What a fitting anology! I’m going to start saying “I play Pathfinder BTW” at the end of every TTRPG comment now, I love it hahahahaha.

Pwech. I don’t play D&D!

I play Pathfinder…

Thanks, very detailed answer. I’ll check out the lenspec option, that seems like a nice addition, especially when adding older windows programs from questionable sources, which is something that won’t happen often, but may be necessary.

Yeah, I’m fine without one two, I just:

1: want my wife to feel secure with her system, which I am setting up for her.

2. believe that desktop Linux is becoming steadily more attractive as a target

Thanks! I wasn’t aware that it was such a fire-and - forget software.

My wife was, yes. She tried to keep Microsoft software out of her PC as much as possible, and was used to using such software from her past experience.

Thanks for the detailed answer. It helps to know that this is the best practice.

Awesome guide! I’ve saved it locally, and I’ll pay more attention to these menus moving forward.

The other comments here are far more detailed than mine, and the posters are undoubtedly more experienced than I.

But my two cents: bazzite is the way to go.

It’s unbreakable, gaming-focused, and easy to install and work with. I used to run ubuntu, then arch, and I have been using bazzite for over two years now. Arch was amazing for tinkering any learning about how Linux works, but bazzite just works, and runs smooth.

The only issue I’ve had are small ones with non-standard hardware drivers. I rencently bought a gigabyte gaming laptop, and some of the hotkeys don’t work (like screen brightness +/-) out of the box. Also openRGB didn’t find the drivers it needs/expects to control the RGB keyboard.

Since bazzite is atomic, installing additional drivers for such stuff is more complicated, I haven’t even had time to look into it yet. On other distros this would be easier, for example I bet that on arch it would be simple. But arch can break if you don’t know what sou are doing, bazzite can’t really get into an unbootable state unless you try really hard to do so. So it is a tradeoff. Again, others here are much note knowledgeable than I, just wanted to share my experience.

NordVPN works very well for me. I’m coincidentally working on setting up an openVPN with their guide, and so far it has been clear and easy.

This looks great! I’m not into self-hosting, I just don’t have much use for it right now. But this’d is exactly the kind of tool I’d be looking for if I did.

Oh really? I had no idea that fusion360 did toolpath stuff. Oops.

OpenSCAD is a great program, but it’s not like blender or fusion 360. the input is a text file, and you need to describe the object you want to model as geometrical shapes in text. It also only renders when you tell it to, not constantly.

But if you are willing to dive into it, you can get great results. There are libraries available for threads and gears and curbed shapes and such.

It does take some getting used to, even more so if you have never done any programing, but it’s FOSS and can create the same output as the graphical-menu counterparts.

Edit: I had originally posted a link to some stl files I made, but my read name is on there so I removed it.

I currently use bazzite, but I learned more about Linux by installing arch from scratch than anything else I’ve ever done with my PC. It was a beautiful experience and I will never forget it.

I recently got a new laptop, and I’m considering installing arch again on the old one again to have a system available that is less restrictive. I’d probably use an installer this time around…but maybe not.

I’m not drinking today! I’ve been sober for a while, and it’s getting easier to resist the temptation with time. I sleep so much better, and a nice cold non-alcoholic beer often helps me as a placebo.

Eat the rich. Everything else is a distraction.

I’m never going to buy/make something like this myself, but I am nonetheless very happy to see this in my feed and read about it. Super interesting, thanks for sharing!

For me the most important aspects of terminal commands is that (1) you are forced to learn how your OS really works and (2) the terminal will always be able to do things that your GUI isn’t programmed to do.

For example, I use brew commands to install brew packages on bazzite because there is no GUI frontend available. I also use it to start ollama LLMs on my machine even though there is a GUI frontend available, because I don’t need a frontend for two commands.

I’d bet that arch is a good choice. It’s really lightweight, and great for learning about the console, managing packages, etc.

Wonderful! Thanks for sharing.