People have the ability to block communities as they see fit individually and also follow whatever communities they want and only browse their subscribed list. (steering wheel)

But when popular communities are on an instance that is very much “get on board or get out” to the point they ban users from every community on their instance for having differing political views, it is very much reasonable to try to start or promote communities run on different instances controlled by better admins. (where the roads go (ok, so building roads is a bad analogy, it is more like when a place has terrible sidewalks so people walk through the grass and they wear in those little dirt-path short cuts and eventually no one uses the sidewalks))

My install does use btrfs (but unfortunately since I reused the other drives they are still ntfs formatted) and it does regular snapshots, but to the same drive. It isn’t completely borked yet so I’m hopeful I can “clone” to a new drive and rma the bad one (10 months old so should still have mfr warranty). I’ve used clonezilla in the past but had read it doesn’t support btrfs, maybe that info is outdated? I did see some promising tools for doing basically the same job through btrfs though. I planned to work on salvaging what I can tonight. Worst case scenario, all my personal files are synced to a cloud storage service so I’d just be out installed programs and configs if I have to reinstall from fresh.

I’ve been 100% on Linux since July of last year. I thought I was currently having my first major Linux removeded up situation that I just could not figure out this weekend.

It has been very depressing, after trying to convince friends and family to give Linux a chance and keep an open mind for months, I was beginning to feel like a fraud and a liar.

But, after hours of software troubleshooting turning up nothing I’ve discovered I’m in the early stages of a dying ssd… My first major problem, and it’s hardware related. It sucks but it is also a relief in a weird way.

And I’m finding out about it way earlier than I likely would have in windows thanks to btrfs. But it’s also funny because if I had been having similar issues in windows I probably would have ran hardware diag much sooner, but because I’m still a bit of a Linux newbie I assumed I broke my OS and wasted hours troubleshooting software.

Ah damn. Didn’t proof-read myself. It’s a fun typo though, maybe Linux is related to Jebediah?

Linux is the kerbal, the company would be GNU.

/s

I just broke 1000 hours on baldurs gate 3.

Minecraft also great, thankfully it does not tell me how many hours I’ve spent mining and crafting…

I’ve been using it daily for about a year on my primary desktop gaming pc without any issues. I love it.

As for performance, I vaguely remember phoronix doing a benchmark comparison of a few distros and in some tests it was marginally better (cannot find it now though…). For the most part though I’d say it’s not as much about potential performance gains as it is ease of use for gaming. So many useful tweaks and useful programs “out-of-the-box”.

I’d suggest that Linux tends to attract a higher percentage of people that want to tinker with their OS, and tinkering with your OS can lead to some unexpected outcomes, or outright break things that someone would have to turn to the community for help.

It depends a lot on what you want to do with it though too. Browsing the web, checking email, spreadsheets / word processing, etc? You could likely install literally any Linux os and be fine, and definitely be fine with the mainstream core distros.

If you’re gaming, I’d recommend a distro aimed at gaming. PopOS, nobara, bazzite, or Garuda all come to mind, depending on your preferred flavor.

But, as much as it pains me to say it, if you need to run, for example, Adobe or Autodesk products (or something similarly specialized and proprietary) you’ll probably have a better time doing it in windows. There are alternative options that will work in Linux fine, but if it’s for work or some other situation that requires you to use those specific proprietary products, you might be stuck.

He’s just flat out wrong about gaming. I haven’t had to put in any special “commands” (unless he means the tick box in steam settings to allow compatibility on all games, which I checked once and didn’t have to futz with anymore…) and I haven’t run into a game I wanted to play and couldn’t. I’ve heard that games that rely on aggressive root-kit anti-cheat don’t work, but I’ve avoided those titles on principle for a decade at least. But if those are titles you want to play, then yes, you’ll need windows - no amount of tweaks or commands will make them work in Linux because of the game developer’s choices.

That said, it really makes me wonder if gaming on Debian derivatives is worse? I can only speak to what I’ve used which is fedora based and arch based. And no I don’t constantly run into issues with either. I’ve spent less time “fixing” stuff since I switched to Linux, not more. Ymmv.

If you are interested in something arch-based but like having guis for stuff, I highly recommend Garuda Linux. I’ve been using it for about a year on my everyday desktop for gaming and it’s been great. I also have really liked fedora bazzite on my laptop for almost the same time period.

I’d stay away from manjaro, I wouldn’t touch it again with a 10 foot pole. Every time I’ve tried to use it, it just breaks itself every 3-6 months. I know some people swear by it, but I just have to assume they either have extreme tier knowledge to prevent trouble before it starts, are so used to fixing problems they are blind to their time spent doing it, or they are just incredibly lucky.

The guy said he’s been using linux for 20 years… He also didn’t “recommend” it, he said it’s an option if you want the arch rolling-release experience.

Manjaro kinda does suck, compared to the other arch based options out there :/

I dunno if it is “the main” one, but it’s where I landed for my desktop gaming rig. Benchmarks seem to hold it in good regard and it’s been really easy to transition to from limited previous Linux knowledge.

I’d highly recommend it to anyone that’s used Linux before, but maybe not to someone that’s never left windows or macos.

He’s also very clearly going to be running the vm with a Windows host… More likely than not that means virtualbox, not spending money on software / hardware that does it well and easily on windows just to test out… Truly the best option here for OP is dual boot.

This is a great write-up, I loved your post and wish I had your commitment.

I started using fusion 360 a little over a year ago and got half decent with it. Then I gave up windows completely and keeping it running in bottles has been a pain. It worked for a bit then something updated and it still loads but runs like trash and has problems logging in.

I’ve tried freecad over a dozen times and get so confused and lost. I watch a tutorial and it makes sense for 10 minutes then turns back into gibberish. I suspect if I’d only learned freecad initially, I might make better progress, but after getting used to fusion it just makes me feel like an idiot…

I second bazzite. Been running it on my gaming laptop for a few months now and loving it. My main desktop is running Garuda Linux, which I also absolutely love but I was weary of a rolling release arch based distro on my laptop which isn’t on and running 24/7 - tried manjaro on my laptop previously and it was broken more often than not. (although I am learning that is likely more a manjaro problem than an “arch-based” problem, it gave me a reason to try bazzite)

Crazy hot-takes here. I feel bad that you’ve had such bad experiences, but that is definitely not representative of my (or many other people’s) experience using Linux (with KDE)…

I’ll have to look when I get home but I swear I have a geforcenow app on my Garuda install out of the box… Or maybe it’s subject to the same limitations (or even is browser based itself).

I am curious why you have to or choose to exclusively play games via geforcenow though?

I’m pretty sure if fonts are missing they will still look and print fine but you try to select text to copy and paste it will be no bueno.

Game pass is the one problem with no great solution in sight… But not great doesn’t mean none. If you have an Xbox you can play them on the pc streamed over your Lan, and you can also stream games directly from the web as well.

Again, not great solutions, but it is unlikely we will see Xbox game pass running on Linux. I think MS will do anything and everything to prevent that.

Then there’s the not-solution of running a windows vm. You aren’t ditching windows with that entirely and, at least from what I understand, you’ll need a second graphics card to dedicate to the vm to get “bare metal” performance.

Dude. Same.