I’m a retired Unix admin. I’ve been using Linux since I installed Slackware 3.1 from several boxes of 1.44MB diskettes. But, working in a corporate environment with lots of M$ Office requirements meant that my work desktop has always been Windows. I know it sounds crazy, but I was really hesitant to switch to away from Windows - I guess after 30+ years I’d developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome. But, Copilot and the looming Recall were enough to push me over the edge.

Anyway - I spent a while making sure I got all my data off OneDrive etc. and then installed Debian 12 with LXDE - my laptop is an older i7 with 16GB of RAM, but lightweight and minimal really appeals to me. Everything just worked and I was happy for a day or two. Then I started noticing video tearing - especially on my 2nd monitor. I did a bit of research and found a suggestion to enable TearFree in the X11 configuration - X wouldn’t even start when I did that. So, I did some more reading and now think I understand that the lightweight window managers don’t have vsync and this causes the tearing. Apparently the real solution is to use a compositing window manager (I don’t understand what that means…) with OpenGL. Oh well, I can’t have minimal lightweight - so, I installed KDE. It’s very clean and no video tearing. I still don’t have it doing power management for my monitors the way I want, but other than that - I’m very happy. It was noticeably sluggish compared to LXDE, but I’m used to that already after only a day.

It’s only been a few days, but I have not regretted the switch for one second.

  • RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️
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    23 hours ago

    I’ve found 2 GUI’s, one better than other. First one is OneDrive_Tray. Minimalistic and you have to compile it yourself. The other is OneDriveGUI which you either compile yourself or download the appimage.
    They both use abraunegg’s onedrive CLI, so it’s a given one installs that.
    Anyway, OneDriveGUI has a nice account login feature, which makes it a bit easier to setup than having to set up the config file yourself as with OneDrive_Tray.