There’s nothing wrong with a DE, those are great for the people who want an experience that “just works”. But I switched to Linux because I was tired of someone else deciding to install hundreds of packages I’ll never use, and start up dozens or hundreds of services in the background that I never asked for.

Part of the feeling of owning my machine has been looking at the list of packages installed, and the list of processes/services running and knowing why each one is there.

If you want an OS that lets you own the machine you bought, Linux is the most viable option. Conversely, Windows is not an option. I don’t consider an OS where you are the product to be one that works for me at all, much less one that “just works”.

Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun

Like with any OS, those are a subset of users, but not all. The thing is, Linux users spent the last 30y building a set of tools that enable you to use as little effort as possible to do very powerful things with your hardware, and yes, with great power comes great ability to break everything. But in the last 15y, there are distros designed for people who want an OS that “just works”, that don’t require you to know or use the risky tools that could break things, and they’re getting better every day.

Why did you switch

I wanted to use Linux for the last 15y, but gaming was a sticking point. Around 5y ago, thanks to valve, it is no longer a sticking point. I do all my gaming on Linux.

what was your process like?

I first switched to fedora on my laptop about 12y ago. I didn’t do a lot of gaming on my laptop, so this was fine. Eventually I switched to Manjaro. Around 5y ago I put Manjaro on my desktop. Then eventually switched both to endeavor.

I’ll admit, I create problems for myself by refusing fully featured Desktop Environments. But I always learn something more about my machine in the process. As a result, I believe I can now simply do more with less effort on Linux than I could on windows. I have bash scripts on keybinds that open custom UIs for various things. I can seamlessly access multiple servers on my network running various services. I don’t ever have to worry about some update overhauling my UI and sneaking an AI in the background. Any experimentation I do with AI is on my own terms, and none of my data gets shipped off without my consent.

What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?

I used a Mac 20y ago. It was solid. But eventually the cost outweighed the hardware capabilities. And then they deprecated every graphics API but Metal. Now there’s relatively nothing in the way of gaming on Mac. On top of that, it’s just as bad as windows when it comes to doing what some company wants it to do rather than what I want it to do. So I don’t consider it an option that works for me.

Ahhh I see. That’s really neat, I’ll have to try that.

Does sway have the feature OP is asking for, or are you just suggesting a different tiling window manager, and they would still be left solving the same problem?

Idk if I follow. I believe the default keybinds in hyprland allow you to switch between windows using super+J/K/L/;, and between workspaces using super+number. Hyprland, like all tiled window managers, are specifically designed to be used exclusively with a keyboard.

Are you asking for something more like alt+tab on windows? Where it shows a little preview of all the windows? I think that’s kind of obviated by the concept of a tiled window manager.

If it just looks like a stream of TLS packets, so the content is encrypted, what would DPI be able to see? I feel like if it could detect it as a VPN, that’s just a bug that needs fixing, not an inherent weakness in the protocols involved.

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.