i always liked Bunsenlabs, very nice minimalist setup. windowmaker live (wmlive) is also interesting, more in a retro direction.

For the opposite side of the spectrum: Garuda Linux Dragonized

Not exactly the same, and the music industry has had plenty of lawsuits going both ways on that kind of thing establishing a status quo for remixes and samples in music

Few could be zero lol, i have no idea.

i think the copyright question is still unanswered: it could turn out that any LLM-generated code is a copyright violation by definition unless trained exclusively on a clean, legitimately-obtained dataset (which few of the major models are).

Will projects that allow LLM contributions have to roll back years of progress when the other shoe finally drops? Seems like a huge risk, especially for FOSS and copyleft. I think disallowing LLM-written contributions until this is all sorted out in the courts is the pragmatic move from a legal perspective.

My suggestion would be KDE Neon or Fedora KDE, since both are straightforward and have official Plasma Bigscreen packages

I don’t think atomic distros like Bazzite are a good fit for something like this since Plasma Bigscreen does not appear to have an official flatpak. It can be done but there are some drawbacks.

If you go with one of my suggestions, you will want to install multimedia codecs that do not come with the OS by default.

Here is a guide that will work on KDE Neon.

This guide is for Fedora.

unused RAM is wasted RAM. Just idle desktop browsing it can look like Linux is using more than the same task on Windows, but Linux does a better job actually feeling fast.

Just my experience but i’m not the first person to notice this. Could definitely vary by distro or setup, but comparing memory usage between Windows and Linux is very “Apples and Oranges”

i mostly see immutables recommended to beginners on here

Mint is a good suggestion for a new user. An underrated distro, but solid, simple, and works well for any purpose.

Go with an AMD graphics card over Nvidia, even if it costs significantly more. with Nvidia you will need to deal with shitty drivers (similar to Windows) and eventually your GPU will stop being supported. Also niche distros may have extra steps required to get everything working.

With AMD your card just works great no matter the distro, no matter how old the card gets. I never think about my GPU because it works at full performance every time with zero setup

CPU matters less: Intel and AMD are both solid on Linux

Linux can live with less RAM than Windows and work fine, but with more RAM Linux will intelligently cache frequently accessed files to speed up pretty much every program. Linux looks like it’s using more resources but it’s actually using them for something useful, and Linux will still back off if something you are doing actually needs more RAM

Firefox + uBlock Origin + sponsorblock. Set it and forget it.

I haven’t seen an advertisement or a sponsored segment on my desktop in over a decade, and same with my phone for several years. I’m astonished how willing most people are to put up with a constant barrage of ads coming from devices they own

Firefox allows all addons now on mobile but for a while it was only a few selected addons (ublock origin being one of them)

I am currently using 19 extensions on mobile

Brave is a bad product as of now.

Firefox with ublock is at least acceptably performant on desktop and mobile without all the crypto/tracking downsides of Brave or the open unpatched vulnerabilities (as of this posting) of Chrome/chromium (that also affect Brave)

The name is awful. I’d rather see the posts here if that’s the name of the community

You should switch to Firefox with ublock origin.

Brave is a mess of a browser and a dumpster fire of an organization, even compared to the famously dysfuctional Mozilla.

You can look up your games on ProtonDB and see which will and won’t work. Pirated games are no different from retail compatibility-wise but there might be one or two extra steps

Wayland is a mess for me with Plasma 6 (Fedora) but i’m not going back to X11. Quite a few features i use(d) have been broken along the way.

On the upside high DPI support is getting better and better

Suspend and hibernate both work 100% of the time for me so far on both of my laptops, and have for as long as i’ve had them.

Thinkpad x270 Fedora (current) KDE spin

Thinkpad x250 Ubuntu 24.04 GNOME

Fully working since 2019 and 2016 respectively. I have not tested opening the lid after just 5 seconds so i can’t say for sure how long it takes.

My previous laptop before these (an x200) would sometimes fail to suspend and get super hot in my bag before running out of battery. I was using Gentoo at the time and i suspect i had something configured incorrectly. It only happened a few times but it was pretty frustrating.

nano but i’m a casual. i can use vi/vim in a pinch, but i’m inefficient. ed and emacs are totally foreign

i tend to use a graphical text editor like Kate unless there is a specific reason to do it in the terminal

Ah i see. You are right, new hardware would need new drivers.

If MS just released the source of W95 as GPL you could still use the existing proprietary drivers, but like now you’d still have to download them from each vendor.

Making it possible to study the code itself would allow WINE devs to audit their code for edge cases and get W95-era compatibility to pretty much 100%

Thank you lol i will look into this next chance i get. I only remember looking at man systemd