Yeah, recently I’ve run into 1 game I’ve wanted to play that I just couldn’t (Valorant so probably a better outcome lol) and maybe 2 that had any sort of issue.

If you’re mainly into competitive games it’s still rough, but otherwise it’s honestly smoother than my friends on Windows often.

Yeah, imo the problems solved by using snaps for core system stuff are better solved with immutable distros, and I see very little reason to use snaps for anything else.

Yeah, sorry couldn’t resist.

snaps are very similar to flatpaks and, honestly, is technically better in a lot of ways.

Snap can be used for basically an entire system, while flatpak is limited to graphical apps. (Ubuntu core is built basically entirely off snaps.)

Snap is controlled by canonical, and the backend for the snap repo is entirely closed source. I’ve heard snaps are also easier for developers to work with, but I haven’t experienced that side of them.

Snaps automatically update by default where flatpaks don’t.

Snaps also get treated as loopback devices when they’re installed, which bloats a lot of utilities. (And they keep a few old versions around which makes it even worse). For example, you could run lsblk and if you’re using snaps like 90% of it will be snaps you’ve installed instead of actual devices.

Flatpaks are also noticeably faster to start up, which for desktop apps matters, but wouldn’t really matter for a server that’s aiming for a lot of uptime.

The loopback device issue is the main reason I don’t use snaps. I also like flatpak being completely open, but realistically that doesn’t matter for much. There used to be an open snap store, but that shut down because nobody used it.

The easiest way to think of it is flatpaks are AppImages with a repository and snaps are flatpaks but bad.

That has benefits and detriments. Appimages contain everything they need to run, flatpak’s mostly do, but can also use runtimes that are shared between flatpaks.

All flatpaks are sandboxed, which tends to make them more secure. AppImages can be sandboxed, but many aren’t.

Flatpaks tend to integrate with the host system better, you can (kinda) theme them, their updates are handled via the flatpak repo, and they register apps with the system.

AppImages are infinitely more portable. Everything’s in one file, so you can pretty much just copy that to any system and you have the app.

Yeah, but people installing GrapheneOS probably aren’t in the vast majority of users

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I agree with pretty much everything they’ve said, though I’ve gotten more use out of the swappable parts. I have a desktop I use for things I need a powerful system for, but being able to swap in the GPU when traveling is great.

When I’m at home I have basically everything on USB C and the empty expansion bay.

When I travel I swap in the GPU and add an HDMI port and some USB a ports.

If you don’t have stuff set up like I do I agree it’s mostly just a reparability / upgradeability thing.

Nah, they’re just it people on their way to a convention

Yeah, they can’t attack her record cause conservatives would like all the bad things she’s done

Oh yeah, they’re free to decide, I just disagree with them! I get the decision though, and if I were on charge of a large distro, I’d probably make the same choice (until plasma is on a normal release cycle)

Yeah, like I’m all in favor of having an opinionated design, but their dominance makes their bad decisions actively harm every other de. Stuff like refusing to compromise on cross-desktop protocols

Their whole attitude towards development is similar, down to not working with other dekstops and insisting on doing things the way that works best for them regardless if it’s worse for the linux ecosystem overall.

Nah, GNOME is worse mostly because it’s the default on a ton of distros, so them having this attitude actively get’s in the way of cross-desktop development instead of just being annoying.

Yeah, KDE’s basically at the point you don’t need GNOME imo, it’s so customizable you can make it basically look/function the same as GNOME without having to put up with GNOME’s dumber decisions

My only concern with nobara is that Fedora 41’s dropping x11 support, and I’m not confident nvdia drivers will be in a good enough state to recommend to a beginner.

Yeah, I’ve heard it’s getting better, but I have an amd card, so not really sure where it’s actually at. X would probably be better for nvdia for a while, especially on pop_os, but idk what the actual state is.

The basic recomendations I’d give for distro is something popular based off Ubuntu or fedora. Both are pretty friendly distros, and most things based off them aren’t going to make too many changes to how core systems work.

If it’s based off one of those I’d argue the more important question is what user interface (called a desktop environment) you like. Watch a few videos of each distro in action and pick what you think looks best.

A lot of big distros have “spins” or varieties that have different desktop environments. So if you

Some specifics I’d recommend:

• Linux mint: a distro based on Ubuntu that’s designed to be easy to use, without much setup. Most stuff will just work, but being based on Ubuntu, it’s a stable distro, so updates will be a bit slower, and there won’t be any major changes in the same version. (I would reccomend this over standard Ubuntu personally because the company behind Ubuntu has made decisions I don’t like (like prioritizing their own way of installing programs that, in my opinion, is a inferior to other methods))

Slightly less highly recomended:

• Fedora: takes a quicker approach to updates, but isn’t as focused on being friendly to new users. It has a variety of spins: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/ if you go with fedora, I’d recommend GNOME (the default, more similar to Mac), KDE (similar to windows), or cinnamon (what linux mint uses, similar to windows).

• nobara: I’ve heard good things about nobara, but I’m not super familiar with it. It’s basically fedora KDE with some extra patches added to better support gaming. The one negative I’ve heard is the maintainer is very busy, so ocasionally updates will be delayed vs fedora. It’s more of a hobbyist distro, but the maintainer seems pretty dedicated, and they also maintain a version of valve’s proton (one of the things that lets you play windows games on linux called proton ge that includes additional patches)

In order I’d recommend pop_os, linux mint, fedora, nobara. If you look at KDE and decide you like it, then I’d go withth fedora or nobara.

The main reason I’d recommend pop_os or mint is because you have an nvdia graphics card. Nvdia drivers have tended to be worse on linux, especially under a newer protocol called Wayland, which fedora is moving over to in it’s next release. Mint and pop_os slower update cycles are more likely to stay on x11 (the older protocol, but better supported by nvdia cards) until everything’s very solid.

Fedora’s trying to push linux forward, which is good imo, and most things should be fine with nvdia, but there will be more bugs. (I’ve heard it’s gotten pretty good, but I have an amd card and don’t want to recommend them without warning until I know for sure there aren’t issues)

1. I’d recommend pop os over bazzite because it’s a more standard distro, bazzite is immutible (update entire system at once instead of individual apps, and part of the filesystem are read only. It’s harder to break stuff on an immutible distro, but they’re less common and most resources online are for normal distros). It isn’t hard to get nvdia drivers working on pop os, so I’d just google it after you get it set up.

2. I’d make sure your windows drive is unplugged before installing, so you don’t accidentally wipe it! I’ve never dealt with swapping what drive the os is on, but I’d expect some stuff to break because the filesystem is pointing to unique IDs that no longer match. That shouldn’t be hard to fix by googling the errors, but I’d watch out for it.

3. Windows updates like to mess up bootloaders sometimes, I’ve never had that happen, so I don’t have any advice there. Unplugging the windows drive when you instsl should help, and just make sure the default is to boot into linux, that way any auto restarts won’t get into windows to mess stuff up unless you let it.

c/[email protected]

c/[email protected]

Could also be good places to ask

Wym, both took the correct action?