If you want to get into customizing UIs hard, something the likes of this

You could get started with window managers (very opiniated topic, its really up to you to decide on which you should use) and UI toolkits like

• ewww
• AGS
• QuickShell

Also I know X11 is slowly dying but AwesomeWM fits your bill really nicely.

TL,DR: You want a cool UI? look at unixporn’s top posts of all time, research an option you find good enough and go bananas on everything you need to make yourself at home.

ALSO consider posting at !unixporn@lemmy.ml so we can marvel at your fine grained setup, good luck!

LocalSend for quick local network file sharing from my phone that just werks. I prefer it over kde connect because the latter uses lots of random ports that kinda bloat my firewall whitelist. I know there is an alternative called warpinator, but I don’t see a reason to change my preferences for now.

So ZQ comes from the sound of a fly being swatted?

I went into void as my first DIY distro, mainly because I wanted to mess around with window managers and it was a very good experience. Runit made my underpowered laptop boot into linux in like 4 seconds, crazy fast. XBPS package manager was always really really fast too. I like the fact that nearly everything you need is in the official repo, instead of having to delve into the depths of something like the AUR. I also managed to make a contribution to the repos with the help of the community on the IRC chat rooms which were very noob friendly. Overall just a solid experience.

When an app supports linux, it can do so by either:

• packaging it for popular distro repositories,
• giving instructions on how to build the app from the source code

or

• package it on distro-agnostic, package management solutions like flatpak or appImage.

These last ones are sandboxed environments. That means they have their own dependencies isolated from your system, so they dont have to deal with every distros pecularities at the cost of using more storage space. This is very useful for developers and in your case benefitial for the user because you can have both steam and zoom via flatpak on mint, arch or any obscure distro that has flatpak available, without any major problems.

Edit: Formatting