That’s the first one… Wait, how do you think Cache is pronounced??

Damn it, it’s been too long and I forgot the name of slow fall… I think that means you won the internet today.

Hope you’re quick on the levitate, cause we are going to summon you off a cliff.

Shit I miss Ventrilo… Setting up custom binds so I could talk shit about the raid leader directly to the other warlock in the group just by pressing a different “talk” button was amazing. And I can still here the push-to-talk notification sounds… When the guild moved to Discord, I died a little inside and didn’t even know it yet. Yea, we have a meme channel now, but at what cost??

Ah, that adds a lot of context. Sorry, the post just sounded like this was a “you” initiative.

Super weird that you upgraded your fiance’s computer to Linux, but not your own? What’s the driving factor here that led to using your partner as a lab rat?

I’ve spent uncomfortably long trying to figure out what “figma balls” means, or what the obvious answer is when I eventually ask “what’s figma”.

In this case they are clarifying that it isn’t just a handheld device OS, it is a full desktop OS.

Garuda is great. I tried Bazzite on my nvidia based laptop and had problems getting it to work well (to be fair to Bazzite, this was well over a year ago when Bazzite was very new on the scene - I have no idea if i’d have the same problems today). Replaced it with Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop) and it literally “just worked”. And, frankly, I’m a linux idiot. I basically just read the messages that pop up occasionally and do my best to do things like they say (for example, I try to remember to run updates before the system has to tell me “hey, it’s been a bit. Would be best if you would update me soon”).

Speaking of being an idiot… I don’t even know if I HAVE to download the “dragonized” version to get all the gaming bells and whistles just as easily, or if I can use their KDE plasma version that doesn’t have all the theming and still get the “gaming” tweaks? Since my system works, I don’t want to install a new version just to find out, but I feel like I could convince other people to try it more if they got the same functional experience without all the purple glowing stuff out of the box.

Best suggestion I have is a bit involved. This is assuming the laptop uses an nvme storage drive, if not, replace “external nvme enclosure” with “external sata enclosure”. Pull the windows drive out entirely, install a new drive. Install linux of choice on the new drive. Flip a coin, have a long conversation about expectations, or otherwise decide which to leave in the laptop before putting it back together. Tell BIOS to boot USB first always, then internal drive. If the external is not plugged in at boot, you boot whatever you left inside (windows or linux). If you plug in the enclosure, you boot the other. I don’t know how windows will react when ran entirely from an external over usb (highly recommend a good enclosure that has good speeds and connects to usb c even better), but linux doesn’t even seem to care.

My preference would be leave linux physically in the laptop, and keep the windows drive in the enclosure somewhere nearby for emergency use only. I’d bet you find that you go a long time without needing the windows drive (if ever), but if it is “too easy” to just boot to windows instead, most people will tend that way.

SSD died that had windows 10 on it. During the re-installation process I got fed up with onedrive and skype popping up every reboot despite being told not to start with windows multiple times. Attempt to disable, the next round of windows update brings them back. I didn’t even have the absolute basics up and running before I lost all patience for it. Downloaded several distros, setup like 10 different USB sticks to boot them all. Cycled through them for a bit poking around and testing out. Landed on Garuda Linux kinda by chance, but it has been great. It was so refreshing to have a computer feel like it’s mine again.

FuriLabs was looking promising, but the new version of the phone is a downgrade in a lot of categories, and the old phone is not available anymore. Disappointing at the moment, hopefully more hardware options in future from them.

I did jump in when Bazzite first began to gain traction early on, so I feel like it’s reasonable to expect some kinks to work out. And like I mentioned, it is very difficult to completely brick a Bazzite install as you can always boot into the last working configuration.

I love it. It’s been my only OS on my desktop almost 3 years now (and now my laptop for almost 1 year). I know a lot of people get turned off by the appearance, but it is a truly great distro imo… I don’t love the theme either, but I also don’t love default KDE theme, so a fresh install is going to always be a few minutes of tweaking the ui anyway so where it starts doesn’t bother me at all.

Nothing that I know of, lol. I use the laptop infrequently, usually at a DnD game every other weekend. I don’t know if that is part of the problem, like it really wants to run updates more often than once every few weeks? I would let it run updates via whatever it is that pops up in the system tray asking to run updates. Eventually, anytime it tried to update it would give me an error message, undo whatever had been done so far, and then close itself. I think they have a new software center now, Bazaar or something? This was before that was released so the problems might not repeat if I tried it again.

And honestly, rebasing to a new image was incredibly easy to do, it just takes a bit of time, but I didn’t like randomly “having to” do it.

I was already running Garuda on my desktop for about a year prior to the Bazzite problems on my laptop, so I just switched the laptop to Garuda as well.

Honestly, installing Linux these days is significantly easier than installing windows. For every distro I’ve tried anyway (haven’t tried any of the “hard” distros).

That’s only really true in the sense that you will “get a bootable OS”. I had Bazzite just stop being able to update itself 3 times in a year, two times I had to entirely rebase to a newer image to get it working again, last time I just left it, pulled the drive out, and installed a different distro. I still have it, it still boots to exactly what it was before, and it still won’t update - but in an external enclosure it makes for a good “emergency” boot option (better than a live USB stick anyway).

This is strictly my personal experience and is not meant to negate someone else’s experience.

I disagree, as a middle user myself, I’ve had much less problems since the switch to Linux. I don’t own a VR setup, so can’t speak to that, but I have used basically everything else you’ve mentioned since switching without issues. Older software seems to work better on Linux than windows 11 in my experience. The rare stumble I’ve had was easily remedied by searching forums and wikis.

Most windows problems I’ve had to search for solutions in the last several years led to either blind registry changes, following some useless wizard that rarely fixes the problem, or a nothing-burger circle where the OP ended up either giving up entirely or re-installing windows to avoid the problem. I’ve very much had better luck actually fixing a problem in Linux than just avoiding it.

I use mouse primarily. Though on a laptop, if I don’t have a mouse, I would much prefer a little red clit-mouse and as much keyboard shortcuts as I can over having to use a touch pad…