I daily drive Pop!_OS, which uses the GNOME desktop environment. I know that DEs are a hotly contested space among Linux users, and my use of GNOME wasn’t so much a choice as it was a default: it’s what came with my distro.

I like GNOME. I don’t really understand the hate it often gets, but I also don’t really have the legacy understanding of Linux that a lot of people do, and it seems like a lot of distaste lies there. I’m as casual a user as they come — Linux for me is like a Chromebook: it “just works” in that I pretty much need it to get me online and manage some documents. (I do also play games on it, for which Steam and Proton have been a huge boon.)

I also have a Steam Deck, and it uses KDE’s Plasma on the desktop side, so I got to see what that was like. I also like KDE. It’s very different from GNOME, but I can see the appeal. It feels more like Windows but also has a lot of little nice touches and additions. Also, no ads.

This got me thinking: what if I tried using KDE instead of GNOME on my laptop?

I assumed that this would be a big deal. Like, I would have to completely gut my distribution, or reinstall it fresh. Multiple hours of work. Lots of preparation. Looking up myriad terminal commands I don’t understand and hoping they do what they’re supposed to, because if they don’t I’m really screwed — as soon as something goes wrong “under the hood” I’m dead in the water when it comes to fixing it.

But I was looking on System76’s support site and they made it seem super simple. A single terminal command to install the whole DE?

It can’t be that easy, right?

I am astonished to say that it WAS.

I ran the command, had to select between gdm3 and sddm (a choice which I didn’t understand at all so I searched around a bit before just going with the default: gdm3), and then rebooted.

I can now select between GNOME and KDE on the login screen, and both work flawlessly. It was so easy.

I don’t know who to credit for this. Did System76 do a great job of making this easy on their distro? Did the KDE team work hard to make their DE effortlessly plug-and-play? Is this just a general product of the way Linux handles its different components?

I don’t know but I’m willing to spread the love around to anyone and everyone who contributes to Linux and all of its facets. It’s wild to me that I can so easily reskin my entire operating system in the same way that I used to do with Winamp back in the day. I keep waiting for something to go wrong, but after a few days of this, I’ve realized that everything still “just works,” automagically.

A big thanks here to anyone who has a hand in open-source software and making computing better for people like me, who have (mostly) no idea what they’re doing.

Hey Tildes!

I need some help with a specific tech issue, and I'm sure someone here can help me do it way quicker than I would be able to on my own.

General Request

I'd like to be able to scan a directory and find all of the largest files of a specific type (e.g. the largest .jpg files). I'm running Pop!_OS and I'm assuming there's some way to do this in the terminal, or alternately some utility I could use.

More Specific Details

I'm cleaning up my digital music library, and I realized in setting it up I made some errors by saving some very high res cover art. Many of my Bandcamp purchases come with a cover.jpg or cover.png file that is several megabytes large. I made the mistake of writing these into the files (adding, for some albums, an extra, say, 100 MB across all tracks). They also take a lot longer to load when I pull them up in my cloud music player. I'd like to be able to identify the albums with the largest cover.* files so that I can go in and replace the album art with a lower res version and gain back all that wasted space lost to unnecessary duplication.

I could go folder by folder and take a look at the sizes of each, but I figure there's an easier way to surface the ones that need my attention. Everything I've looked at online so far has helped me figure out how to identify the biggest files in general, but all that will do is surface the actual audio files, when it's the cover art that needs the specific attention.

Also, in case it's necessary information, the directory structure is Music/[artist]/[album]/cover.*

Any help will be very appreciated!