I read something about this but is MATE as viable an option for most users as XFCE in 2024? I can’t tell if there’s much of a community around it.

There’s a school I’ve worked at that’s got somewhat old desktops running Ubuntu. I smiled when I saw it.

Give it a decade, I reckon. As traditional SMS and phone calling die to platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram/etc., and those platforms become available cross-platform, the idea of a Linux phone might become possible. It’s just a matter of decentralizing the distribution of that software, at that point (like how GrapheneOS and others current have the problem of needing the Google store for installing proprietary apps).

Switching to Nix could certainly simplify a lot of things. I wouldn't be surprised if they went that direction soon.

Is that the Nyoom neovim distribution? I’ve never seen it out in the wild! How is it?

Will 2025 be the year of the ARM Linux desktop?

Keeping my fingers crossed for XFCE…🤞

Not really an answer to your question, but personally I resolve issues relating to vi keys in Emacs by just knowing the Emacs bindings as well. When I came back to Emacs, I took a month to just use the vanilla bindings. It was painful for about a week, but boy did it pay off; not just for using Emacs (especially for niche packages that don’t have evil mode bindings), but also for other GNU programs like bash and midnight commander and such (as well as, as you mentioned, the defaults on zoomer-shell).

Have you given any thought to using a window manager with your desktop environment? Maybe one that can be customized to provide very basic functionality? I use bspwm with XFCE, for example.

Wow this looks awesome! Is Debian the only option?

Actually, I just tried both homebrew and Nix with a Debian 12 installation and I’m not impressed. Homebrew only ships CLI apps, and GUI applications installed with Nix famously don’t show up in application launchers… it seems like you don’t really get the features of Nix unless you use NixOS.

I like the idea of the fedora immutable distros, but the reliance on flatpak makes me a bit nervous (guess I’m just old-fashioned)… I think some kind of solution that puts a stable system like Debian or immutable fedora with a package manager like Nix might be very good (I know the U-Blue guys have been playing with homebrew?)