Cocaine Bear

Hmm, oh well. As long as you found your happy place…

Hmm, well, “works on my computer” is never a helpful comment but I have a heavily modified panel that I moved to the top with no issues.

I’m using the built-in task manager widget rather than a dock. Maybe that’s why?

Mind me asking what distro? And Wayland or X11? Also, which dock?

I’m using Wayland and Fedora (Plasma 6.4) and also had a good experience with NixOS (6.3, also Wayland).

Have you considered using a mesh VPN instead of opening a port to the public? Nebula and TailScale are both great options that have a free tier which is more than enough for most home use cases. With Nebula you can even selfhost your discovery node so nothing is cloud-based, but then you’re back to opening firewall ports again.

Anyway, its going to be more secure than even a properly configured reverse proxy setup and way less hassle.

When’s the last time you tried Plasma? I felt the same way about it as you did until version 6. I’ve been driving it now since 6.2 and its at least as polished as Gnome but with WAY more features and almost infinite customization out of the box.

The lack of understanding around open source is alarming. Open Source licenses only require someone to share the source with anyone who gets a copy of the binary. So top secret military software can still be open source because if the DoD doesn’t share the binary, they don’t have to share the code either. But forcing it to be open source ensures that if that software is ever declassified and distributed to 3rd parties, those third parties will have a legal right to the source.

Macabre Stardew Valley is the game I didn’t know I was looking for. Thanks!

Don’t use Windows either.

You can use an XML file with the Windows installer to disable/uninstall most of the bloat and spyware. It’ll also automatically configure local accounts for you so you don’t have to manually bypass the Windows account install step.

This site will generate the file you need based on the options you select: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

And this video might help you if you get stuck: https://youtu.be/h9SpKVEc_Yo