To me, it’s just death by a thousand papercuts. It doesn’t have any unique selling points that I’m aware of, and it’s slightly worse than my preferred distro in every way that the two differ, at least as far as I can think of.

I know that QMMP has a built-in visualizer, and the webpage says that the visualizer is call projectM, which you can apparently also run standalone: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.

At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.

If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The texlive-full package is always a fun one in that regard…

I’ve seen doormats that look more alive than this lawn…

I mean, different regions have different plants which they call “grass”, not to mention different climates. It is genuinely possible that even grass in the wild goes brown in that region…

There’s Endless OS, which goes in that sort of direction. It includes even a good chunk of Wikipedia, so you can just install it on PCs and ship those PCs into regions where they don’t have internet.

Thanks. 🙂

Interesting, I always assumed they would be using a pretty optimal algorithm with their .tar.bz2 format, because they obviously benefit quite a bit from smaller downloads. Good to know that .tar.xz is actually better.

Yeah, particularly for downloading Firefox Nightly, these self-contained archives are extremely helpful.

I think, you’ve answered your own question? There’s a lot of different formats for Linux. Getting them all correct and working on the different distributions is significantly trickier than just bundling a self-contained archive.

Having said that, they do actually provide a DEB repo since a few months ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions-recommended

On distros like Debian, openSUSE and Fedora, you need to enable a separate repository, if you want icky software, like proprietary drivers or patented codecs. In particular, you can’t watch MP4 videos. So, PeerTube and YouTube work, but if a webpage is hosting its own videos, or you happen to acquire a video file in some other fashion, there’s a good chance that it’s an MP4 file and you can’t look at it.

I’m hoping that when these patents expire, that it’s possible to ship the MP4 codecs directly, and then at least for me, that would currently result in not needing to deal with these separate repos.

Hmm, sounds like it doesn’t repaint the browser contents then. Could be something to do with your graphics driver.
Could also be that a profile refresh happens to fix it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems#w_5-refresh-firefox

I gave it an extended look a few years ago, and I don’t remember much of the details, but I found the workflow not terribly intuitive, it had some unusual defaults and was relatively limited in features.

If I remember correctly, it did save in the ODF formats, so for just writing out a letter, it’s definitely fine.
There’s just not really a reason to use it over LibreOffice, except for it being somewhat more lightweight.

I mean, as someone who hasn’t encountered these same issues as you, I found btrfs really useful for home use. The snapshotting functionality is what gives me a safe feeling that I’ll be able to boot my system. On ext4, any OS update could break your system and you’d have to resort to backups or a reinstall to fix it.

But yeah, it’s quite possible that my hard drives were never old/bad enough that I ran into major issues…

It’s been a hot minute, since I’ve been to the GTK side of town, but I’m aware of Geany and GNOME Builder (I believe, the latter is focused on developing GNOME apps, but not sure to what degree).

Well, and I guess, there’s also gVim and Emacs, if you’re into very keyboard-driven editors…

There’s a slider to apply a global scale multiplier in the System Settings under “Display & Monitor”. So, if you set it to 200%, everything will be twice as big.

As for making a distro gaming-ready, honestly I think that’s a bit overpronounced on the webpages of Bazzite and Garuda. It’s one of their distinguishing features, so that’s what they’ll talk about, but I’d be surprised if we’re talking 5 FPS more compared to a general purpose distro.
They generally use the same software and both of them are tuned for performance, with only a slightly different focus when they’ll perform the most optimal.

Yeah, I don’t know what concrete difference zstd makes. The Arch Wiki (great resource, generally applicable independent of distro) tells me that compression may speed up some workloads while slowing down others: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Compression
Maybe Garuda found out that it mostly helps with gaming when openSUSE decided to not make use of it, because openSUSE is more general-purpose.

But yeah, I don’t know, if you’re feeling Garuda, then go for it. At this point, you could tell me that you merely like the theme of Garuda better and I’d support that decision, because what I’ve read about it does sound reasonable, and it sounds like you’ll be fine either way.

And on linux, i should be able to edit custom shortcuts, macros and stuff, right?

Not entirely sure what you mean by macros, but: Yes.
The whole OS is built from the ground up to be scriptable and configurable. It’s very likely better than you can imagine.

