That has been my experience too, having run Linux on different diy PCs from gtx970 to rtx3090. Everything has just worked.

So an acquaintance’s son asked for upgrade advice and I told him to get a rtx5060 because that would give him the most performance on his limited budget, without also requiring a PSU upgrade… And it turned out to be a nightmare to get it up and running. I spent hours to get it to boot and then to actually use the GPU, and the computer still freezes on shutdown so he has to hold the power button to turn it off.

It could be the combination of rtx50xx, gigabyte motherboard and Bazzite, i.e. not necessarily only Nvidia’s fault but the computer worked fine while he had a gtx1080

It could be… But if we’re speculating, it could also be the opposite. For example if someone has software they really need Linux for, thanks to WSL they don’t need to switch or dual boot. Additionally, if someone uses WSL and it gives them a lot of trouble, then it might also give them the idea that this is because Linux is bad.

WSL is to Window users kind of what Wine/Proton is for Linux users. It’s not exactly the same because people have more reasons to want to ditch Windows, but I doubt Wine/Proton is a stepping stone to full Windows for Linux users :)

Now is a bad time to buy hard drives price-wise

It’s a bit of a gamble, isn’t it? At least here, HDDs appear to have gone up 10-20% compared to lowest prices last year, which isn’t that much compared to SSDs and RAM. Personally I bought new disks last week just in case the prices continue to rise and I don’t want to end up in a position where I have to buy new disks while they’re at an all time high.

You mean “spinning disk” metaphorically, right? Or is there any reason to not have it in low power standby mode? I don’t have any hot spare in my server, but on my desktop I use hdparm to spin down a rarely used storage drive just because it’s so loud.

Can’t remember if it was Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity, but I think at least one of them had the intention of creating a unified UI for all types of devices.

Very important. I spend a lot of time at my computer and my desktop environment is like my home. I want it to look in a way that I find aesthetically pleasing and it mustn’t try to force me to change the way I work because some UX designer decided that their way was much better than everybody else’s. Perhaps you can guess where this is going :D but I’ve tried to like Gnome 3 since it was first announced. I’ve given it multiple chances but it just doesn’t work for me. It feels like they’re going down the same road as all “modern” UIs, where only the most basic features are visible and everything else is either dumped into the “advanced” category or removed entirely. On the other hand, I have a coworker who only uses his PC like a tool, and he thinks Gnome is the best DE ever and can’t understand why anyone would want something else.

Currently I use KDE and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s highly configurable, and I’ve made it look and feel the way I want. I used mainly Xfce for a long time but now I prefer KDE.

It’s funny if you know that it is parody, but it’s so widespead in this day and ago so I tend to unconsciously filter it out. Tbh I probably wouldn’t have clicked the link if I hadn’t seen your comment, since I thought this was the original title of the video

My friends are currently throwing a tantrum because I won’t “just enable Secure Boot and run Windows” to play Battlefield 6 with them. But I’ve never felt that I must play a specific game, so the few ones who are incompatible (usually due to bad anti-cheats) have been easy to ignore. There are plenty of good games I can play on Linux.

Offline updates is one of the things that annoyed me most back when I was using Windows, and somehow they’ve managed to make it even worse in Fedora. Luckily you can turn it off in F41 by going to the “Software Update” section in system settings, and then changing “Apply system updates” to “Immediately”. Haven’t upgraded to 42 yet but I hope the setting is still there.

I’ve got a MSI MAG Tomahawk wifi which has had a lot of issues, but nothing related to Linux

Can’t help but think about this old XKCD from 2010.

Products targeted towards businesses have always been unreasonably more expensive than those targeted towards consumers. It sucks for us AI hobbyists that Nvidia are stingy with VRAM on consumer cards, but I don’t find it surprising.

Personally I only have a single RTX 3090, but I know a lot of people online who are stacking multiple consumer cards to run AI. Buying used 3090s and putting them in a mining rig is probably still the best value for money if you need a large amount of VRAM.

How much VRAM do you actually need btw?

If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don’t more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

My guess as to why this isn’t a more central feature of Linux distros is that this is not something most users need. If you need to reinstall the OS because you broke it, then a full system backup is probably more convenient, even if it’s less than optimal to back up packages which you could download. If you need to reinstall the OS because you want a clean slate when upgrading to a new version, then your package list for the old version could cause a lot of conflicts as maintainers regularly remove and add new packages.

I have backed up my zsh, vim, tmux, etc. configs and written a few shell scripts which install them and download vim plugins etc. If I ever need to reinstall the OS I would use these. However, in the last 20 years since I ditched Windows I have reinstalled Linux exactly two times: Once because I was an idiot and didn’t have a proper backup when I accidentally formatted the wrong HDD, and once when I switched from Xubuntu to Fedora in which case a package list wouldn’t have been usable.

I use Fedora (KDE) and game a lot. While I mostly like it, I’ve had some problems with it that were non-trivial to solve, so if you’re a Linux beginner I would not necessarily recommend it to you.

Perhaps Bazzite would be a good option? It’s based on Fedora and created with gaming in mind. I got it recommended here and installed it on a friend’s kid’s computer and he’s very happy with it so far.

There’s also Nobara which builds on Fedora to create a gaming-focused distro.

Paper GTK theme is a little bit similar, though with more vibrant colours ofc.

Tbh the majority of my FOSS contributions were to fix problems affecting me personally :) but I’m glad that they’re helping others too. This one is definitely the one that goes on my CV though hehe

Thanks for the kind words :)

In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)

For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.

The problem I’ve had with bad themes (e.g. black on black text/icons) seem to stem from apps using system/fallback colours, e.g. not defining it’s own list background because it assumes it’s always going to be white. But I can’t say if it happens more often with Gtk or Qt… Most recently it happened both with GIMP (Gtk) and FreeCAD (Qt)

Glad you enjoyed it!

As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was “can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?” so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn’t sure what they meant)