I believe the search term you’re looking for is ‘multi-seat’.

I’m with you. I’ve never really liked the look of QT, but I think I’m going to go for it anyway. It’s always felt more plasticky and artificial, compared to GTK feeling more grounded and earthy. Plus, KDE has always felt cluttered in every way they can clutter it. So I was into the boxes (I was partial to fluxbox) and XFCE back in the day. Played with Gnome 3 a bit, had a cyclical love and ultimately hate relationship with it, but got hung up on Gnome as the best option when I wanted to switch to Wayland.

I’ve been using Cosmic since January, and I like it, but I’m left wanting more out of it. I was thinking of spinning my own environment with LabWC, but… meh. It’s a lot of work, and I want something more integrated.

I’ve been using KDE in Asahi on my Macbook Air a bit, and I guess I could use it more. But I don’t really use that machine a ton, either. Mostly for it’s better speakers than my Thinkpad, and I have it connecting a VPN automatically until I can be bothered to switch from iwd/systemd to network manager on my primary.

God I wish Gnome would change it’s tune, and stop being so militantly simplistic. The idea of extensions is great, but using a rolling release distro is rough when you’re relying on a bunch of extensions to make your DE suitable. I really like their approach to UX at it’s foundation. Cosmic is showing a lot of promise, and has that configurability built in, and I do look forward to where it goes. but it’s going to have this problem where a lot of the software that looks best in it is libadwaita, which enforces drastically different UX.

Ah, now I remember why I bought the Macbook.

I started dabbling in around 2000, getting sick of the instability of Windows, and it seeming like the next logical step of geekdom.

I tried a LOT of distros. Mandrake, Connectiva, Red Hat to Fedora Core, Slackware, Debian Woody, Crux, etc etc. I drifted in a Debian-centric circle until I finally landed on Arch. Lost my way for a bit during my IT career, supporting Windows I ended up just using that. But I’m back to Arch now as my daily, Debian for some networking projects, and a bit of Fedora from time to time when I need to spin something up quick.

Oh no, I know. I’m just limited to wireless right now because I’m renting an old house with massive amounts of insulation. So I had tried to get the Sonos speakers working with a combined sink wirelessly, but it just wasn’t able to keep up, leading to intermittent interruptions to the stream. I’m going to play with that wired in a test environment at some point, but I think I’d prefer something like Snapcast over Airplay.

But once I buy a house in the coming months, I’ll do some low voltage runs to support the audio network, among other things. I figure I’ll probably have a dedicated POE switch so I don’t have to worry too much about QoS, probably Mikrotik if Ubiquiti doesn’t release some new EdgeSwitch gear.

I’m just not sure if the software is there yet, with Pipewire AES67 support. It was “new” in v1, with I think some PTP patching in the first point release. So I’m trying to see if anyone has cut their teeth on this yet, since it’s going to be pretty costly to get gear. I imagine I can just create a combined sink, but I’m not sure if PTPv2 is just automagic within the RTP configuration of Pipewire.

And potentially needing a second server for MPD/Pipewire is something I’m keeping in the back of my head. I’m hoping to run it in a container on the NAS server, probably running Debian (or maybe something more cutting edge if I’m reliant on new Pipewire releases). But RTP and PTP might need something a bit more dedicated to the task. It’s not like I’m doing broadcast or some other form of professional audio here, so I’m optimistic that a container will be fine. Just a single 16/44 FLAC decode to combined AES67 sink. And since containers use a shared kernel, I wouldn’t need to worry about the clock scheduling issues some hypervisors had with Asterisk and Free Switch in my previous life working on VOIP networks. But I’m also not planning on a ton of cores, 4-8 only in a low voltage CPU, sooooo… I dunno.

Well, right now I don’t really have a setup. I bought the Sonos speakers when I was experimenting with the Apple ecosystem a few years ago, but now that I’m fully back on Graphene/Linux they haven’t been worth the trouble. I don’t have an audio server yet, I’m just storing on my laptop and playing locally to headphones/XLR Genelecs using Quod Libet.

What I’ll end up with is probably a home built NAS running stuff like MPD and Home Assistant in containers. I’ll have either a VLAN or dedicated switch for audio.

The Genelecs I’m looking at for AES67 stuffs are the Smart IP Installation series like this 4410a. I’m pretty sure these are full audio-over-IP using AES67/Dante, and not using IP only for control. Unless Genelec documentation on these sucks. If they were to require XLR, I’d choose a different speaker that does not, or run structural audio cables to a multi-zone receiver.