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At least Grandma's cookies are yummy.
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Gaming was in a sorry state, and there were driver problems with Broadcom wifi modules specifically that were so bad the recommended fix if your laptop had a Broadcom wifi module was to buy a usb wifi dongle and leave it plugged in at all times, but it was still a lot more pleasant to use for non-gaming tasks than Windows was.
I loved Compiz-fusion.
I definitely didn't play a lot of games back then. (Though the ones I did play, mostly Winnie the Pooh kiddie games... six year old me probably would have strangled anyone whose advice or actions led to her not being able to play any of her Pooh games. But she also might have had a surprising amount of patience to troubleshoot them...) The main things I eenjoyed doing on the computer back then were tinkering with the system, essentially the digital equivalent of taking apart your toys (or your dad's toys...) to see how they worked (which I know lots of our type of folks probably did as kids), and drawing stuff in Paint.
Honestly? Me now would not have the patience for 00s/early 10s Linux. But little me at the time would probably have loved it. But of course, I didn't know enough about computers to know the questions to ask that would have led me there.
Ooh, I've heard of Compiz... That was the thing that could display your virtual desktops as a rotatable cube, make all the windows wobbly, and set them on fire when you closed or minimized them, right? I like to think I'm mature enough nowadays to not be too miffed I missed out on that time or that such things don't really exist anymore, but gosh, I kinda want flaming windows... and little kid me would have had so much fun with the cube thing and wobbly windows. (One of my favourite Winblows features at the time was the cursor trails... and custom cursors were neat too. Never did find the set of teddy bear ones I'd always hoped existed somewhere out there.)
I was a teen at the time, so I turned on every possible Compiz effect to the maximum and felt very smug when several years later windows introduced slightly transparent window decorations that tanked system performance.
Yeah... the glass effect was kinda cool, I really liked it. But it's got nothing on the stuff Compiz could do. I wasn't into Linux in that thing's heyday but I really wish you could still get some of those effects. I've seen videos and there was cool shit in there.
My favourite fun graphical effect I've seen on a modern Linux DE, though, has gotta be the KDE scaling cursor thing. What can I say, I still find cursor effects stupidly funny after all these years. (I remember a browser game I used to play as a child, that had a loading screen gimmick with a little monster that'd chase and eat your cursor, complete with the most delightful chomp noise. I kinda want one of those as a little desktop panel.) Yes, I do realize that I'm a very childish adult at times, especially while using a computer.
Gnome extensions has the cube of desktops, the wobbly windows, and even the burn on close available
But then, I'd have to use GNOME. Which I guess isn't necessarily a bad DE, but I don't think I want it.
I've tried most DEs at this point but I keep coming back to GNOME. I think the only major one I haven't tried is Cinnamon, because its core "selling" point is looking like the bad OS and that is entirely unappealing to me, and because it didn't exist yet in my peak distrohopping era.
That's really funny, because Cinnamon is the only one I have used... and I'm starting to get pretty sick of it. I'm not entirely opposed to a DE that looks similar to Windows, especially older versions of it that actually worked (relatively speaking, of course), but I don't think that's really what I actually want/care about.
Well, you know what they say about distrohopping. Usually, you don't really want a new distro, you just want a new DE.
Try GNOME
I see so many posts of people who "got GNOMEd" by accident, and now one of the crazy (affectionate) Linux nerds on Hexbear dot net is telling me to do it on purpose... lol.
Get GNOME'd, nerd
Okay, that one's good and I totally walked right into it.
You really like GNOME, huh?
About a month ago, I distrohopped because the distro I was using (PopOS) stopped using a customized GNOME and started using their own (buggy, unfinished) COSMIC DE. Now I'm using Fedora GNOME.
I like that it's fast and smooth and stable and looks nice with no effort, and is very customizable through extensions. And I like that it makes absolutely no effort to resemble The Bad OS in any way.
See, you make it sound very good, but then lots of other people talking about it say it's a nightmare to use and you need to find and install extensions for the smallest tweaks, so I'm hesitant to try it. Although "no effort to resemble The Bad OS" is a good selling point.