He touches on my major issue with all these companies, data mining without compensating the people that created that data. I have to pay for the operating system, get served ads, AND you get to make extra money off my information too? This kind of shenanigans would be tolerable with a free OS, or maybe one that compensated you like brave browser. The blatant fleecing of the consumer here is sickening. I’m glad data mining your screenshots is the last straw for people.

How bout rocm support for your own inference cards? Got an instinct mi25 I can’t do a damn thing with because it’s the only instinct card rocm does not support.

Don’t install on your main rig over your main hard drive. Don’t obliterate your windows drive, that will ease a lot of the intimidation, knowing you can always go back. Getting a cheep laptop or thin client to try distros out on will elevate that intimidation as well.

Start with what you have heard of and have been recommended repeatedly, Mint, popOS, Ubuntu, all great distros to learn on, have great documentation.

Also, read the docs. They are dry and long, but will always have the solution.

Although you are right, apps, in my opinion, smooth over the rough edges of a website, and do so in a way that easy for the average plebeian to access. Sure, I could figure out how to make lemmy.world look and act how I want, I just don’t have the time, knowledge or patience to do so. So I use Memmy.

But you are completely correct.

radeontop?

This is an interesting question.

My daughters have grown up with Ubuntu as their main typing and work computer, with windows being what they game on. They are just as able to use one as the other. They don’t break stuff in Ubuntu, and I find myself troubleshooting their windows game pc more than their Ubuntu installs. They don’t touch the command line in either OS.

I use Debian as my main ride, and don’t do any troubleshooting with that either, unless I’m just tinkering around and even then it’s not like I’m borking the whole OS.

I think most Debian distributions could be installed and used with no issue, and unless you are gaming or doing 3D modeling or CAD, could be daily driven. I don’t believe you need any more ability to use Linux than you do windows. I believe you have just as much chance blowing your windows OS away as you do any Linux distribution. Just practice 3-2-1 backups, which you should do with any OS, and take it one step at a time.

I never had an issue with system stability with Arch. It was just tiring every day making sure everything was up to date. Updates would break little things, like audio or some wine dependencies and I would just have to deal till I ran updates the next day. Meanwhile with Debian, the only issue I have ran into was with lutris and battle.net, and that turned out to just be a problem with mangohud.

I switched from arch to Debian bookworm for my work/gaming pc, and I have no regrets. Same amount of time setting up as arch, because of the newer kernel on bookworm you don’t have many prerequisites to install. Was gaming within an hour or two. That was six months ago, and things don’t break all the time like arch, where they would fix graphics drivers, but doing so would bork the sound. I play everything from factorio to cyberpunk, no issues. Only thing I can not get running for the life of me on windows or Linux is forza motorsports.

I don’t think distro matters as much anymore with modern Linux. There are enough tutorials out there on most of them, should be easy to get setup on almost anything.

I currently use restic, but borg backup or just rsync would do well for what you need.

Whenever I have no clue what’s happening I turn to journalctl and google. It’s just how I learned to parse log files and investigate.

journalctl helps with viewing log files.

I installed from the contrib repo, from the wiki,no issues at all so far.

That’s what happened to me. Switched all my servers to Debian 12, figured I’d give it a try on desktop, now I tell everyone to try it

Throwing Debian in there. Switched from arch 6 months ago. Still running x11 because xfce doesn’t support wayland yet, but KDE does. I run amd cpu and gpu and have no compatibility issues. And with lutris/bottles/proton games run with minimal issues. Plus most every is based on Debian, so why not just use the original.

I have never had issues with AMD for my graphics cards, been running team red with Linux for almost a decade now. Even switching distros no issues. But, I don’t buy new hardware, I always grab last gen, so bugs are usually worked out by the time I get my hands on it.