That’s what pacman -Syyu is for. The occasional life support failure and forced bug hunting is part of the experience.

I see. I mean, there’s always a way how you decide what you want to buy without any hard, arduous research.

Does the same happen in ONLYOFFICE or Collabora? The documents I sometimes interact with might be too “basic” to notice problems. The worst issue I had was LibreOffice Draw freaking out over a PDF, which arguably it wasn’t made for anyway.

Sucks if they still keep protecting their monopoly through software / document manipulation.

Never had the opportunity to use or see one since they don’t cover the European market. Pop!_OS was fine though when I used it, it’s unfortunate you had such problems.

Luckily there are a lot of other vendors as well. Star Labs, Ubuntushop, NovaCustom, even Lenovo and I think HP by now (although their laptops are almost always shit). So there are options.

The potential pain with setups is a reason I like to point people at vendors like Slimbook, Tuxedo Computers or System76. Avoids a lot of possible problems for those who can afford it.

there’s no good DAW on Linux

Now that’s not true though. Bitwig Studio and Reaper f.e. support all the common plugins APIs and are excellent professional DAWs. And then of course you also got Ardour if you prefer FOSS.

Things like Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects have no solid alternative to this day for Linux

I’m not perfectly familiar with Adobe products, but I’m very positive that DaVinci Resolve, Lightworks (literally used by Hollywood), Blender and Natron offer all the functionality those two do. And most likely with less crashes, as far as I heard about Premiere Pro. 🙃

Office uses proprietary file format constraints to lock down their ecosystem.

Didn’t hear about issues with Office Suites in more than a decade. Microsoft famously manipulated their docs to hamper third-party apps in implementing docx support, that’s quite a time ago though.

Unreal Engine, lots games, my audio interface, drivers for obscure small devices I need? I just don’t know and I have to dedicate time to researching all of it.

Yeah, hardware is always a thing especially during a switch. Once you made it of course you can pick new gear that’s known to be supported on Linux by their company. At least with Unreal Engine it’s known to work, and Games by now basically always do except for those with the most vile Anti-Cheat.

I bought a notebook and will try to go CachyOS x KDE Plasma on that

May I suggest to use a more general-use, Ubuntu-based distro? Those often offer way better hardware support for more devices out of the box. That’s one reason they’re called bloated, but damn is it comfy sometimes.

Wait until people come up with other, older things to be nostalgic about. Like Shoop da Whoop or Ronald McDonald Insanity. Peak 2000’s internet brainrot.

There’s also an additional middleground between them, Slowroll. Still a rolling distro but slower with feature updates for additional stability.

Leap tends to be rather outdated as it keeps binary-compatibility to SLES. Of course makes it as stable as possible, but also more often than not uncomfortably lacking behind.

To be fair, OpenSuse is an umbrella of multiple distros other than Debian and Arch. There are

• Leap (Stable, binary-compatible to SLES)
• Tumbleweed (Rolling)
• Slowroll (Rolling but slower, duh)
• Aeon (Immutable w/ Gnome)
• Kalpa (Immutable w/ KDE)
• Factory (unstable)
• MicroOS (Immutable for Server)
• Leap Micro (Immutable, binary-compatible to SLES)

And then of course the whole Enterprise stuff around SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server). There’s definitely a need to specify what “OpenSuse” actually means in any given context. 😅

I agree though, it’s god damn great. The bootable btrfs snapshots that are set up by default in particular.

It would risk “our” wealth.

More rare than an i5-8600 and probably becomes rather rare as time moves on.

I’d still keep it. Even though it doesn’t appear to be a more rare CPU (like, a 5950X or similar). Might become worth a little bit in a few years.

Pretty much any distro can do any of the things Windows/Mac users are hoping a computer can do.

Without knowledge and at least an hour of your time for configuration, CLI-first distros like Arch can’t even play a video - or show a GUI for that matter.

[…] Nvidia GPU […] It’s not super complicated to set up, but it’s definitely going to feel like a foreign experience the first time.

If you’re lucky that means. If you happen to pick a distro / device combo that doesn’t harmonize and the distro didn’t took care of the driver from the start you’ll have a really, really bad time. Especially if it’s a hybrid GPU system. You’re right about picking a distro that comes with it. Options like Pop!_OS, TuxedoOS or Bazzite come to mind.

Windows Vista.

Oh, oups. That’s a remnance from a meme I made a few minutes earlier. However now Tux is looking towards the text, therefore this was all planned.

I thought you said healthy.

Oh, translation mistake on my side. Is the word “desktop” really still in use for tower computers? 🤔 I only know it for the kind of computing, not the device type.

Anyway, can’t quickly find proper statistics for that. I once read an estimate done by what I think was Valve, that’s obviously scewed towards the gaming bubble though. Still, I think it “only” was about 50-60% desktops over laptops and “other”. They won’t vanish anytime soon though, you can’t squeeze highest performance into a laptop and game streaming only works very selectively.

I’m really curious how it will shift in the future given Linux becomes more and more popular, and that ecosystem is already offering a synergy approach (not just the way SteamDeck does, but also with both GTK and Qt apps able to shift depending on display size and touch capabilities).

According to this data, desktop devices still make well over 50% with over 75% in Europe.

It was somewhat of a special situation back when Gnome 3 dropped. Ubuntu & flavours of it was still regarded as the go-to distro by many and KDE still had a somewhat damaged reputation due to KDE 3 (even though 4 was already available, however that also had some issues). Many environments we know today didn’t exist yet, so lots of people were rather distraught when Gnome broke with a lot of concepts and dropped what arguably was a horrendous DE.

Many of our current DEs are Gnome 2 or 3 forks (MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and back then also Unity), made exactly because of this whole debacle.

Same here. Has to be degoogled though.

Bloated when being run on a potato.

Luckily 99.9% of people do not compute on a potato.