d3Xt3r

Sounds like what you're after is lxqt-panel. Problem is, it's not quite ready yet - things like positioning settings, taskbar and a few other plugins do not work, last I checked, but feel free to check it out.

Presently, the main issue is that Qt's layer-shell-qt isn't complete yet - without layer-shell support, certain key taskbar-y things wouldn't work, such as listing and management of active windows, menu popups, reserving the screen space etc. But I suspect it's inching pretty close to completion with the looming release of KDE 6.

For now, check out this page and keep an eye for updates to it: https://github.com/stefonarch/LXQt-Wayland-files/blob/main/lxqt-panel.md

In saying that, what's your issue exactly with Waybar? I use it on Wayfire and it works fine, and the taskbar plugin does display icons for Qt based apps.

Is it possible to create an OS that simply automatically runs .exe files through WINE/Proton/Bottles?

Zorin already does that out-of-the-box. See: https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/windows-app-support/#run-apps-in-exe-and-msi-files

And if you want to take it to the next level, there's ReactOS, which is basically an opensource reverse-engineered Windows - but sadly it's development is slow and it's hardware support is extremely lacking. But it exists, and does qualify as an answer to your question. For all practical purposes though, Zorin is what you're looking for.

Make a persistent data block for Fedora/Ubuntu/etc. and make a Live ISO point to it, then boot from Ventoy into the ISO, which then handles mounting the "drive".

You don't need a live ISO or a separate persistent data block. The best way is to just create a single VHD/VDI for your Linux distro of choice and boot it with Ventoy. You can even have it encrypted using LUKS.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html

That sign up button doesn't even work for me lol. Which highlights a major issue: what if the website/auth service/network is down for whatever reason, and you can't even fricking launch the terminal? That's a major oversight IMO.

You can use ncdu for this. Launch it with the options --show-itemcount --sort=itemcount

Tiny Music Player is only 16KB!

Magic Lantern is awesome, played with it on my mate's 550D and was blown away by the features. Wish there was something similar for Sony mirrorless cameras.

Gitlab:

• brillo - Control the brightness of backlight and keyboard LED devices
• Gammastep - Day/night gamma modifier that adjusts the color temperature of your screen.
• Veloren - An open-world, multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust

Codeberg:

• Fnott - Keyboard driven and lightweight notification daemon for wlroots. Better than mako (IMO).

SourceHut:

• Kanshi - Dynamic display configuration tool for wayland
• Senpai - A modern, easy-to-use, terminal IRC client
• Shotman - Fast and simple screenshot GUI written in Rust, for wayland.
• wlr-randr - xrandr clone for wlroots compositors
• wlrctl - Keyboard macros and window automation for wlroots compositors

There are several tools for this which work on Wayland. An easy way to do simple remapping would be evremap, your config would look something like this:

[[remap]]
input = ["KEY_LEFTCTRL", "KEY_N"]
output = ["KEY_DOWN"]

If you want more complex macros, AutoHotkey style, check out hawck. Note that hawck doesn't support GUI automation in case you were curious, but if you want something similar you could pair it with KWin scripts and ydotool.

If you use Nix the imperative way (nix profile blah), you don't need to learn the Nix language at all, or write config files. Installing/removing/upgrading packages is just a single command, similar to other package managers.

Eg:

• To search for bat on nixpkgs: nix search nixpkgs bat
• To install bat: nix profile install nixpkgs#bat
• To upgrade all packages: nix profile upgrade '.*'

Ref: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-profile

ZorinOS

I think, for people who don't like change, it's great, but it can be very outdated. What's your opinion on that distro? It looks very modern on the surface and is very noob friendly, but under the hood, very very old.

It's great for people who have simple requirements and older hardware. Basically for folks who just want to use a PC for basic computing tasks like Web browsing, emails, document editing, printing/scanning etc. The thing about Zorin is that it uses a traditional UI/UX which is easily to navigate for non-technical people, and it's stable enough that you almost never run into any issues (assuming you're sticking with standard distro packages and config).

My elderly parents have been using Zorin for several years now and they've never had a issue. The only time they called me was to help install their new printer last year (which was reasonably easy to install), and that was it.

So I'd recommend Zorin for anyone who has very basic computing needs, and they are not using a brand new/high-end PC.

If they don't use advanced features like macros, they could just use the Web versions of the M365 apps - they work just fine under Linux.