But on closed source drivers, right?

If coding is the means to an end they want, they will learn it.

I started learning how to program because I wanted to mod Halo 20y ago. Gaming is often a motivator. I had a co-worker who started in the 80s, whose only option to play games on his C64 was to type up a bunch of BASIC from a magazine. He had to take care not to make any typos, then play the game, and then didn’t have any persistent tape to save it to, so he just lost it all on a reboot. Turns out, if you’re “forced” to type code in all the time, you start to figure out which bits do what, and you start changing it to behave how you want.

“Hacking” could probably work as a motivator, though with great power comes great responsibility.

But yeah, a kid won’t be interested in programming unless they see it as their only option to do what they want to do. PICO8 might be a good entry. Or something like Minecraft modding.

I was going to say you’ll probably be fine, but if you’re considering Mint you’ll definitely be fine.

Terminology you don’t need to know: Mint is still using x11, which Nvidia works fine with. I assume mint won’t switch to Wayland until it works smoothly on Nvidia too.

My partner is using mint on a 3080. I think she had one graphical bug in one game one time after an update. Mint has a program specifically used to roll back to a past Nvidia driver. She chose the driver from before the update, rebooted, and the bug was gone. Just gotta remember to switch back to using latest later when a new driver comes out.

Windows is constantly doing things I didn’t ask it to. I wanted something that didn’t do anything I didn’t ask it to.

He wouldn’t be a billionaire if he were a good person.

But…to his credit, he did publicly say recently that he wants to have given away 99% of his wealth over the next 20y, and says he doesn’t want to die rich. I am ok with making that the bar for being remembered. Provided it’s not to his own foundation.

No one rich enough to be in Trump’s vicinity actually believes any of the glazing they do to him. They’re all executing the very basic strat for dealing with a baby man: stroke his ego -> get what you want.

As far as interacting with other sociopaths goes, my guess is trump is refreshingly simple for them.

I’m not a fan of having two definitions for “lint” in the tech world. Unnecessary ambiguity.

This should just work if your Android device’s USB mode is set to Mass Storage, no extra software needed on the PC. It’ll just show up like a thumb drive.

Note: Gaming performance is purely based on money spent. There’s no fundamental reason windows would have better gaming performance, it’s just that there is more money being paid to engineers and vendors to support DirectX and related tooling.

Then there’s the self-fulfilling aspect that, windows has the largest marketshare, so devs are going to spend the most money targeting it, so that they can get the most money in return, which means more people will use it, which leads to the high marketshare.

The ONLY reason Linux use is seeing the few percent blip in gaming is because Valve has dumped truckloads of cash into making it viable.

The better comparison is that distros are the operating systems (like “windows”, “macos”, and “android”), while “linux” is the kernel under the hood that end users likely never interact with (like “NT”, “XNU”, and…“linux”).

A distro represents an intended user experience. If you want a distro that has an intended user experience that is similar to windows, go with Mint or OpenSUSE. If your desired experience is like the SteamDeck, install bazzite (with an AMD GPU ideally). If that’s all you care to know, then that’s all you need to know; go use your new system how you would any other.

But if you want to dig deeper, yeah, the fact that all the distros are based on linux (and more importantly, are posix compatible) means that a lot of the software is portable across distros. But that doesn’t mean your experience on all distros will be the same. Different distros organize their filesystems differently, they might ship with different versions of core utilities based on the stability testing they’ve done, and they likely offer varying means of installing and managing new packages.

The tl;dr is, go use one distro, and then later try doing the same stuff in a different distro, and inevitably at some point you’ll go “oh, this didn’t work exactly how I expected because the other distro I’m used to handles this differently”. That’s the difference.

The performance is relative to the user. Could it be that you’re a god damned genius? :/

Man, we’re gonna have to change the name of the AUR because bad journalists keep thinking this has something to do with the distro.

“Arch Linux Users who go out of their way to install RAT at risk of installing RAT”

Ah, I think you mean non-free or just non-open source.

Something being “native” means it’s compiled for your specific hardware, ex. an x86-64 binary running on an x86-64 CPU. An example of non-native is an x86 binary being emulated on an ARM CPU, Java bytecode running on a JVM, or Python code running in an interpreter.

But your drivers are all definitely all running natively on your hardware.

ofc amd drivers should be native so that shouldn’t be my issue

I’m curious, what’s an example of non-native drivers?

Driver bugs exist, it could definitely be a hole in someone’s testing. I would assume the number of people running PopOS (and whatever build of mesa their release is on) with that specific GPU is pretty low. Maybe try the amdgpu-pro driver and see if the issues go away (or change, heh)? Not sure what the recommended way of installing it on PopOS/Ubuntu/Debian is.

We’re talking about an eink tablet. I assume none of them are running X, so there’s no “desktop” involved here. I have a remarkable 2 which runs Linux. I can ssh into it to rsync files to it, back things up, and make customizations. There’s no package manager, it seems to be an embedded system. It has python, so i’ve written some python scripts to do custom operations. Everything i do on my remarkable 2 is stuff I would expect to also be able to do on an android based tablet.

Not to nitpick, but Android is Linux based. So I would expect to be able to do all the same stuff that I can on a Linux based one.

Edit: can anyone explain why the downvote? Any concern about android ecosystem vs linux ecosystem should be moot, and I think that’s useful context…

Why are they called “patched” and “fix” and who is installing them?

It’s meant to be a convenience for people who know what they’re doing.

You can’t even install from AUR using pacman directly. You either need to makepkg them manually, or use an extra AUR compatible package manager like yay. It’s made as clear as possible to arch users that the AUR is not vetted in any way, it’s just for convenience.

Cool, welcome! I assume you’re aware that it won’t be all sunshine and rainbows from day 1, but give it time and leverage the community to solve any issues you run into. Effective bug reports and knowledge sharing make the experience better for everyone.

To me it’s worth having control over my hardware, and an OS that’s designed to work for me and not some corpo against me.