For me, on CachyOS, there does appear to be some fork of the drivers that the OS maintainers have kept up; I haven’t really had any complaints. In my case I don’t use ultrawide monitors or any unusual features, but maybe others with specific use cases would struggle more.

Do not stop the war against techbros simply because we can’t settle a perfect, concrete, legal definition of them.

Sorry, but something I’ve had to learn with time is that it really doesn’t matter who’s operating the gas chamber, if their actions rely on hundreds of other people openly saying “Death to all jews”. There’s no importance to whether those people would ever pull the lever themselves. The language is what’s important, not how much they were “only joking”. Both an ultra-racist and an edgy teen in their late 20s are just “trying to get away with it” and don’t care who they hurt.

Yeah, I’m lucky that my main games of interest weren’t blocked from Linux when I switched. If I had a friend group that played BF6, it likely would’ve been a harder decision

I recently learned there’s an entire fork of proton entirely for “anime” games (dwproton). They be dedicated

Shit, I think CachyOS and its gaming optimization made me jump to the end.

Fingerprinting. Age, as well as factors like IP address, can be one more data point to individually identify a user with a certain number of accounts.

There’s also potential they changeover from “Enter your DOB” to “Show your driver’s license”, which they can collect much more data from.

I’ve been at risk for carpal tunnel before, which is why I primarily use a keyboard.

…on a GUI.

Linux is great for a lot of things but so many open-source apps are terrible about giving you a visual interface for something, and then letting you use your keyboard to navigate it. Granted, Windows has steadily enshittified its lead on that front as well.

It starts to feel a bit like going to university. Maybe 10% of the ones you try out will be total misses, maybe even discourage you on the search. But chances are, 90% of the options are perfectly suitable for your uses, and everyone will end up feeling a bit of faithful loyalty to their destination of choice.

I mean, isn’t that how package managers work too? Just relying on the default repo of each one, since most users won’t work with new sources.

When I tried it, it didn’t feel all that great for gaming. Several games I tried had issues, and whatever tools would make it more compatible weren’t readily available for me. When I eventually tried CachyOS, much of that was fixed; my theory is that it was using more recent, less proven packages for some feature support.

I’ve been using CachyOS and impressed by the array of available software, and it was only in the back of my mind, the thought; “Wow, so much of this is so refined and polished. I wonder who has motive to maintain it?”

Joke’s on me, the motive is hardly there - and it’s a shitty time for it with Windows announcing that 10 is the last version and that there are no plans for a new one.

I’m glad Valve has a profit motive towards open source right now, but especially in a world where fewer people can donate at random, I really hoped that the model wasn’t specifically built to rely just on tip jars.

The problem is, I feel like more recent MBA lessons tell people that the “rising tide that lifts all ships” is a business death sentence, for reasons unexplained. Many of them now would rather sink the whole ocean if they believe that their business will sink a little bit less.

I have so many causes on my mind that all need money; some for helping starving children, others for supporting sane politics, GoFundMes for people affected by a warped healthcare system; the request you’re making very much makes sense, but it’s so hard to put it above so many of the other critical needs for donations, when the image of an open source worker is someone who can, and often does, get paid working for a large company.

I’m sure many people could point to hundreds of dangers around open-source programs relying on government funding. Yet, I can’t argue that it seems to be a necessity.

My current plan is to try, how you say…CachyOS?

Mainly, I want a clearer idea of what the “fork bases” are, so that when I inevitably run into some problems, I can google “How do I prevent window docking in Plasma” or “How do I prevent window docking in Arch”. Not, “How do I prevent window docking in ObscureCachyFork875”.

I think I’ve had several attempts on “simple” distros, and unfortunately I think the trend of trying to simplify things for me has just cut off customization options that irk me to no end.

Note that my post said “old drives” - plural. Mint was being installed on a secondary, formatted drive, and refused because that drive was not GPT-formatted (that record exists outside of the filesystem formatting). At the time, the BIOS was not set to force UEFI, so this was Mint’s decision, not the BIOS’s, and I don’t understand it. I left Windows alone on a different drive.

Believe me, I did plenty of reading up on BIOS UEFI settings just to resolve the issue. I still don’t claim to be a master, but I at least know enough to express how annoying the reconfiguration can be - independent of which OS you’re choosing.

I believe your anecdote, but my Linux Mint install also took multiple days, BIOS visits, and lots of documentation searching. It’s a factor of how much the OS makers anticipated the specific hardware configuration and how out of date the partitions are configured.

My main point is that both can be frustrating, and there’s nothing consistent.

I’m not sure what you mean by an existing Windows install. If you mean going through launch screens on a new device that’s configured the OEM setup, then no, I have experience (granted, now in the past) with doing Windows installs from blank drives.

Not to make a “Gotcha”, but Linux Mint was the other distro I tried, as I’ve complained about before. The first release I tried, which was less than a year old (on a 2+ year old computer) didn’t even run the wifi, audio, or bluetooth drivers correctly.

And, I had that same type of UEFI setting on Linux; Mint wanted to install on a GPT drive record, when my old drives (on Windows) used an MBT. It’s a conversion process both OSes will help with, but Mint gave some errors with it, and it was honestly easier to use Windows’ tools to get it done. Not even sure why Mint was insistent on it. Oh, and a mostly distro-agnostic annoyance: While attempting that conversion and making extra space for the GPT format, I ended up wiping more of the drives than needed during conversion because the partition manager used on several distributions uses bad messaging, and incorrectly refers to an individual partition under /dev/nvmesda0# as a “device”.