SunRed

+1 for uBlue. I did the same for my mother on her laptop and desktop PC for office work. Chose Aurora in this case. Setting system and flatpak updates to automatic means I hopefully never have to look after these systems again as the distro maintainers basically do the maintenance. Setting up Secure Boot with the shim/MOK method and TPM auto-unlocking for full disk encryption using the ujust scripts is a breeze as well.

What surprised me the most, also in part due to me not really being knowledgeable about software solutions in their respective industries, was the Unreal Engine (the editor that is) and Houdini being available on Linux. Tbf, at least in the vfx department it is apparently more common as most of the high profile software in that industry does have a native Linux version available.

What I appreciated the most though was software like Reaper and Renoise providing a (very good even) Linux-native version when I looked for a new DAW to learn, seeing most software in the audio industry not being very Linux-friendly.

If you can wait just a little longer I would seriously consider the Framework 12 that is going for pre-order next month and being shipped “mid-2025”.
Of course, this isn’t an option if you need a laptop right now. In that case the current Framework 13 offerings are the best you can get but of course are not as affordable and possibly a bit overkill for a simple browsing machine.

Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying they ‘had to completely reinstall the os’ and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn’t rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don’t count). This is due in part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn’t hurt to apply new package configs by going through pacdiff once in a while though.

Edit: Typo

I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its ‘obscurity’ though. It’s definitely a standout among distros.

KDE for its Wayland performance and features and occasionally I switch to hyprland if I need a more focused work environment.
In the past I used Cinnamon but it became ever more buggier on Arch and due to lack of Wayland support still it was a dead end anyway.

Well, Minetest also can hardly be compared to Minecraft as Minetest is only an engine or platform for voxel based games like Minecraft. What you rather have to critique is something like Mineclonia that is apparently a more active fork of the MineClone2/VoxeLibre project that try to perfectly replicate Minecraft (without using Minecraft assets that is) on Minetest. Allegedly it’s pretty good now but I haven’t tried so myself. As already mentioned, the community for Minetest as a whole is pretty small and that additionally split among so many different games building on that. But it’s good that viable alternatives exist in case Microsoft ever considers shutting down the Java edition.

Edit: Typo

This concept is also known as Double Blind Passwords or Horcruxing.

Don’t you want to run an ai assistant directly from your favourite font? /s

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You have to keep in mind that this is only about the kernel module (and only for Turing GPUs and newer). The userspace components stay proprietary. You are still not going to use the mesa graphics stack using an Nvidia gpu anytime soon.

I could mention that my bare metal server runs a rather unusual setup in that I use Arch Linux on ZFS headless as a kvm hypervisor and lxc containerisation host. I maybe want to migrate it to something else like NixOS at some point since I use nix on Arch on my desktop already but since I know Arch the most of any Linux distro I just went with it and it’s running rock solid for quite a few years already.

Most shells usually default to a truncated version of the hostname that only uses the hostname up to the first dot. Of course one can change that by setting the PS1 env var and using (in case of bash) \H instead of \h.

Honestly the reason I’ve put yay/paru’s build directory into ram/tmpfs long ago. It’s almost never worth it keeping all those packages checked out. You also do your ssd a favour by not hammering it with compile workloads.

du -sh ~/.cache/* | sort -h

Basically servers and Pis.

If you wanted to host your own site and services, a Linux vps was (and still is) the only choice. Back then it was Debian, nowadays I use Arch on everything. Same with Raspberry Pis when the first one became available in 2012. With university I started using Arch on my laptop and later when Proton and Wayland became good, I moved to it on the Desktop as well.

I am running alarm / Arch Linux ARM aarch64 on mine for years already. Just make sure to use the linux-rpi kernel and use rpi4-eeprom for bootloader updates as these are not installed by default.

I learned that using nix on arch for the home directory in addition to pacman and the aur is quite an unbeatable combo that I prefer to having everything managed by nix. The problem with nix and nixos I see for one is that it leaves some performance on the table for reproducibility and that many packages are or cannot be packaged for nix. Additionally arch already is quite reproducible albeit not as much as nixos. Writing your own meta package with a simple pkgbuild to manage the system base seemed like a good substitute for me.

+1 for the Technitium DNS server. I run it in Docker on a pi4 because I need a proper local dns server first that does DoH and ad and tracker blocking second. It does the latter just as well as pihole and adguard with support for many more list formats but pihole and adguard do dns just on a really basic level.

I am surprised no one mentioned HCL yet. It’s just as sane as toml but it is also properly nestable, like yaml, while being easily parsable and formattable. I wish it was used more as a config language.