I was just about to post the same thing. I’ve been using Linux for almost 10 years. I never really understood the folder layout anyway into this detail. My reasoning always was that /lib was more system-wide and /usr/lib was for stuff installed for me only. That never made sense though, since there is only one /usr and not one for every user. But I never really thought further, I just let it be.

I’m on Arch (actually a converted Antergos) and I have an NVIDIA card as well. My first attempt a few months ago was horrible, bricking my system and requiring a bootable USB an a whole evening to get Linux working again.

My second attempt was recently, and went a lot better. X11 no longer seems to work, so I’m kinda stuck with it, but it feels snappy as long as my second monitor is disconnected. I’ve yet to try some gaming. My main monitor is a VRR 144Hz panel with garbage-tier HDR. The HDR worked out of the box on KDE Plasma, with the same removedty quality as on Windows, so I immediately turned it off again. When my second monitor is connected I get terrible hitching. Every second or so the screen just freezes for hundreds of milliseconds. Something about it (1280x1024, 75Hz, DVI) must not make Wayland happy. No settings seem to change anything, only physically disconnecting the monitor seems to work.

I bought a ThinkPad new in 2014 for my study for like 1200 euro’s. She’s still happily purring today. Around 2019 I made the mistake of emptying a cup of tea into the ThinkPad accidentally and then holding it upside down to get the water out. I think I should’ve just let it leak out of the bottom since the laptop has holes for that, but I panicked. This broke the keyboard, but not the rest of the laptop. I got an official new keyboard for like 100 euro’s which came with a tool and the simple instructions, and since then everything has been working flawlessly.

So I recommend ThinkPads, although I can’t really say anything about compatibility of new models

I recently tried to get Wayland working. Followed a simple guide to enable some NVIDIA boot parameter. Somehow it removeded my complete grub and I couldn’t boot until I messed around a fair bit with live usbs. Cost me a whole evening.

So I guess what Wayland is missing is normal support from the GPU manufacturers.

At our office (and probably in many) the developers mostly use Linux and the other people often use windows for Microsoft stuff like Word, Excel, and other windows specific software. We can’t really choose, everyone is forced to use Linux for development so we all have a more or less the same environment

It’s not so much an argument, it’s my personal experience. My experience was just not great. Maybe I did something wrong, but I’ve had a way better experience with Antergos, Arch, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

Idk what was wrong then, but I constantly had issues with packages being out of date due to the kernel and not wanting to update. Dependencies were constantly a mess. I’d rather just have normal Arch or Antergos/Endeavor

Manjaro. I had previously already used Antergos and Ubuntu, but after Antergos stopped I needed something like it. So I installed Manjaro in my secondary PC (with old components). I constantly got into trouble with the manual kernel version selection thingy. I was used to kernel updates being part of the normal update process, and suddenly I had to manually pick the new one. I constantly ran into incompatibility issues with older or newer kernels, vague update deadlocks where I couldn’t update things because they depended in each other, and I absolutely hated having to use a separate program for updating the kernel. Now the PC runs Fedora and I’m liking that a lot more so far…

For tasks that I know, I’m faster in the terminal. For tasks where I’m less familiar or that are very important (like disk partitioning) I prefer a GUI because with a GUI I can usually see a bit better what I’m doing.

Terminal tasks for me include copying stuff, setting folder permissions, uncompressing or compressing folders, quick edits in vim, etc.

I use mostly pure GNOME on my PC. The missing system tray is very annoying, though I really don’t care about the missing dock or desktop icons. I start programs by searching for them, not by clicking on a desktop icon or in a dock. That’s my preferred method. And the alt+tab menu of GNOME is nice enough to find anything when I need it, together with having workspaces to organize everything.

I tried KDE, but it just felt more messy to me. For instance, I tried to move the bottom bar to the side of my screen, accidentally moved something on the bar itself, and then everything looked off and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back. It all felt a bit janky and unrefined. On some systems I also use i3, but that’s only for productivity. For daily use I prefer GNOME, where everything just seems to work.

That sounds very idealistic, but not very practical. I use my computer for deep learning projects. Since AMD and Intel are way behind, I almost have to use Nvidia. How would I stop making myself dependent on Nvidia? Give up my hobby/interest in deep learning? Stop playing the games I like? Help with programming a CUDA replacement myself in the very limited free time coding that I have time and energy for? We don’t live in some utopia, it’s often not possible to ditch these companies even if they act like absolute cunts.

I’m just saying that it doesn’t matter whether we agree or not. If the choice is made to drop X support and Nvidia doesn’t fix Wayland, a lot of people will end up in a mess when trying Linux for the first time and might turn back to Windows/Mac. I agree that no volunteer should do anything they don’t want to do. But in the world we live in that does mean we have a problem

I agree that volunteers shouldn’t have to maintain legacy just because a private company doesn’t have their removed together. But the reality is that a lot of people have Nvidia hardware. If GNOME and KDE will not work on the most popular gaming GPU brand, we’re going to push away a lot of people who are trying to start with Linux but encounter a broken mess.

That’s gonna make gaming a lot harder though. And I’m on an AMD CPU. I’m not sure whether it has an internal GPU even. My point is that they’ll lose a lot of users by forcing Wayland. I’m not dure Nvidia will care for such pressure

My problem is that I’m kinda tied to CUDA and thus Nvidia. If AMD’s ROCm would’ve been a bit better and supported on consumer GPUs I would’ve went for that.

But having a non-NVIDIA card in order to use the latest GNOME doesn’t seem reasonable to me. Then again, maybe the pressure will finally make NVIDIA get their removed together

Well let’s hope that massively improves the Wayland experience then. I tried it last week and still had flickering screens, laggy windows, and crashing games. In the current state it would be unacceptable for me to switch

I prefer a tiling WM for programming work. On my personal PC I actually use GNOME or KDE or something. But on my old study machine and my current work machines it’s i3 all the way. Being able to quickly tile 4 terminals together makes my work much easier. Often I have many terminals open, each with a bash history specific to what I’m doing there. Workspaces then act as a sort of bundle of applications with the same general purpose. For instance, one workspace for installing and copying stuff to a machine, another for VNC related stuff, etc. If I’d have to alt+tab between 8 terminals I’d never know which one is which. But now I can remember them by location which is way easier mentally. Similarly I sometimes have multiple projects open in an IDE, and I usually remember which workspace is for which project.

It’s even better on 4K monitors, where having 4 1080p terminals open is amazing. I can see everything and I only need to move my eyes. No keypress to switch terminal, everything is right there.