nyan

You can install any desktop environment on any distro. For some of the more obscure DEs on some distros, a bit of hoop-jumping may be required, but it's still possible. And some distros ship without any DE at all.

Technically, you can have a functional desktop without a DE at all, just a bare window manager (in X) or compositor (wayland), but that's getting into advanced topics.

It's a normal browser setting left over from the early days of the Internet, when most pages did little or no theming (or did it badly). My primary browser is Pale Moon, which exposes the setting as a dropdown under Preferences > Content > General > Colors. Firefox also exposed the setting on its settings page the last time I checked, although it may be a checkbox there. It's also a boolean in about:config, browser.display.use_document_colors.

Chrome-family browsers may not have such a setting, unfortunately. The only one I keep handy is Vivaldi, which doesn't have it but does have a "Force a dark theme on all websites" checkbox (under Settings > Appearance > Website Appearance).

I chose a slightly different way of achieving what that extension does, and long ago set my browser not to allow websites to choose their own colours. That does partially break a few sites that don't handle their images properly, but overall it's workable and gives me white on a slightly different dark colour for each browser profile.

The colour scheme. White screens are one of the things that trigger my migraines.

This in turn leads to my modifying several other visual aspects of the desktop, because a lot of widget set themes come with scrollbars that don't work well with really dark colours. I also turn animations and automagic snapping and desktop navigation facilities off, because I find them annoying. Kindly behave like it's 1999 and don't do anything I don't explicitly tell you to do, Mr. Desktop.

And then I embed a conky instance in the second desktop for general monitoring—CPU activity (composite and by thread), memory in use, disk space, network usage, temperatures, fan levels, and greediest processes all conveniently in a single view that doesn't require me figuring out what I did with the window.

KDE provides a very large set of services. This makes it something of an elephant in the world of Linux desktop environments. Lighter DEs should fit in less than 1GB (that's anything other than KDE and Gnome). I think the last time I checked my system with just the DE up and nothing open, it was using on the order of 200-300MB. However, the lighter DEs will also do less by default.

It should be safe to kill baloo, but as others have already said, you will see some tradeoffs in how file searching works if you stick with KDE. If I'm not mistaken, it may restart periodically to index new files unless you go to some effort to exorcise it.

Perhaps if you're younger than the horse, it owns you instead.

That may have been the point.

I'd be more impressed if they stopped bundling random crap. It's their unwillingness to use upstream's dependencies and toolchains that makes Chromium a nightmare to package on Gentoo, and flatpaks are not going to fix that. They bundle clang, rust, and so many additional libraries that the "must keep bundled version to prevent breakage" list is almost 300 items long. This is not the correct way to ensure reproducibility, guys.

I'd be interested in tests across hardware of different ages (but as others have said, same/similar DEs/WMs/compositors as much as possible, please). While I have no proof, I'd guess that Wayland is making assumptions that would make it less efficient on some older kit.

Traditionally, "freezing" means that the system doesn't respond at all. More than likely, your system is just swapping heavily and slowing down to a crawl. If that's what's happening, the hard drive activity light will be on constantly.

The best fix for this is more memory, but RAM is currently expensive. If you can't afford to buy more, you may have to try to cope in software. First, do The Bleeding Obvious: close any programs that you don't immediately need before you start that Discord call. This includes not leaving unnecessary webpages open, just in case.

See what your distro has to say about swappiness and how to set it. You probably want a value lower than the default 60, maybe even as low as 0.

If it gets worse over tme, it's possible that something you're running has a memory leak. You may be able to figure out what using top or similar and seeing which programs' memory use grows over time. Restarting the greedy ones periodically may be able to keep your system from bogging down, at the cost of some inconvenience.

Moving to a bare compositor rather than the relatively heavyweight KDE might also free up some RAM, but I'm not sure how much that will actually help.

Yes, precompiled packages are available, although only for 1-2 common combinations of USE flags per package.

To get rid of the vulnerability, just blacklist the Open vSwitch kernel module if, for whatever reason, you have it installed. As far as I can tell, you probably don't need it unless the machine in question is acting as a switch or router.

No need for an urgent kernel update this time.