my motherboards drivers don’t come with windows, and so when i tried to install it and it forced me to connect to the internet, i just couldn’t. luckily i found a usb dongle to ethernet which worked ootb.

never had a weird mono driver issue like that on any linux distro i tried.

i think i’ve managed to get to this state exactly once, but i don’t remember how i got there and what machine it was. i just know that it was a machine i tried multiple distros on and so i can confidently say that, in my case, it was not a hardware, but a software issue. i hope that nothing of value is broken for you either. good luck!

afaik that depends on the type of medium, where ssd are more susceptible to rot than hdd (and never use usb sticks). now this is just my guess, but i’d think that zfs with frequent automatic checks and and such will keep your data safer than an unplugged hdd

i have read that russia is blocking matrix country wide, so i doubt that the great firewall can’t do that. then again i dont remember the source rn, so take it with the usual pinch of salt

a friend of mine uses a non modern ryzen that has issues with sleep states. his home server ran fine until the os got an update and managed to idle much lower than before. that made his machine crash and was a really weird error to catch. dunno if this could apply to you at all. just throwing it out there.

working at a research institute, nobody set any restrictions for what os i install. there are guidelines, but only to make sure that people keep their os secure. i’m using fedora, my boss uses mint, a colleague uses macos. everyone is free (as long as it’s within a somewhat tight budget)

ford

i would like to second this. though i’m not really experienced with it, creative work can be quite the pain in the butt from what i’ve been hearing.

for general usability and gaming it’s generally not really any more difficult than windows it feels like. i would just always recommend to check whether the things you really need run on linux or have an equivalent. this includes checking areweanticheatyet and protondb for the games you wanna play. some companies block linux in their games because some windows hackers exploit linux comparability… some other companies are stupid and think that a single player needs anticheat…………

also your choice of distro very much matters when it comes to how easily you get your things to work. for example i love bazzite for gaming, especially on laptops with igpu and nvidia, but it may not be the right choice for creative work, like i wont use it for my work related programming. there i use fedora KDE.

i also need to know for my setup 😅

yeah i think that there’s a good chance for vpn users to be harassed by anti ai measures

dealing with logitech devices. i love their hardware, but i feel like they’re really bad at doing any kind of software… i know that there are alternatives for configuring logitech devices, but i quite enjoy solaar.

i’ve heard that some people love using kate because, with some plugins, it really can do all most people need. i’ve seen a dude make a video on it but would need some time to find it again if there was any interest.

can it be sandboxed in a sensible way? (on linux specifically)