RAM could be a cheaper culprit. Try re-seating it.

Do not use Manjaro. It is a known trap. What you can do is install pamac, which is what Manjaro uses for GUI package management. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve used Arch, so here’s a tutorial:

https://itsfoss.com/install-pamac-arch-linux/

Alternatively you could look at Garuda, which is a solid Arch distro. You’ll either love or hate the theme, but that’s easy to change. It also comes with an interactive kernel by default (most distros use a regular kernel build, which works better for servers).

Whatever you do, please please please not Ubuntu. It’s the lowest common denominator. Emphasis on “lowest”. It was good in the past, but Canonical have really lost the plot.

I have read on more than one occasion that Wine is becoming the “Linux Gaming ABI.” It’s no longer just about Windows. With the huge variety presented by distros, Wine is simply a nice stable target that never moves.

Try forcing it to use Proton (game properties in Steam).

MacOS is a BSD, so go with Linux if you want variety.

I heard it in a podcast, but here’s a written source on that: https://fedoramagazine.org/pipewire-1-0-an-interview-with-pipewire-creator-wim-taymans/

The message is still to use the PulseAudio and JACK APIs. They are proven and they work and they are fully supported.

I know some projects now use the pw-stream API directly. There are some advantages for using this API such as being lower latency than the PulseAudio API and having more features than the JACK API. The problem is that I came to realize that the stream API (and filter API) are not the ultimate APIs. I want to move to a combination of the stream and filter API for the future.

Switching over to the discrete GPU work in the efi/bios might help. Optimus (the driver that chooses between discrete and integrated) is known to be a steaming pile.

PipeWire wins in the feature-set game, which is why it is being preferred over PulseAudio.

According to the inventor of PipeWire, this is the wrong perspective to take. PipeWire is preferred over PulseAudio as a server, clients (apps) should continue to use the PulseAudio/JACK APIs because the PipeWire API is not designed for general use (it’s designed for things like pipewire-pulse and pipewire-jack).

The biggest hurdle to open sourcing proprietary stuff is often 3rd party code, but we can indeed hope.

What do you mean? Apple doesn’t have a package manager at all. Brew is a removeding mess that takes ages to do anything.

I use NixOS on my personal machine and nixpkgs on my work Ubuntu (22.04 LTS). In the absence of NixOS I would not be using it: it somehow breaks all the file (open, save, etc.) windows, causing any app that tries to open one to crash (particularly annoying for browsers).

Not to mention the wrapGL issue.

It needs more polish on “genericlinux”. I did previously use it on MacOS, and it did make MacOS almost bearable - definitely years ahead of brew.

GPU drivers. It uses the Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) userspace side of drivers. Could be incompatible with your kernel. Had all sorts of graphical weirdness with my AMD GPU with flatpak Steam.

Silverblue doesn’t solve the same problems as Nix, or Ansible for that matter. I built my own in the past and it was non-trivial - although the CI process could pair quite nicely with Ansible. IMHO the primary advantage of Silverblue is that updates are a download, with practically zero work to do after the download has completed (this is a very big deal for RPM-based systems because an update boot can take a long time).

As for Ansible vs Nix, try switching from one program to another across all your machines. It’s doable but not fun. Now try switching back across all your machines. Nix makes your system equal a configuration, it does not add configuration.

Things have changed since those days fam. For example, if you install Steam on Ubuntu (snaps) today it’s highly likely to break. If you want a solid Ubuntu recommendation go with the downstreams: Mint, PopOS, etc.

Try running your file manager or something else that displays icons from the terminal, it may log error messages.

Btw COW isn’t necessarily (and isn’t at least for ZFS) a performance trade-off. Data isn’t really copied, new data is simply written elsewhere on the disk (and the old data is not marked as free space).

Ultimately it actually means “the data behaves as though it was copied,” which can be achieved in many ways. There are many ways to do that without actually copying.

I recently switched away from the Legion 5 15ARH05: AMD APU+NVIDIA. The thing with laptops is that you are at the mercy of the system integrator. They are able to integrate the GPU in weird ways and often do. For me the external monitor wouldn’t work without the proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed. The NVIDIA drivers caused all sorts of problems, from backlight woes to failure to resume from standby (which worked fine without the drivers installed).

If you do go with an NVIDIA machine, go with one that is built for Linux. I switched to an all AMD (I really don’t want to deal with NVIDIA bullremoved) System76, but I hear their NVIDIA story is pretty good.

Do not buy a Windows+NVIDIA laptop and put Linux on it - unless you get a glowing recommendation for a specific model.

You should install the open source System76 modules for the best experience (not required): https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware

Linux actually stands for “Linux is not Unix.” Recursive acronyms were a bit of a geek inside joke at the time.

That’s a Stallman rant/copypasta. Calling it GNU/Linux isn’t very common outside of his fans.

Linux is a Unix, but Unix is not Linux. Solus is a Unix, as is MacOS (a really bad one), and BSD.