I wish the thing about tags was ironic

Concerning the rest of your points: Icons are one of the few things I never had an issue with in Gnome. ;-)

Concerning automated setups, the only system I care fore is Linux and am forced to use macOS. For my use cases, I don’t care about the tooling/possibilities for companies to install crap on my machine (my company does that). Using Ansible to automate my setup for macOS is theoretically possible, but such a crappy experience compared to Linux, that I don’t bother. Not to mention no unified installation/update system on macOS and the shitty default apps like Finder, Window management etc. The solution which sucks the least for me is using macOS as dump VPN driver for my virtual Linux box, so I can get shit done.

… no need to argue about bad Gnome defaults, it is trivial to disable all animations and the shell is fast enough even on my netbook. :-)

Wait - Gnome user here (heavily modified and with multiple extensions) …

macOS window management and trying to using it via keyboard is a totally miserable experience (forced to use it at work :-/ ) … at the same time, Apple thinks their users are smart enough to use tags, while Gnome developers think the user are too dump to use tags. I still happily prefer Gnome over macOS on my desktop for literally everything, macOS has no proper software management, all apps try to up-sell me on their shitty i-cloud offerings, setup cannot be properly automated, the ‘auto features’ totally suck and do everything I do not want them to do and macOS feels too slow for the hardware it runs on…

Gnome sucks, but it sucks less for me than all other alternatives on the desktop at the moment…

My biggest reason to stick with Gnome are Wayland, Evolution/Online Accounts and that I can automatically configure Gnome to something usable with dconf/gsettings. I am not holding my breath that KDE ever gets their KMail story under control, stability as in zero crashes and being fully configurable via Ansible. The very moment this happens, I’ll happily jump ship. (Of course also waiting for Wayland support for Xfce :-P)

It sounds really strange, that you end up with the problems you described given your usage.

My systems are heavily modified/tweaked, so one would expect I would experience the problems you describe.

Given your usage, using an immutable distro sounds like a no-brainer to me, immutable Linux was created with your usage scenarios in mind.

In your shoes I would still try to pin point the root cause of the error, because in theory™ your usage should not be a problem for any of the mainstream Linux distros and we don’t know if an immutable distro solves your trouble.

Given your 6 montish circle it sounds like some kind of accumulation? If the computer runs stable for several month, IMHO you can rule out hardware problems, unless you have a kernel update every 6 months… :-P

Can you be more specific about your hardware, laptop model and Ubuntu version you are using?

If you ever figure out what happened, or if you try out an immutable distro and it runs for a year for you, give us an update! :-)

IMHO you should first figure out what exactly happens/goes wrong with your Ubuntu installations.

Immutable distros might or might not be a solution, but if the core of the problem is really the quality of the Ubuntu updates for example, you could try to run Debian (stable).

But again, the suggestion to use Debian is throwing a solution in the room which might not fit your problem.

Just as a reference point: I am running Debian stable on Laptops, Netbooks, Raspberry Pis and in virtual machines (AMD64/AArch64) and have no weird bugs, everything works for years now and runs smooth.

Concerning the Steamdeck… I love them, they run perfectly fine, but unless you are tweaking them/do more than run games, you cannot really compare them to what happens on your desktop.

Vivaldi is a great Blink-engine based browser, my fallback in cases Firefox fails to render a page I really need.

Outstanding are the official flatpaks for amd64 and Aarch64.

(I do not understand why it is impossible for Mozilla to provide an official Aarch64 flatpak.)

Awesome, @hades@hades@lemm.ee . Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction! :-)

No worries and thanks a lot for your suggestions/answers!

Thanks for your suggestions: Can confirm start/end bytes are wrong. Tried to open in Shotwell, GIMP, Firefox, Google Chrome w/o results.

I assume the hard drive is ok: I also have some git repositories on the drive and the checksums for git are correct. Every other file on the drive is ok, so cryptolocker malware could have only been on my phone at that time.

Tried GIMP, Firefox and Chrome - does not work.

Thanks for your suggestions, added the output to the original question!

Thanks for your answer, I guess fair enough. ;-)

Good luck for your survey!

Sorry, but how are a lot of the questions relevant for this community?

Especially concerning the (family) income, age, being neurodivergent etc. These are sensitive information and seem more fitting for a market survey/selling ads.

What is your goal with the answers? What are your research questions? How will the answers help this community?

This. I really don’t understand the down-votes - using the correct words makes life easier for everyone, including the OP.

Because we are men/gals of culture! :-P Hadouken! ;-)

Nice, I love Yakuza, really very special in the world of gaming! :-)

• Street Fighter 2 Turbo (Arcade)
• Chrono Trigger (SNES)
• Contra (NES)
• Dark Souls
• Warcrat 3 TFT (non remaster)
• OpenXCom with X-COM data
• XCom
• Slay the Spire
• OlliOlli
• Mark of the Ninja
• Yakuza0
• Horizon Chase Turbo

(No order, might be not exactly 10 :-P)

Thanks, great write-up!

This! So great when simmering/cooking stuff one has to fish out of a pot. Mine is used almost daily at home!

Perhaps for perspective, because ‘rich’ is relative and I am always surprised how hard it is to forget that every person/class lives in a world of their own.

When I was studying, I had to work to support myself, coming from a working class background. My whole time at the university was like visit mandatory courses, study, work and use weekends to study some more/do classwork. My parents could neither help me financially or with advice.

I meet a study friend from a normal ‘middle class’ background on the street. He would spent many weekends to do short trips, go sailing, visit family, … perfectly fine and I am happy he could afford to live like that. During our conversation he mentioned casually, that he was going on a multi week vacation, because ‘Sometimes you just need to get out and see something else.’. He didn’t mean it in bad faith, I just felt like shit because at that time I haven’t had vacation for multiple years.

Now, I am perfectly fine with my friend living a good life. What really gets to me, though, is that for example the middle class takes all their privileges for granted and nowadays you can suddenly read in newspapers discussions, if it is still worth to go work if you cannot even afford to buy your own flat/house. Where I live, working class couldn’t afford to buy a flat/house for decades now, but there was never a discussion whether it would still be worth for the working class to work. The discussion is more about how to force the working class to work more for less.

So Firefox Nightly for Linux on top of Arm64 hardware, like Apples, Lenovos, a whole bunch of Chromebooks etc.