depends on where you draw the line.
in the past, i’ve been mildly dissapointed by the drama-queen-esque antics of the kernel developers; but i most recently DEEPLY disappointed by how thoroughly the kernel developers to caved to the us gov’t’s demand to kick out russian developers instead of complying maliciously like others do.
both are separate from linux, but linux can’t exist without them.
When I set up Linux on my wife’s MacBook it took two hours to find all the instructions on how to do it AND the files needed to do it. Had to use 4 different instruction sets because all 4 left out some steps.
same here w my macbooks almost 10 years ago.
now deepseek will give you copy/paste-able instructions in a few seconds; the future is now. lol
yeah, it doesn’t take to make yourself exotic. lol
I need to replace those, but they’re fine and working for now, and in this economy…
that’s why i haven’t bought any parts to rebuilt my everything home server. lol
and the more “exotic” your setup is – and use the word exotic very loosely here – the more time you have to spend thinking of how exotic it is compared to the plain-jane systems exist out there and compensate for it.
for example: most computers have a permanent drives, so if any of your drives are not permanent; your system automatically becomes exotic.
not using hdmi, vga, display port or hdmi; youi’re also exotic.
is your keyboard not the normal 104 key; you’re also exotic.
using pata & sata together; you’re also exotic.
…
gnome and kde have always been the most dramatically resource hungry of the whole linux/foss eco system; both were almost unusable back in the early aughts.
this would be a useful troubleshooting step and, since you’re already using xfce, you should be able to easily and temporarily switch your display manger to switch to something like gnome or kde to check.
if gnome shows battery correctly; then you know that it’s xfce and then you have you answer.
is the behavior the same in any other xwindows environment?
it feels more like the projects developers either assumed or didn’t consider that people want to encrypt their computers from the start.
part of me feels like that my own security posture as at a higher level than theirs is. lol
i dug through my downloads because it bugged me that i couldn’t remember and it was ubuntu 24.04, kubuntu 25.10, fedora-kde 43, and mint 22.2 cinnamon that didn’t give the option and it was back in august.
i was under the same impression as well; but no, all of the distros i tried on my new laptop (various different ubuntu flavors and some others i don’t remember) didn’t have it.
i’m capable to doing it myself, but fedora’s installer let me simply check a box for it.
Funny enough I went to Fedora because it did all the pre-configuration to setup disk encryption unlike all of the Debian based distros I tried; not even Ubuntu had it.
i came here to post this and of course someone beat me to it. lol