My Current Set Up
16GB RAM
512 GB Hard Drive
Distro: Linux Mint Debian Edition
Desktop Environment: Cinnamon
Display Server: X11
Processor: 11th Gen IntelĀ© Coreā¢ i5-1145G7
Previous laptop: Microsoft Surface Pro 7+, 8GB soldered RAM, 256GB Hard Drive, processor i5\
Unfortunately I have been through many distros trying to find the perfect āfitā (and losing some data through my eagerness and inexperience). First, I tried Ubunto Pop!OS. Lasted maybe a week, very plain in terms of settings and customisation but nice, just not for me. Next came KDE Neon. I truly tried to stick with this one as I loved the amount of customization, themes, and Kwin is a magnificent window manager. However, when my task bar decided to stop working the day after I spent a week trying to make my cursor non-miniscule, I gave in. It did not help that I had my surface pro, so KDE was not a great choice for my limited RAM. I accepted defeat and moved onto something that would hopefully not eat through my RAM like before.
Evenually I settled on XFCE with itās minimal layout, conf files for literally anything you could dream of, and the stability of plain old debian. I was in love, even if the environment was not as modern as I would have liked. To be honest I probably wouldāve stuck with that for awhile as it truly was amazing when I had such low RAM.
However, I unfortunately wouldnāt be me without impulse purchases made of anger and hours of research. Eventually, I found a beautiful Lenovo for a decent price, nicely refurbished. The ram was double what I was used to + upgradeable, I have absolutely no regrets. When she finally arrived the first thing that I did was evict windows and try out Fedora KDE Spin .
I donāt know why, but I hated it.
It didnāt have the simplicity of X11, and I still felt like I was constantly fiddling to try and find that ārightā feeling. After a few weeks, I give in to the godawful =GNOME= hype, and hop on over to GNOME 49. I understand many people love GNOME but I find it abhorrent, like who gets rid of the system tray??? As a DE I found it barely useable without extensions and despite being open source it had a very corporate feel to it. So after a quick cry, I lasted less than a day with GNOME before compleely throwing away Fedora. I then tried on LMDE because I donāt personally agree with Ubuntuās philosophy on wanting to get rid of X11, and I also just don't get the hype (do let me know if you do know, I am nosey). And here we are! I have missed x11 dearly, draggy windows and everything.
My goal is to make my laptop as functional, fun and girlypop as possible. I adore pink, specifically baby pink, and the lack of cute themes for linux is disappointing to say the least. So, I am slowly hunting down the pretty pinkest of extensions, themes, icon packs, customization that I can find - and hopefully learning how to make themes from scratch\