Does KRunner (Alt + F2 default, sometimes Super + R in configs) still run? Try launching “plasmashell” from there. Or a terminal emulator so that you can see the logs of plasmashell, and maybe attach a debugger…

Maybe it was merged into the mainline kernel already but your distribution still has the older package?

Ukrainian here, pretty eastern European. ISP doesn’t make enough money to care.

No idea how good whatever “Bluefin” is, but if their front page makes my computer lag much worse than actual videogames, it’s really not a good first impression.

Also, it seems to come with Gnome which is a bit further away in terms of user experience from Windows than the other choices like Plasma and Enlightenment, so I am not sure if whoever sits in them cubicles will get used to the lack of tray icons for example. Well, assuming they know what a tray icon is, but even if they don’t, they are gonna get a bigger “something’s off/missing” feeling than otherwise. And I am assuming nobody is using Windows 8 specifically, so it will take some time for people to get used to the excuse of a start menu Gnome has. Have to always be pessimistic about user’s intelligence and will to adapt.

What are you actually broadcasting while doing so? That you are using KDE Connect?

That + device name which is probably pretty unique. Chinese routers scrape all of that. IIRC mDNS is actually disabled on Linux for now because it was conflicting with Avahi which broke some more stuff.

do not use KDE Connect on other networks

Last time I used it, I don’t recall a toggle for that in either the Linux or the Android clients.

Edit: what alternative device discovery solution could be used by KDE Connect to make it more private on untrusted ntetworks?

Exactly as it is right now but on a whitelist.

Offtopic but I am really annoyed by how many custom ROMs (especially LineageOS) disable MAC randomization at build time and make zero mention of it on the wiki/forum/whatever page. That’s just as important.

KDE Connect seems to send identifying broadcast packets constantly (just like gapps), not the best for privacy on public bing chilling router WiFi. Android itself technically does too, but you can just change your device name to " " (space).

Intel graphics support, or the absence of it

That’s like one of the best platforms.

Decent touchscreen support

Pretty much everything on Wayland LGTM. If something doesn’t look quite right (like, hover tooltips), it’s probably the fault of the widget toolkit and will also be broken on Windows.

Windows Ink

As in stylus/pen/drawing tablet? kwin has awesome support, other compositors have some basics.

WSL which I use with NixOS

??? you want a container? distrobox can do that, or something like this

Adobe apps

true… slightly outdated repacks work fine in Wine tho

PowerPoint Libre Impress (…) it’s not even close

Wine.

idk works on my machine

If your user is in the input group (set up in pretty much every distro), you can use uinput over netcat for forwarding devices (display server agnostic) without extra privileges. Same with the video group. No idea if anyone used this in an actual remote desktop piece of software tho.

Hmmm, don’t Libreoffice devs test it with actual MS Office instead of guesstimating the format?

Another thing that helps is baking in the fonts or using metric compatibles to MS ones.

display drivers

describes an issue that would be the job of your compositor & window manager

ODF support is in MS Office as well, but if you want to be extra sure you can export as .doc from any office suite (Libreoffice should also tell you if a feature you are using can’t be exported).

“to code”

Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux

Maybe the Arch Linux “ports” RFC will finally be of use…

Also, box64 works better in my experience when all of the depending libraries are installed properly, and they are guaranteed to be there in this scenario given that there’s the Steam runtime.