It defaults to BTRFS with more recent releases

Fish, less config and super easy to set things like path, colors, and the support for dev environments and tooling is better than it was. Used to be a Zsh user, but moved since I distro hop so dang much. Less time to get going.

Croc or syncthing depending on what kind of experience you are after. Syncthing if you want to have a shared folder like expert. And croc if you just need to send something. Croc has an app on f-droid, and syncthing is on the app store. Both are open source and pretty for excellent in their own right.

I have an old Lenovo W550s Thinkpad with a 2GB Dedicated Nvidia and an i5 5500U. It’s got two batteries and sips power. It’s only 4 cores, but for what I run it does great. I get fairly consistent 60fps on low settings for “boomer shooters” like Selaco. The thing is an absolute beast and hardly flexes. The plastic is cracked and I can just hand it to my kids without a care in the world. Dump a drink on it, drop it, I could care less. I had them help me change out the RAM and SSD because it’s essentially bound for the dumpster and any value I get out of it is the cherry on top.

That and I can run pretty much and retro gaming console on it to about the Wii/GameCube, which blows my mind. All for probably like $200 of hardware.

Syncthing, micro, fish, btop, podman

I distro hop so these are usually the first that get installed.

It consistently ran slower on a few benchmarks I care about like language model performance, which was surprising. Baulders Gate was also jankyier for some reason. I love that people are out trying to do this stuff and the community was nice. Just like anything the reality is often less exciting than the marketing. It is bundled together arch with some hopeful optimizations that I am certain will work for some hardware and some applications, but not all hardware and all applications.

This is precisely where I am at. Endeavor for when I need a newer kernel and Mint for when I want something that just dang works without too much config and driver work. I suggest Mint to friends but love having AUR and yay.

Well if you are doing work on you computer you find rewarding and it functions I would quit while you are ahead. Getting into distro hopping and caring about Linux internals is a bit like being a car enthusiast. You can either have a car to drive it or have a car that you fart around all the time tweaking bits, replacing it, breaking it, developing strong opionons about things almost no one cares about.

So to you want to be a driver or an enthusiast? By using Linux at all you can essentially consider yourself part of the “car club”, but there is a whole heck of a lot else to learn.

I used the default v3 kernel that Cachy installs by default. My guess is the workloads I have are Ram I/O bound and that just doesn’t mesh with the scheduler. I’m literally rooting for it to be faster because I want caring about scheduler and optimization to matter, but freaking stock Linux Mint ran the loads faster.

I swear it is my machine or something, but despite CachyOS claiming being faster and more optimized I have yet to benchmark it as faster than the stock kernel for things I play around with. I wrote an application in rust to process a large text file and it both compiled and ran slower on CachyOS. I play around with llama.cpp and again it compiles and runs slower on CachyOS. I want to like Cachy, but right now all I can see is a bunch of window dressing to stock Arch with KDE and a couple of themes that I would rather change to default.

Also, why in the hell am I being asked to make a wifi password encryption key with the damn USB installer? CachyOS is not the only one. A lot of KDE using distros pop up the encryption window when you setup WiFi on the install image. Why? You want me to temporarily encrypt my wifi password on a temporary live image??? I just slows me down.

Anyways, I’m sure I’m crazy and clearly it is fast for somebody, but I can’t even get games to benchmark higher.

Well, it turns out only a handful of companies actually make image modules. I would say it is better in terms of US based support, firmware, hardware design, and the fact it meets TAA and buy America compliance. I’ve seen these cameras in the DoD and even in the oval office. If you want a camera that is absolutely not spying on you I can vouch for these because I have watched the firmware get built on these.

I was product manager at a company that made PTZ cameras based on Linux. The company was acquired a few times but still actually manufactures them in Minnetonka MN. Kind of fun working at a place the had development, manufacturing, support and engineering in one building.

https://www.legrandav.com/Products/Cameras/Videoconferencing PTZ Camera/RoboSHOT-12E-USB/

If you have uncapped bandwidth you could run a syncthing relay server. Syncthing rocks as a file sync option and I host my own.

relays.syncthing.net/

Handles graphics drivers, printer drivers, looks like a windows without the influence of advertisers, what I consider a consistent theme, and best of all it is mind numbingly boring. Prepare yourself for the heart pounding activity of predictable updates, uncomplicated booting, running familiar applications, doing work, being productive, not even actively thinking about your OS.

Linux Mint is where I always go crawling back to. I have hopped so damn much. Mint sometimes needs a newer kernel installed, but I’ll be damned if that Ubuntu base doesn’t help with printers, graphics drivers, and scanners. Getting that to work on Arch was a blast and a half, on Mint I literally just turned my network printer on and it found it. IDK, you can do anything and there is always some issue eventually.

I constantly check out dell refurbished for deals on workstations. Pretty good Linux compatibility in my experience, workstation hardware, and they have 50% deals all the dang time. The precision line of workstations looks like it would meet your needs.

I second the motion on ghostwriter. Had a nice focus mode, looks good, isn’t distracting. I use syncthing to backup everything. It’s my jam.

You can configure the system for backup and auto updates which is handy to keep it secure without any interaction. Only reason I ever had it fail was entirely me screwing it up, usually by distro hopping and formatting wrong.

Mint is surprisingly loved and disliked from what I have seen. Having used it since 2007 I am in the category that likes it for what it is. But I am somewhat surprised by the open hostility it gets for simply existing. Main arguments being that it is a dinosaur, uses X11, should not exist because anything not KDE or GNOME is just diluting desktop Linux and is part of the problem. It has no fancy corporate sponsor, it has a small team, and it for sure has warts, but you can claw Linux Mint from my cold dead hard drive because I have distro hopped like an addict and it just checks the boxes for me. It shows up and works, even on newer hardware with a little tweaking here and there, but I can use Nvidia, find network printers without effort, scan, install and update flatpak, backup the system, game, and get actual work done that is not fiddle farting around with esoteric configs all the time. I can post on actual forums with actual users on it and not some discord where someone will just post memes over my questions. I have a strong feeling it will exist for a long while given it’s history. And it is mind numbingly borning as an OS. I just sit down and compute, what a concept.

Portainer has been great. I almost don’t need ssh