Truly humble beginnings.

Been 100% Linux on all my personal devices for about 4 years.

I just got tired of being treated like I was either an idiot or a criminal by Microsoft. Plus the way they kept forcing their bloatware and trash ads on the OS that I already paid for!

I decided I didn’t care what I had to give up, it was worth it to be rid of Microsoft’s clutches forever. Switched to Linux and I’ve never looked back.

Turns out, I actually didn’t have to sacrifice much at all, and the few things I don’t have anymore are nothing compared to the benefits of using Linux and FOSS software.

Everything works better for me too, more stable, updates are rarer and wayyyyy faster when I push them. No more fighting with AMD driver hell in Windows, no more weird lockups or crashes, a million times more customization options, and zero bloat or spyware installed by default on my system.

I think you have to manually install the Nvidia drivers. If you search “drivers” in the Cinnamon launcher, they have a system app to download and install them.

I hate these companies, they are the end game of hyper-consumerist Capitalism. Cheap junk, made largely with slave labor, with extremely toxic chemicals that destroy our environment, most of which gets dumped after a few uses in landfills to slowly rot and leak micro plastics into everything.

DO NOT BUY FROM THEM!!!

Influencers on TikTok doing $200 haul videos with huge boxes of this swill for their addicted viewers, it’s horrific.

Such a great game!

Unless you are a power user who is confident in your ability to troubleshoot weird/esoteric issues and bugs, just go AMD.

If there aren’t any specific features you need from Nvidia, like CUDA for CAD/Render workloads, AMD is going to have a higher chance of #JustWorking and will give you awesome gaming performance.

I’ve got a 6700XT paired with a 5800X3D running Nobara Linux for my main gaming rig. Love it to death, runs everything butter smooth.

For instance, Deep Rock Galactic maxed settings at 1080p, I don’t ever see it dip below about 160FPS, and most of the time it’s between 180-210, which feels amazing on my 240Hz monitor.

In defense of Nvidia, things are wayyy better than they were even 2-3 years ago, and the majority of folks, especially with older Nvidia GPUs, seem to have a pretty decent experience on Linux.

That being said, I would estimate that roughly 75% of the posts I see from users who are having really odd/random issues with Linux have an Nvidia GPU.

Flatpaks aren’t perfect, but they are really solid in almost all cases.

For the general user that just wants a simple way to download apps on Linux, it just works.

For power users, they will know already the upsides and downsides.

Eh, bring it all on. Part of what is great about FOSS is the vibrant ecosystem. I welcome new stuff, even if I don’t have much use for it.

I do think it makes a lot of sense for certain use cases. Like my Steam Deck, great use case for an immutable distro.

Another is school or work deployments where you just need a herd of identical, generic systems or thin clients that run the same small set of applications.

You fell for the meme lol.

Arch is great if you want very high levels of customization without having to get into compiling and coding, like with Gentoo or NixOS.

I think of it as the distro equivalent to custom keyboard kit, you get all the parts and can swap them out as much as you want. But you’re not designing and fabricating your own circuit board and microcontroller, writing your own custom firmware, getting a custom case modeled and fabricated, etc.

There’s a reason “I use Arch, BTW” Is a meme.

As much as I can get it, and more every year.

All my computers run Linux exclusively. Gaming desktop, personal laptop, Steam Deck, work laptop, and all my servers in my home lab.

Hypervisor is XCP-ng, VMs are a mix of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and some random other Linux distros for testing and experimenting.

My NAS is a TrueNAS Core box.

I’m in the process of switching my router to PFSense.

Phone is a Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS.

Email, VPN, and cloud storage is Proton.

Password manager is Bit Warden.

Office docs are all Libre Office & Only Office.

The only non-FOSS software I use constantly is Discord and Steam, and of course, most of the games I play. On my phone I have majority FOSS apps for everyday stuff, but some things are still proprietary.

I’ve been thinking of using Linkwarden for a while now. As my computer usage spreads across more and more devices, having a single place to go for all my bookmarks would be fantastic.

Nope, Russia could have been working on building up infrastructure and trade deals with China, India, and various middle eastern countries, all countries that aren’t beholden to the USA.

Get mad and seethe, bro. 😆

Sure, Russia can peacefully withdraw from all the Ukrainian territory they seized and respect the long-established border of Ukraine.

Russia is the largest country by area in the world, with trillions of dollars of natural resources/rare-earth materials. It shares borders with China, the up-and-coming other world power, and borders the pacific ocean, allowing for trade routes to some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world.

But instead of harnessing those resources, shoring up power and influence with potential allies, they elected a pseudo-dictator douchebag, sat with their thumbs up their asses, and decided the best way to gain power and influence in the world was to bully smaller bordering nations and invade their territory with a pathetically weak and ill-equiped military.

And then Putin and his muppets blame the US and NATO for “encroaching on them.” As if trying to take back a tiny sliver of former USSR territory will do anything to make their country powerful or wealthy.

Beautiful.

I just use Protonmail’s web client. Fast, sleek, similar polish to gmail imo.

For an actual desktop client, Thunderbird with Dark Reader addon and some tweaks for theming.

Honestly though, I just prefer the web client from Proton, it’s really nice.

Performance and how configurable things are, plus ease of use.

For instance, my default router/modem device from my ISP was super clunky and confusing. I needed to set up some custom port forwarding and firewall rules. The aftermarket router I bought was faster, had way better wireless coverage, and the UI was so much easier to set up the configs I needed.

So it’s up to you, from what you said, seems like you probably would be good with the default from your ISP.

Never mind, found the Debian security bulletin, my version is patched already.

Leaving this here for any other newbies that might be wondering.

Sorry, all!

I’ve heard that the DoD uses RHEL pretty extensively. RHEL in the US Military

That article says that the US military has the largest single install base for RHEL in the world, but that was about 15 years ago, I don’t know if that’s still true.

Apparently back then the US nuclear sub fleet and its sonar systems also ran on RHEL.

I suspect lots of military hardware runs some form of *Nix or BSD type system. Many embedded systems run some *Nix type OS, and a huge portion of the developed world’s weaponry is smart, so it it full of low power embedded systems and custom SoCs.

Appimage is probably the most similar to a naked .exe in Windows. They are useful for small apps or simple indie games, but I prefer Flatpaks for my everyday big applications.

Agreed, Snaps are like Flatpaks but worse because locked down back end and Canonical’s sketchy nature. Imagine a really delicious pastry that anybody can make and sell, then imagine the same pastry but only one bakery in the world can make and sell it. Which would you prefer? Lol

Essentially yes, if you start using lots if older applications or mixing applications that use many different dependency versions, you will start to use lots of extra disk space because the different apps have to use their own separate dependency trees and so forth.

This doesn’t mean it will be like 2x-3x the size as traditional packages, but from what I’ve seen, it could definitely be 10-20% larger on disk. Not a huge deal for most people, but if you have limited disk space for one reason or another, it could be a problem.