I am aware of the perks of having your /home not tied to your root filesystem. In my case, I have a single LUKS2 encrypted btrfs partition with separate subvolumes for root and home.

I just don’t see the reasoning for having it on a separate drive, as the OP explicitly states in their post. Both drives would have the same likelyhood of failing and it makes encryption (though, only slightly) harder.

What?

Why do you need /home to be on a separate drive?

Long live NewPipe!

I recently installed VMware Workstation on Fedora 41 KDE. Browsing Broadcom’s website to find the download link was one of the most abysmal life experiences I have ever had. So, at the end, I went to the AUR and got the link from the PKGBUILD there. I installed it by running the executable as root. I didn’t have any issues with the modules since the Workstation automatically offers to install required kernel modules upon launch if they are not present. Only manual intervention I had to do was to disable Secure Boot from BIOS since MSI likes to enable it each time I update it’s firmware.

That’s a great build, OP! I got nearly the same system running Fedora KDE, at least architecture wise.

I recommend getting an SN850x for your SSD instead. It is not much more expensive but so much faster. Everything I do on my system is super snappy. I even got a close friend also to buy this one and they are super happy as well.

What?

Linux Mint, my beloved ❤️

You definitely should. I am running Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma and I don’t miss anything running the Wayland session. I am using it for all my gaming, university home assignments in a Windows VM, playing with local LLMs, content creation and programming. In fact, Fedora had Wayland enabled by default for nearly a decade.

Wayland doesn’t require specialized hardware though. How is it obsolescence?

Deprecation of X11, currently, only affects cutting/bleeding-edge distributions and will, hopefully, push app developers to target Wayland properly.

Those who strictly require features of X11 can continue using desktop environments running on it. It is not like deprecation of X11 in GTK5 will suddenly make all apps using other toolkits require Wayland.

I am not sure. It has been like this for over a month.

Yes, I do have the same issue. Though, I noticed it with secure notes since I usually only update those. It does actually save the first time, it is just the UI that doesn’t update. You can verify it by clicking on another login and back to this one after the first save.

If you are a little keen on learning the ins-and-outs of Linux, I highly recommend staying with Fedora. In my opinion, it has a great balance of stability and cutting-edge software selection in its repositories. The problems you have outlined are due to the default desktop environment choice of GNOME in Workstation Edition. The developers of GNOME are kind of perfectionists and have their own vision of what a desktop environment should be like. This often leads to having some common functionality most people want missing, at least without community-made extensions. KDE Plasma, on the other hand, is quite receptive to feature-requests and has all the functionality you mentioned, while being just as well supported development-wise.

Can you currently install flatpak apps through commandline? If yes, check your software sources from Discover settings page.

How did you install Arch and Plasma? My installs always come with both flatpak and Flathub enabled by default.

Depending on the distribution you use, you might need to set up Flathub.

Have your swap file in another btrfs subvolume. E.g: @swap mounted to /swap and put your swap file there. All subvolumes under the root subvolume will be excluded from your snapshots.

This is one place where I love MacBooks. Most other touchpads are loud and can only be clicked near the bottom border.

I highly suspect the culprit is the touchpad. I have a pretty modern ASUS Zenbook laptop and its touchpad has horrible palm rejection on Linux, but works just fine on Windows. I often move the cursor to a point where a click wouldn’t do anything, like the bottom panel in KDE Plasma, or just outright disable it for that session. My guess would be that ASUS is sending nonstandard signals to the OS which is then misinterpreted by poor libinput. My next laptop will definitely be a Framework or Tuxedo, just because of this annoyance.

Owls. They look funny.