On my laptops: Debian -> Fedora. Mostly because I couldn’t reliably use my external display on Debian, and because I needed wanted shiny new things. Also new hardware.

On my gaming rig: Manjaro -> Nobara -> Bazzite. I left Manjaro because the system was slowly getting worse with each update, and I wanted to game, not maintain my system. I ditched Nobara after a botched version upgrade. Bazzite is fine for now.

Unless you go once near a beach and a single grain of sand gets past the airtight bag the phone was in and the Totally-IP67-We-Swear phone chassis and is fucking destroys the screen from the inside, with a repair bill worthy of a new phone because “that kind of damage is not under warranty”.

Source : happened to one of my best friends. Fuck you with a folding dildo, Samsung.

That’s what I love about my ‘23 Yaris. The entertainment system is basically a radio and hybrid telemetry. Everything else is CarPlay/Android Auto. No shitty outdated maps, no 90’-style MP3 player…

gestures!

Still the reason that 20+ years later the second thing I install on any browser is a gestures extension (the first one is always uBlock Origin, obviously).

Seconded, I moved my gaming rig is on Bazzite and has been trouble free and maintenance free ever since.

I installed Bluefin on the laptop I gave my father, and it’s been happily running trouble-free every single day since August without a single intervention. And my father is the kind of man who can conjure up unknown bugs, weird failures and random crashes by simple hand contact.

Thanks!

Shameless self promotion: https://lemm.ee/post/37682729

It won’t answer all of your answers, but it should at least give you a good primer on what distros are and what are the main key takeaways.

I’ve successfully used Anyconnect for years in a dedicated Windows VM. However I only used it to connect to a Remote Desktop so performance was a non-issue.

Based as fuck.

Sure you’re absolutely free to do as you please ;)

From personal experience tho, anything connected to the TV should Just Work^TM. Nothing more frustrating than just wanting to watch an episode or play a quick game before going to bed and having to spend this time doing updates and maintenance instead.

As this is for a HTPC, I would rather go for uBlue Bazzite instead of Nobara. Same Fedora base, super gaming oriented too, but atomic/immutable so 0 maintenance.

Plus, uBlue projects are not distros but an alternative build pipeline system for Fedora Atomic projects. That means that the projects scope is tiny and much easier to maintain, and that the real distro maintainers are still the Fedora team. From a user perspective, it’s much better in the long term than a single-person effort like Nobara.

Installing Fedora. I had almost nothing to configure, it worked out of the box. How frustrating! I had the whole day planned and now what? Enjoy my free time like a pleb !?!

(/s just in case anyone was wondering)

On my previous laptop, the trackpad had a bug that made it spam interrupts after waking up from sleep. It ruined battery life and basically kept one core at 100% permanently.

So I duct-taped a systemd script that unbound and bound the trackpad after each wake up.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
        post)
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/unbind
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/bind
        ;;
esac

Wait, it didn’t work? I use Apple Maps all the time in DDG

“Cloud Native” means uBlue’s OS images are basically Docker images, but meant tu run on bare metal instead of inside virtualization, that are built automatically with GitHub actions.

The project itself is super interesting. It’s not a distro, it’s an alternative automated build pipeline toolkit for Silverblue/CoreOS that lets anyone build their perfect atomic image. It’s still 100% Fedora+rpmfusion under the hood.

UBlue’s official images have massive quality of life improvements over Silverblue.

Yes. Tuxedo is German, Slimbook Spanish, Starlabs British, NovaCustom Dutch… Framework is US/Taiwanese but sells within select EU countries and the UK. AFAIK S76 is US/Canada only.

Edit: most of these actually ship worldwide but won’t collect VAT and probably won’t honor warranty claims outside their territory.

Tuxedo, Framework, Slimbook, System76, Starlabs are Linux-first vendors with an excellent track record.

“Hate” is a strong word. I don’t hate Ubuntu. It’s just irrelevant.

It’s not alone anymore in the realm of “easy to install and use”, and ongoing enshittification nagging you to upgrade to Pro™️ makes it an objectively worse product than its direct competitors.

Thanks !

I think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it’s neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I’d even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.

The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn’t always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux.

I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.

What’s bad about Ubuntu is that the “free” version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).

The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don’t currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently.

Fortunately that knowledge can be used downstream and often upstream too. After all, most Ubuntu issues are Debian Sid issues.