Oof, so I came to Linux also with a history of Android Custom ROMs. And well, I had quite a bit of frustration, because my phone was so much more capable and customizable than my (Windows) desktop.
In that regard, Linux has been an absolute fucking delight. And it kind of took Android’s place, in that I now prefer tinkering with my desktop and am frustrated with how incapable Android is.

If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I have one recommendation to make:
You want something with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. It’s extremely customizable, extremely feature-rich. Other desktops, as well as more minimal GUIs (“window managers”), can be fun, too, but for starting out, I would recommend KDE.

If your Tumbleweed looked like this, that was KDE:

Well, kind of the default for both Bazzite and Garuda is KDE, so this doesn’t tell you terribly much. 😅
But I’m coming at it in this roundabout way to tell you that I’m on Tumbleweed and well, therefore I’m probably biased, but I don’t really see why you’re looking for something else, if you liked Tumbleweed.

openSUSE has the best implementation of KDE (by some fine details, but still). It’s got a really nice snapshotting system (btrfs for the filesystem + Snapper).
Garuda seems to have adopted that from openSUSE, although I don’t know, if it’s quite as fully integrated in Garuda.

Those snapshots will save you, if your system should ever break.
Basically, if your filesystem and bootloader are still intact, there’s a pretty easy way to rollback: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-snapper.html#sec-snapper-snapshot-boot (should work the same on Garuda)

But yeah, I would kind of recommend against Bazzite due to it being a relatively new concept (with the caveat that I haven’t dabbled around with it yet; I simply wouldn’t know, if it’s actually already very mature).

I should also say that I actually lied, I’m not on Tumbleweed, but rather Slowroll, which is a semi-official flavor of openSUSE. It’s essentially Tumbleweed, but you get one big upgrade once per month and only security updates in between. While the snapshots can easily rollback the breakages, eventually I got mildly annoyed at having to do so once or twice per year on Tumbleweed, when a bad update made it through, so I’m trying out Slowroll. Might be an option for you, too.

And finally, if you feel like I’m coddling you a lot less in this comment than in the last: Yep.
Since you’re dicking around with Android Custom ROMs, you’ll be fine, no matter what you choose. I mean, Linux will still be a humbling experience, because it has no qualms showing you how much you don’t yet know about computers, but it also loves to teach you. The most important ‘skill’ is having fun when tinkering with technology, which you’ve got.

A lot of the newbie recommendations, and that people tell you Tumbleweed is hard to use, are like that, because we just don’t know who’s asking these questions. Some people want to get away from Windows, but have no interest in learning. And then, yeah, I’ll also sometimes recommend Linux Mint, because its keyboard shortcuts are exactly like Windows, even though it actively got in the way of my desire to tinker, when I initially switched to it…

They’re certainly somewhat more exotic choices.

Bazzite is currently seeing a hype wave, because it’s strongly inspired by what the Steam Deck does. But that also means, it’s somewhat built like an OS for a console (or in fact like Android), in that it’s a transactional/atomic distribution.
This means, you can’t easily make changes to the OS itself, only to the applications you install and of course your personal files.
It certainly makes it more difficult to break, but it’s still a relatively new thing in the Linux world and particularly you might still run into some limitations when trying to use it as a full-fledged desktop (depending on what you’re looking to do with your PC).

Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux, which is what we refer to as “bleeding edge” (as opposed to “cutting edge”), because you get the newest version of all the software on your PC just a few days after it got released by the respective developers. Sometimes, those newest versions will have bugs.
You’ll find folks who’ll tell you they’ve been running Arch since they were two years old and never had a problem, but ultimately, why risk it?

And yeah, Trisquel is also getting basically a hard no from me. It’s a distribution for purists. For people who want nothing to do with the corporate world, who’d rather not be able to do something than rely on proprietary software.
If you’re coming from Windows, the chances of you even really knowing what that means are basically non-existent, so I doubt it’s what you want…

That’s “Nemo”.

The one that’s used by Ubuntu by default is called “GNOME Files” or “Nautilus”, in case you want to do some research on it.

Well, most people don’t have spare computers at home, so they do actually need to decide. It also means that they can’t easily try out different operating systems, so even when they’re unhappy with their current OS, they’ll rarely inform themselves about alternatives.