Crozekiel

My biggest hurdle is honestly that GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones… I had one once and hated it and honestly don’t know how much of that was because of google’s android or the phone itself and am reluctant to buy a new pixel phone to try GrapheneOS and find out I still hate the hardware. I’ve had a much better “out of the box” experience with Samsung phones (and love that my current one has an sd card slot and headphone jack - but I know that’s pretty much non-existent on new phones) but am finding they are so locked down and closed off by Samsung you can’t really put anything else on it and have it work properly as far as I can tell.

It’s time for a new phone, and I’m honestly not sure what to do… The easy route seems like getting a pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it before doing anything else, but I just don’t super trust that the hardware isn’t going to drive me nuts…

KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong)

and then…

if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them.

lol. I love it. :P

To OP though, if you really don’t want to “distro-hop”, you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won’t get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the “look and feel” which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.

This feels out-of-touch itself, like you haven’t actually tried in years. Yes, to rebind your mouse buttons, you will have to install a piece of software, and tell it what you want each button to do… Exactly like you have to do in Windows. I haven’t seen any janky work-arounds needed, and the software is a lot more responsive than I was used to in windows with the official logitech software. You don’t need command line in linux any more often than you need to edit the registry in windows - your typical PC user can get by without it just fine and probably should stay away from it. As for game performance, there will always be variability here, but there is no hard and fast rule like “you will lose 20% performance in linux vs windows”. Some stuff may not get along with proton or linux (big one is some of the “bad actor” anti-cheat stuff, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread that just won’t work at all), but the vast majority is running great under linux - imperceptibly different, if it is even different at all. Finally, there are plenty of distros that will handle all the drivers you need with little to no input from the user. One of the primary selling points of PopOS is fantastic graphics driver support “out of the box”, but they aren’t alone - many make the process invisible or butter smooth.

I always love how many people that don’t use linux to do ‘X’ thing, feel the need to tell people that do use linux every day for ‘X’ how bad linux is at doing ‘X’… People going into windows specific communities and shouting about how bad windows is for ‘X’ or ‘Y’ task would be shunned to oblivion if not outright banned, but they come into the linux communities every day to tell us how bad linux is??

Earthbound is fantastic. Also, Chrono Trigger has several different endings and secret things to accomplish along the way, so it is good for more than one play-through. Finally, I remember stumbling into a game decades ago around the same time I first discovered Chrono Trigger called Seiken Densetsu. I remember having a copy in English and really liking it.

GPS is quite a bit different. The satellites just orbit and send the same information out. The user device doesn’t have to send anything back - the “communication” is only 1-way. Also, GPS is significantly further out from the planet and involves a lot less satellites, so it is not really feasible to turn them off specifically targeting a small area or an individual target - you’d have to black out a huge chunk of the planet to reliably block “an enemy” from using it.

I don’t feel like nationalizing Starlink for the USA is best for everyone. It is a world-wide network, I feel like it would be better as something that isn’t controlled by any single country (but, obviously I agree it should not be controlled by a single billionaire fuck-boy either…).

“now now, calm down everyone. Let’s see what the Orphan-Crushing Machine really does before we start getting upset. Just because it is fully capable of (and seems exclusively designed to) crush all orphans doesn’t mean it is actually going to crush ALL the orphans. Probably just a few orphans really.”

There is a reason Microsoft stopped caring a long time ago that it is so easy to install and use Windows without paying for a key. You can STILL use any old windows 7 key you have to active windows 10 and 11. You can use the OS nearly in it’s entirety (as far as home users are concerned) without even doing that. It is because Windows is no longer Microsoft’s biggest product, the user is.

The problem is we’ve already kinda seen what that brings to the industry through mobile gaming, and it’s been universally terribly not just for mobile but for the entire gaming industry.

I dunno, maybe this would be different, but to me it is just another test-bed of innovating new ways to dick down the consumers that will eventually spread to the rest of the world again.

I thought this was going to be about the programming language. :/ I blame XKCD

Okay, but what if enough reddit hate floods them now, while the AI is still learning what a reddit post should look like, and THEN we all leave, then the “content” posted by all the bots will just be self-perpetuating reddit-hate devolving into unintelligible non-sentences with anti-reddit keywords? :P

That sucks man. There needs to be less division and derision in the Linux community. Not that there is a lot, but there is enough to drive some people away. It’s not as easy as windows to daily drive Linux. It is SO MUCH better than it used to be, but it still isn’t something you can just dump on a family member or friend and expect to not get calls about it.

And worse, it isn’t the same for almost anyone. I’ve had good luck with Arch derivatives (Manjaro and Garuda), but I’ve got friends that tried running the exact same OS and build etc. on very similar hardware and can’t get half the games working that I play regularly with minimal effort - even following the same steps I used with no issues. They install Ubuntu or Mint and suddenly it works fine… Happy it works, but none of us know why or what to do if something similar happens next time…

And somehow, it seems every problem any of us runs into are so bizarre (or we don’t know enough “likely causes” to google specific and correct terminology) that it seems like no one on the internet has ever had it happen before. Thankfully it’s been going great for me, but one of my friends is just having a rough time of it. :(

TL;DR - Thank you to all the actually helpful people in the Linux community that make this journey possible for the rest of us. To the people being dicks: if you have to swing down constantly to feel good, re-evaluate your life choices and leave us out of it.