Thanks for sharing your experience! I don’t have a strong opinion about distributions, but just wanted to give some pointers to distros that come with a recent Linux kernel (6.5 or greater) for people who aren’t familiar.
Pop!_OS and Linux Mint seem to be the most recommended for beginners, probably because the net is filled with “how to do X on Ubuntu”. I recognize that Nobara, Fedora and OpenSUSE have an enthusiastic following too and I really think all of the distros I mentioned are good in their own way.
Am running EndeavourOS Sway Community Edition myself, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend that particular variant to people who don’t know what they’re getting into. Have tried to contribute a fix to it but it’s unmaintained currently.
Great! It’s good to see they are also contributing upstream!
If you’re not rich or willing enough to contribute to this, the ASUS TUF Advantage (2023) is a very similar all-AMD gaming laptop, a good fit for Linux, at roughly half the price on sale. I’ve been using it for a few months now. Zen3+ cores instead of Zen4 but 32GB RAM and an RX7600S, but with only 1920x1200 pixels at 165 Hz, instead of 1440p.
Just make sure to install a distro with a recent kernel version:
Pop!_OS (best “just works” distro with recent kernel)
Fedora 39+ or derivative (such as Nobara)
Archlinux or a derivative like EndeavourOS or Garuda
Linux Mint will not work out of the box so if you insist on Linux Mint, you will have to install a newer kernel yourself.
It’s good but not strictly necessary to install asusctl and supergfxctl on it for stuff like limiting battery charge to 80% and turning off the dGPU when working away from wall power.
EndeavourOS is easy-mode Arch. You get a liveboot with XFCE and a graphical installer with quite some choices, from a wide selection of desktop environments and window managers to the init system and filesystem. You get pacman and yay, with the AUR preconfigured.
Manjaro is the easiest way to break Arch. It has its own repos which are just Arch but 2 weeks behind. This causes problems when (not saying if) you add the AUR, which is not 2 weeks behind but in sync with Arch main repos. Thus causing breakages due to migrations not happening at the same time.
Garuda is not as widely used as Endeavour and Manjaro, but from those who’ve used it, I’ve only heard good things.
I am using EndeavourOS Sway Community Edition. Was nice to have a starting point for my first pure WM and my first Arch install. The Sway Community Edition is looking for maintainers but I am a bit disappointed by some things in upstream Sway and am not sure I want to stick with it long-term yet. Might try Hyprland at some point.
Maybe this is a problem with my setup, but though I do see a dekstop in the thumbnail, clicking the link takes me to an r/funny post. Could you upload your screenshot in a comment here? @skqweezy
I’m interested what it looks like, since AFAIK, XFCE is still the desktop environment to install on old potato-specd machines. But it’s a lot harder to get it to look good than stuff like KDE, and Gnome
Heard the same from my partner. She loves Mass Effect, Starfield, liked Elite:Dangerous and No Man’s Sky for a while and, ironically, Outer Wilds is her favourite game now. Outer Worlds didn’t click.
Thank you for commenting and asking the questions! You’re never the only one wondering about these things but someone needs to actually dare to ask instead of just scrolling past!
privacyguides.org is an amazing resource, often with links to further explanations of concepts.
There’s not a lot to track in a single browser session. The privacy violation of tracking cookies is that they track what you’re doing. If you set the privacyguides.org recommended settings in Firefox, Mullvad or Brave, the cross-site tracking should be blocked, but deleting them completely means the site will even have to do some advanced fingerprinting to even know “it’s you” on the same site (if not using the same public IP, for example by using VPN, otherwise the IP will be recognised)
Firefox has a setting to automatically delete all cookies on shutdown. You can keep a whitelist of sites that are excluded from this (the ones where you want to stay logged in). Works great, and no more worrying about cookies, as long as you shut down your browser now and then
If your kids don’t need a laptop, I’d highly recommend just getting them a desktop pc with GTX 1060 or RX 5600 or better. You should be able to find these used at a fraction of the cost of gaming laptops with the same performance, plus they’ll be a LOT quieter.
Gaming performance requires cooling, which means ideally some big chunks of metal with a lot of air going through. Laptops should be light, thin and portable. These requirements don’t mix well.
I don’t disagree with you per se (though Eurofighter and Gripen are good too), but I have to point out that the Czech Republic has been using Saab Gripens for a while now, not US-made fighter jets.
There’s probably some way to add it in bash, but if you install zsh and use the default options for everything, it just works! I especially love zsh for things “just work”: not just tab completion for directories but also having completion for tools like git, docker, kubectl, etc is super easy, and you don’t need any weird magic like in Bash if you want to use an alias with the same completion