Once Windows got rid of the gorgeous Aero theme starting in Windows 8, plus the shitty UI/UX that Windows got again starting in Windows 8, pushed me to Linux.

Honestly because it’s quite customizable, that’s about it. Being able to customize my software to look and work the way I want them to is a big reason why I use certain programs over others.

EndeavourOS as the distro of choice for easy installation and AUR access.

Depending on the DE, if it’s not MATE, I almost always install Caja, Engrampa, and MATE Calculator since they just have the most sane look and UX to them for my use cases.

• Waterfox as my browser of choice (reason over Firefox is that it offers tabs below address bar as an option in Preferences rather than mucking about in userChrome.css files that often break on updates)
• Vivaldi as a secondary browser for websites that only render right in Chromium
• Kitty as my terminal of choice.
• Clementine as my music player of choice
• yt-dlp for downloading Youtube videos as mp3s
• htop over top, also have gotop for a more graphical look
• exa over ls

MATE as is or Xfce with some MATE software (swapping Thunar for Caja, swapping the XFCE calculator program for MATE’s calculator, using Engrampa instead of whatever Xfce uses for a file archive manager, etc.). I like things simple and following roughly the same paradigm that I’ve used for years.

And for the love of god, PLEASE KEEP MENU BARS AS THEY WERE IN THE PAST! Stop removing menu bars from programs in favor of “hamburger buttons” or whatever nonsense modern programs like to use! That’s honestly one of my biggest gripes with “modern” software, they keep changing the paradigm to something that I haven’t used and I can’t be bothered to relearn everything.

I disagree. I actually like the LibreOffice, non-tabbed, UI. It’s a UI/UX that I’m used to from Office 2003 and honestly prefer. The 2007+ ribbon interface makes things harder for me to find.

Anything after 7 is bad in my eyes. I HATE the direction Windows went with the UI style, doing away with the Vista and 7 Aero look. Plus Windows 10 drives me up the wall trying to find the proper settings (is it Settings or Control Panel? Why do we have both?!).

Traditional for everything. Scrolling down means the view goes down. The mouse controls the camera (the reason why I always invert Y axis on controllers).

Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.

X11. It just works for me, no reason to switch. Plus I exclusively use Xfce or MATE which as far as I know do not have Wayland support.

Nope, never learned. I’m 31 in the US. Never had the need to learn as I was raised with automatics only.

That’s why you install an adblocker like uBlock Origin in Firefox. The browser isn’t responsible for blocking ads, that’s what add-ons are for.

The Caja file manager. Hell the MATE desktop environment in general is just perfect for me. Xfce is acceptable too, though the inclusion of CSD in recent Xfce releases has made me a bit more wary of it when it comes to theming.

I also use Waterfox as my browser. A Firefox fork that has the option to put tabs below address bar (where they belong imo) out of the box without needing to muck around with the userChrome.css file.

This exists, but it has the downside of being a web app rather than a native application. Can’t use it offline for instance.

EndeavourOS on my desktop and Pop!_OS on my laptop (it’s a System76 laptop).

Xfce overall, but I like MATE a lot as well. Just give me a traditional desktop experience, I don’t need mobile-like options on a desktop.

I actually switched to MATE primarily because I like its suite of software a bit more (calculator, file manager, file archiver) than Xfce’s, though I use some of MATE’s stuff (Caja mainly) on Xfce on my laptop.

Sort of. I personally a more engaged with the system if it’s more mechanically intensive and provides a lot of character customization options (such as feats at every level or every other level from leveling up), with lots of actual hard rules to follow and not just guidelines.

5e is not mechanically intensive enough for me.

Hell even just D&D 3.5e is better than 5e imo. Though I mostly play Pathfinder 2e nowadays (I’d be happy with Pathfinder 1e as well).

Just 5e is boring as hell to both DM and to play.

EndeavourOS.

Basically Arch Linux with a nice installer, simple and easy to set up. Hopped to it from Manjaro a few months back and been enjoying it ever since.

A little bit, there’s a lot of specific subreddits I enjoyed browsing and talking in that have yet to reach a good critical mass here on Lemmy. I’ve been sharing my own custom Zelda monsters for Pathfinder 2e on the ZeldaTabletop subreddit and there’s no substitute for that subreddit over here yet (I might make one once RiF dies on June 30th).