oscar

I would start by looking at what files are included. There's the obvious .desktop entry, but also checking if there are any files put into /bin/, /usr/bin/, /usr/sbin/ etc. should suffice.

If you consider some of these packages as "dependencies" then look at if anything depends on it. But there are application-packages that others depend on, such as coreutils.

I'm a simple man, I just search directly in qbittorrent.

Interesting! I used arch for about 2 years on my gaming rig and it worked fine but I was worried if he went with something based on Arch that he would eventually run into issues due to not properly maintaining it (avoiding partial upgrades for example). But I'm probably overthinking it. If he sticks to a GUI for installing and updating packages and avoid messing with the terminal initially it should be fine.

I will add EndeavourOS to a small list of recommendations (rolling vs point release) so he can decide for himself.

What distro did you go with? My friend is showing intrest in trying Linux but I'm not sure what to recommend him. I use more advanced distros myself but I want it to work well for him OOtB while also not requiring any tinkering. I'm think of either some ubuntu-flavour or fork, like Kubuntu or maybe Mint.

I use debian 12 on my work laptop. I agree with your points but I still use it because I want the fundamental system to be stable, and then any software I want to be more up-to-date I build from source (tmux, alacritty, neovim) or download separately (vscode/slack/joplin).

I used to use ubuntu because it worked so well with my hardware ootb, but I got tired of snap.

I will sound really nit-picky buy the biggest thing keeping me away from using KDE is that accent-colored bar on each window in the taskbar, and the different coloring of open/focused/minimized windows. I want it sleek but not cluttery.

I've tried about a dozen themes but I couldn't find any that got rid of that and looked good. I tried fixing it myself but editing svg files was too difficult for me.

I hope plasma 6 adds more options for this but I'm not holding my breath.

Depends on the devs but I reckon they won't use the API.

I'm 24 hours in and I didn't even know there were acts lol, but I assume I'm also on act 1. I've pretty much only done side missions.

Good point. But then if both the script and the command have the same filename, it will be important to make sure the script has a higher precedence in the PATH. Adding it to the end of .bashrc should be enough I think.

You could write a shell script:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

export SOME_ENV_VAR=value

command

Then place it on your path, for example /usr/local/bin/command_with_env.

I avoided overriding the command itself and naming the script the same, because then I think it would try to invoke itself.