I was mainly curious as to whether this was mostly a fun exercise, or if there were a practical advantage to having the calendar printed in 3D. Cool either way.

This looks great! I love OpenSCAD, and this is a pretty feature-rich usage.

Are you planning to print it for regular use as a calendar, or is there another use case you had in mind?

I’ll throw Alpine Linux into the mix. Not sure how well it supports older hardware, but it’s really small.

They obviously don’t have the features that Rufus has, but I’ve ended up using the default USB image writers that come pre-installed (found them on both Mint and Manjaro, probably available on others). If you’re just looking to write an ISO, check to see if you already have one.

You can make most distros work like most others, with enough tweaking. The main difference at this point isn’t what you can do with them, but how they’re set up by default, which typically reflects their thing (e.g., Debian is super stable vs Arch giving access to the latest and greatest).

To be honest, I think the homogenization is a net positive. I doubt we’d have the diverse driver support that makes Linux a viable desktop OS if we didn’t have lots of similarities. And it’s a natural thing–it turns out that most people want computers to do a relatively similar variety of things, so all the major distros end up moving a similar direction. And with open source, when one distro implements a really nice feature, it makes sense everyone else would port it as well.

Welcome! I was actually in the same boat a year or two ago–every time I tried before that, there was a lot of finagling to get everything working. When I upgraded to Win11, and was having a rough time getting drivers going, I ended up trying Mint. Everything worked out of the box and I haven’t looked back.

1. I find it helpful to have a separate data partition (though I don’t actually use it for /home because I find that gets messy quickly). Separate data is nice in case you’re concerned about something getting messed up, or if you like to try another distros (I ended up switching to Manjaro a while ago). Not necessary, but whatever you do, I recommend keeping it relatively simple.

2. Can’t comment, haven’t tried.

3. Last I checked, there was no client for Google Drive or Proton Drive. Not sure about Dropbox. I’ve heard of rclone but haven’t tried it.

4. I usually try apt first, then check the GUI for a flatpak if needed. I personally prefer native apps/deb packages, but that’s a subjective thing.

5. I use the default terminal and Firefox install. I ended up moving my actual personal data out of /home and it’s been easier to keep it all tidy (there’s even a way to point the file manager shortcuts to an alternate location). Tip: if you happen to have an Nvidia card, there’s a GUI utility to switch to a non-free driver, which improved things for me. My other tip: especially if you have a separate data partition, give yourself permission to not get everything perfect, and that you might want a clean install somewhere down the road. Mint isn’t quite as easy to reinstall as something like SilverBlue, but it’s not that hard I’ve found.

Have fun!

Try Linux Mint. You set it up on a USB drive, and you can try using it before you install it. So load it up, and try doing a few things you’d normally do (check email, etc.). This way, you can get your feet wet without committing fully. If you find you like it, you can do an installation (and it doesn’t require any fancy terminal stuff).

That’s honestly its biggest advantage over Ubuntu + Cinnamon.

So… using Manjaro without using the AUR is fine?

Two reasons: they’re big, and they’re sandboxed.

I was on a 5Mbit connection until recently, so a lot of flatpaks being 1GB+ was frustrating (especially when their native packages were <100MB). And I was using a 250GB SSD, which filled up rather quickly.

And it turns out I wasn’t a fan of the sandboxing aspect. In theory it should be a good thing, but turned out to be frustrating.

I’m using Mint, but I’ve avoided using flatpaks (generally downloading DEB packages directly, or adding ppa sources). It’s worked pretty well so far.

I do have a handful of AppImages, but they’re a bit easier to work with.

Can confirm, Mint was easier to set up and have everything working than Windows. Couldn’t believe Linux had better driver support. What a world.

I’ve been using Mint as a daily driver and it’s the first distro/de that has worked as a full replacement. Everything working out of the box, though I changed the default Nvidia driver from the open source to the proprietary one (and Mint even provided a handy utility for that). My dual monitor setup works great.

I don’t even dual boot for gaming–with Lutris, most things work right away or with a little tweaking. Though admittedly I don’t play the newest games.

All the benefits of Ubuntu, with flatpak and a nice DE.