the Left Super key, GNOME was doing a thing where tapping the Windows key would bring up a kind of Mac OS X Expose screen showing all the Windows. Now Compose is using that key. Anybody know what that shortcut is named. I bet I could map it to something else if I knew what it was named

ALTERNATELY can I just map left super to right alt entire, or something

EDIT: It's "Show the Overview"

OPINION: It is total garbage that (according to every tutorial?) the way to get grub to default to launching Windows automatically involves manually editing a file (grub.cfg) that begins with "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE"

Just total unearned confidence that just because I installed Linux on my desktop it *must* be because I prefer to use Linux on my desktop

UPDATE: It doesn't matter that grub is confusing to change the defaults on, because the moment I boot into Windows, it disables grub completely and I have to go into the BIOS boot select menu to get back into Linux.

Which…
was…
…exactly the behavior I wanted to start with.

…the two user-unfriendly OSes on my computers are fighting, and they're canceling each other out.

OK so unrelated note, a question. I got the compose key working. Now I want to install my custom compose key mappings. I copied over the file from my copy of WinCompose and put it at ~/.XCompose. I logged out and back in.

It did nothing. Not one single app supports my custom compose mappings.

Does… anyone know how to make custom compose work on Ubuntu+Gnome? I'm having surprising troubles finding an answer on Google.

Day one Linux seems to be going okay with my two major issues being:

- Getting apps to respect ~/.XCompose appears to be horrifically difficult, and for "snap" applications, may be impossible
- Getting "click mouse button down to scroll" behavior like on Windows turns out to be horrifically difficult and may be impossible

I *think* I have the NVidia propreitary drivers working. Wayland works, but it causes Chrome menus to glitch out, so I guess I'm going back to Xorg for now

On an unrelated note, I was *very* annoyed to discover that on Linux mousewheel-clicking a tab in Chrome closes it, but now I'm back in Windows, and testing, mousewheel-clicking a tab in Chrome closes it.

…what?

Why would this be the default behavior? That's so weird

Update on my Windows drive being mounted behind my back ( https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110487969478341949 ) : It turns out to be both more normal, and weirder, than I thought

So I thought it was irritating the mount was at this arcane mountpoint and I didn't know it was there until I clicked file browser -> "Other Locations"

Nope, not exactly

The mountpoint *didn't exist* until I went into "Other Locations" in the Gnome filebrowser, at which point GNOME creates it

Ubuntu didn't create it! The Gnome filebrowser did!