You can get Steam on just about any distro, for years at this point. And there's always Flatpak for these cases too although for Steam I recommend native packages.

You're not wrong, it's definitely not something a n00b should attempt in most cases. But I've done this before to save myself the need for distrobox. A lot of proprietary software only offers .deb, but is usually either statically linked or comes with its own set of nearly all the libraries it needs. So just extracting and running it often does the trick on non-debian distros like Fedora in my case.

Seriously though, just use distrobox or see if there's an unofficial package for your distro that you trust (AUR/copr/ppa/OBS). It's more straight forward especially if you don't know what you're doing.

That'll work but distrobox is a much simpler solution

Also great when you get some software as a deb for old Ubuntu and don't want the trouble of manually making it work on a new system. Just make an old Ubuntu distrobox.

I wonder why they use A/B root in the first place instead of a single BTRFS partition with Subvolumes and snapshots

My home server is a RockPro64. I didn’t specifically buy it for that purpose but since I had it lying around I figured I might as well use it.

It has a PCIe Slot which I used for a SATA controller, with two 3,5" HDDs.

They have an official NAS case for it too, not sure I’d recommend it as it’s kind of expensive, doesn’t isolate HDD vibration / noise at all and isn’t very convenient to service (to replace the drives for instance). I’m not aware of a better case option for this board though.

I run debian and OpenMediaVault on it (I didn’t have to mess with the kernel or device tree at all), with the ZFS plugin, and several docker containers (Jellyfin, PiHole, Syncthing, Tailscale).

For my needs it’s working perfectly fine and doesn’t need much power. But:

• It isn’t particularly great at video transcoding
• 4GB of RAM isn’t a ton especially with ZFS, keep that in mind if you wish to run more / heavier services such as Nextcloud
• being ARM based, this board basically limits you to OMV or manually setting up stuff on Linux through the CLI, as TrueNAS, Unraid and Proxmox only support x86. OMV is fine for it’s core functionality and you can get some more advanced features through plugins, but at that point it often gets kind of janky and annoying compared to e. g. TrueNAS. Also, the KVM plugin apparently doesn’t work on ARM.

TL;DR these low power ARM boards are just fine as a cheap option for getting into homelab / Self hosting and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against them, but sooner or later I want to build a low power x86 based NAS with more RAM, SSD cache and TrueNAS Scale instead.

Kdenlive unfortunately isn’t amazing at really utilizing your hardware. Getting better though.

I’ve never had good luck with distro packages of Kdenlive, on any distro. Always crashing and glitching. The Flatpak has always been much more stable for me, and the AppImage is even more solid.

Btrfs snapshots are a blessing. Call me a cheater :P

I don’t use Wine so I’m really not sure if this would be prevented

It is not prevented. In fact I saw a video where someone removed the Z:\ drive for wine (the path that gives windows apps access to the whole Linux rootfs) and then ran Wannacry, and it was somehow still able to encrypt all writable folders on the system.

That wouldn’t remove the Wine prefix, i. e. the virtual C:\ drive where the virus most likely lives. Uninstalling Wine wouldn’t do shit since it only removes files that your user (and thus wine) can’t even write to, and if a virus manages to get around that you have bigger problems.

• Screen sharing works with legacy apps using KDE’s XWayland video bridge
• ??? When I close LibreOffice, Rnote or whatever and have unsaved work I am asked if I want to save
• Compositor Crashes: Valid and, at best, annoying point. Hopefully that will change soon and luckily KWin and Mutter rarely crash these days
• DPI: In my experience scaling is a better experience than on X11. In KDE, you can choose if unsupported apps should have no scaling or blurry scaling.
• Graphical bugs are basically gone for me and have been for months now. On NVIDIA it might be worse
• I have not had significant problems with drag and drop or copy and paste in a long time.

I’m not trying to invalidate your experience; if Wayland doesn’t work for you yet then stay on X11 for a while. But a lot of complaints I see about Wayland are pretty outdated and just not true any more.

I just don’t really get the “I won’t use Wayland until it has complete parity with X” attitude. The status quo is that X11 has features that Wayland lacks and vice versa. Like, I enjoy features like VRR, mixed refresh rates, mixed scaling, better gestures etc. on Wayland right now, but color management isn’t there just yet.

Wayland doesn’t need complete parity with X11, it just needs the features that people actually need these days. And yeah it lacks some stuff like color management but I’d argue for the majority of users Wayland is already fully usable day to day.

I guess that makes me a tech conservative with a hint of newborn paranoid, based on the provided. But I don’t think the name “tech conservative” is very fitting at all. To me those words would describe someone has been using Linux for 20 years and hates everything that is new just out of principle and will never change their mind (e. g. containerized apps, Wayland, systemd etc.). I couldn’t be further away from that stereotype.