Hiya folks,

I work remotely, and I've got a little deck with a table and umbrella that I like to work at for most of the summer. The trouble is, my umbrella can never be fully angled to shade me from the sun.

I find my laptop screen (13") to be woeful for working on outside. Not only is it tiny and promotes bad posture, it also doesn't have amazing brightness. Lots of squinting and hunching, depending on the sun!

Every monitor in my house it turns out is 350 nits, except my laptop screen, which is 500 nits.

Does anyone have practical experience lugging a monitor outside and working on it during the sunny day? If so, what brightness gets you over the usability threshold?

It seems like I could get a 1000 nit monitor relatively easily. Anything above 1000 the market seems to narrow quite quickly.

I've always found a fresh desktop wallpaper now and then is a good way to stop your PC feeling stale, and keeps me enthusiastic/more productive.

That said, I always have a hard time finding one when the time comes.

Unsplash seems like a good resource, but can feel so impersonal just having a nice picture of some mountains or a field. I have some friends who I know just rock whatever the default wallpaper for the OS is -- I can't verbalize why but something that feels tailored, or an image that brings me some joy, makes me much more comfortable using the computer.

Unfortunately the popular spots online I'm aware of for sharing wallpapers tend to lean toward certain subsets of interests (such as contemporary geek culture and/or lewd anime women) which you may or may not be into.

I've toyed with the idea of just having a solid colour to avoid any kind of decision fatigue, but it feels like staring at a wall - it's nice to have something with some depth behind all the flat windows.

Curious what others here on tildes use for their wallpaper, how often they change it, and where they might source a new one.

So my friend has a computer she put together, and after replacing what feels like every single part on the rig, multiple trips to the repair shop, and calling a priest wrestling the demons out of it, it is randomly cutting power and we think the replacement power supply might be just as busted as the last one. Are there decent odds of that being an issue, or could it be something that we are overlooking?

EDIT: So, I had a car issue pop up and I won't be able to to take a look at at it tonight. Will download the tools you all mentioned to a jump drive and will keep you posted.

Was there, stayed up the whole time. Really thinking it might be a bad power switch that stuck, so it would turn off randomly. Thanks for all your help.

FINAL EDIT: So I narrowed it down to the Graphics Card and/or the Cooling System. Running the Heaven Benchmark on Extreme pretty reliably cleans it's clock, especially turning it off and then turning it on again. This happens on the latest Windows Updates, with latest Nvidia Drivers. (RTX 2080) Pulling the card and running the benchmark anyway causes the same issue, and this time it powered on and then back off in a loop. CPU-Z stress caused it to crash, so I'm assuming it's the cooler. Thanks again.

I'm building my first desktop computer, and Linux is my operating system of choice.

I know video cards sometimes can be a pain and wish to avoid any issues.

Dollar-priced items are very expensive down here, and I don't require playing the latest games on the highest configurations. Just something to “put me on the map”, so to speak, so I can have a somewhat current machine that doesn't give me much trouble. Any suggestions?

This post is related and in some part a repetition of my other topic on how to buy a laptop for Linux.

Because I'm in Brazil, many brands and stores that do not ship to my country are out of the question, and even the ones that ship usually cost more than I can pay due to currency exchange rate and shipping costs themselves. What are some universal stores, brands and models that I can probably find on my location, that won't give me much trouble running Linux?

I don't require playing games or top performance (8GB RAM and i5 processor would be the minimum requirements). And SSD would be nice, but, for my budget, it's a plus.

I just need something that is durable and works reliably under Linux, especially when it comes to audio and HDMI output, video graphics adapter support, booting from USB, hibernating, sleeping and power management.

Thanks!

Can be something current or ancient, and if you've really got an axe to grind feel free to drag in Windows or macOS or other proprietary operating systems.

Personally after using i3 for around half a decade now (though I switched to sway about a year ago) everything else I try just seems to add friction.

Previous threads:

What DE and distro do you use and why?

What's your OS and how does it look?

What does your desktop look like? What tools do you swear by?

I've recently switched to Arch and today, it's finally done! You have no idea how hard it was to even turn it off. So I wanted to make another OS/screenshot thread, especially since it's been quite a long time since the last one, and Tildes population increased inbetween, so we might find something interesting again :-)

What's your OS, what do you love about it and how does it look?

Just a bit curious. Currently, mine looks like this. It runs Elementary OS, however considering hijacking it to Bedrock Linux, mainly to get cutting edge software from the AUR (for stuff like Firefox and GIMP) without losing all my data. I think I'll wait for Bedrock to go stable first, though.

It uses the ePapirus icon theme, which is just Papirus with better support for Elementary's UI. GTK theme is (if I remember correctly) Qogir and the Plank theme is the GTK one. What do yours look like?

I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine that Ubuntu and Gnome will dominate the answers as you would expect, but maybe you'll surprise me. Personally, I'm on Arch Linux with i3-gaps. I use Arch because I enjoy the DIY aspect of Linux as well as the aur and slim nature of Arch. I'd also be lying if I didn't say I use it partially just because I like the "pacman" pun.

As for i3-gaps, I think that WMs are generally more customizable and good for 'ricing', plus they go with my workflow and are convenient in that they load faster and the likes, though I have to admit I have only ever used i3 (I've been considering trying out bspwm). So, what do you guys use? You can also of course share more information such as your shell or DM if you wanted, though I highly doubt anyone cares what display manager you us or anything.

Between the recent discussions on the Useful Shell Scripts thread, and some of the tangents on the Desktop Usability thread, I thought it might be an interesting idea to have a desktop screenshot sharing / unixporn thread where we talk about our setups, preferred applications, and share some pointers. This doesn't specifically have to be a Unix circlejerk though. If you have a Windows/Android/ChromeOS/TempleOS setup with some novel innovations, you're more than welcome to share too.

I've been using Solus for years now as my main driver, but I think I may be switching to Arch soon. Or at least, start using Arch on my laptop, and keep Solus on my desktop. The main reason I wanna give Arch a try is because of how minimal it can be. I don't need a lot of applications, and I like to have the least amount of software installed on my machine as I can. Plus, distro-hopping is a disease, and it's time I try something new, haha.

So, I was just curious what DE people are using with Arch. Ideally I want something very minimal, but not too ugly. I liked using Budgie with Solus, so I may very well just use Budgie with my Arch install, but I thought I would see if anyone has any recommendations first! Thanks!

I feel that the mobile user interfaces has been developed and changed immensly compared to desktops, when it comes iOS and Android. While Windows has pushed some controversial but interesting features, macOS and Linux DEs has been kind of stagnant. Has desktop interfaces reached its peak form? Or is there more developments to come?