Removed by mod

Tried flatpak steam as well as valve’s installer script; nada.

It doesn’t matter where or how I mount the drive, the problem isn’t the drive; idk how I could have made that clearer.

What does any of this have to do with KDE, Gnome, or nautilus?

The problem only happens under KDE and Gnome on Wayland; the nautilus thing was just a curiosity. Did you read my comment?

On KDE I couldn’t get Steam to put my game library on my second harddrive. It would open up the file finder, then simply ignore whatever folder I picked (regardless of drive and folder permissions). I was able to recreate the issue on Gnome under wayland, but X11 works fine. I even tried making a symlink to the other drive in my home directory, no dice. Tried flatpak steam as well as valve’s installer script; nada.

Interestingly, it seems that the “pick a folder” button in Steam opens up a contextual file search window in X, but just a regular nautilus instance in Wayland. I’d say that this is the problem (the regular nautilus/dolphin instance not reporting back to Steam what folder I selected), but it works for moving to different directories, just not drives (in both DEs). Same thing happened on Fedora, so it’s not just “Debian is too outdated.”

But let’s be serious, if I wanted to spend a lot of time tweaking and tuning my graphical environment to be exactly what I want, I’m not settling for Gnome nor KDE. I’m not gonna go with Cinnamon, XFCE, LXQt, LMDE, MATE, nor any ecosystem. I’m going with a window manager and mixing and matching every single program/element myself.

I use i3 on my laptops. I would use Sway (because I don’t have to care about Steam), but for some reason it’s like 5x as resource hungry on these machines (constant freezes and stuttering).

>inkjet

LED printers have been around for fucking ever, and the average person doesn’t need the graphic fidelity that only an overpriced pigment soup, which goes bad in a month, can supply.

Oh, and literally every part of a toner-based printer is easier to replace/repair… so why would a printer designed around repairability and upgradability use ink???

Edit’ And I almost forgot: toner is cheaper per page than ink! Whyyy???

Because privacy is a spectrum, and it makes a good stepping off point for the people that still use text messages and social media chat clients to stay in touch. I can’t convince half of my nerd friends to leave Discord for literally anything less shit, but I can convince even my tech-averse mother to use Signal instead of FaceTime.

A few answers say “they aren’t private by design,” but don’t really go into the “why.” There’s the obvious “it’s an electronic tracking device, duh” reason, but there’s also a more nuanced reason:

Airtags are able to be picked up almost anywhere because they connect to the nearest bluetooth-enabled Apple device, and then send location info across the internet to you. Without this functionality (the ability of any and every Apple device to locate it), they wouldn’t have any way to send their location back to the owner.

Your best “privacy respecting” alternatives are something that uses meshtastic (and hoping there’s enough repeaters near you), something that uses cellular data and GPS (which is about as privacy-respecting as Airtags are), or just a key finder/beeper (which only works within a small radius)

I’m going to comment again, not to be an asshole, but because this is an entirelt separate stream of thoughts from my previous comment:

‘GUI/UX for everything, absolutely no CLI’ approach

That’s not a distro thing, it’s a Desktop Environment thing. I personally use GNOME on my daily driver, but I’ve also used Xfce and MATE and gotten away with those. I’d say that GNOME is probably the most “idiot proof,” which is why I use it, but YMMV.

Linux “requiring the CLI” hasn’t been true for quite a few years now, it just has stuck around for a couple of reasons (imo):

1. Tutorials/guides/advice about Linux tends to focus on the CLI because it’s easier to figure out someone’s OS and have them copy-paste a command, than to find out the specifics of their graphical setup and walk them through every window and button press.

2. New users need to know and understand the difference between Kernel, OS, and Desktop Environment to find the answers they’re looking for.

If you tell Grandma that you installed Linux for her, the first time she tries to figure it out herself, she’s gonna search “how to change volume in Linux” on Google, and she’s going to be bombarded with a thousand answers all saying something different, most telling her to install programs, and most telling her to use the command line. Because Linux is not an operating system, it’s a family of dozens of operating systems that can each be configured thousands of different ways.

If you tell her “I installed Fedora,” she’s going to run into the same issue, but on a lesser scale. At least there’s only a few hundred different ways on a per-distro basis.

If you tell her “I installed GNOME,” she will look up “how to change volume in GNOME,” and find her answer. But now you need to explain to her the difference between the three, and when to include that information in her searches, and she will ask “why could I just say ‘how to X in Windows?’ and didn’t have to memorize 3 different names for the same thing that all give me different answers???”

And yes, your grandma will just call you to ask anyway, but what about when it’s your friend trying to figure it out at 3 am and he can’t get ahold of you?

Meanwhile, the terminal is (more or less) distro-/DE-agnostic. So their options are to learn more about how is Opperating System formed than they’ll realistically ever need to know, or use the reviled terminal. Such is the plight of DIY OSes.

full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac

You want Windows or Mac.

If you want a computer that you can do stuff like web-browsing, document/spreadsheet/pdf/slideshow editing/creation, gaming, or multimedia processing on, there are distros and utilities on Linux that make those more-or-less easy and beginner-friendly,

BUT it requires divesting oneself of the habits, behaviors, and paradigms of other operating systems and being willing to learn anew. Community-based Libre software is developed in an entirely different way for an entirely different purpose; because of that, it is nearly impossible to recreate the same software as for-profit proprietary software. One is made by a community hacking together a functional system that suits their needs, the other is made to generate revenue, and thus has to keep users dependent on it by trapping them in dark patterns and igorance of its workings.

If you just want “Mac or Windows, but free as in beer,” suck it up, pay the devil his due, and buy one of those OSes. Libre Software is an entirely different paradigm, and thus requires a whole paradigm shift before anyone will be happy with it; on-boarding people who aren’t ready to divest themselves of the old paradigm just leads to disgruntled users who blame you for anything wrong with their PC, and creates a market void in the FOSS community ready to be filled by corpo proprietary slopware.