Ubuntu is developed and controlled by a corporation (canonical) and they have some non ideal practices (like pushing snaps heavily instead of the more open flatpaks or native apps). Mint takes what’s good in Ubuntu and cleans it up a lot.

I’ve heard that happen with mint before. Try a bit more modern distro like fedora or openSUSE maybe?

For books, library genesis would be a better place to look than piratebay though.

Nobara: Has all the gaming features I want on my gaming pc (like gamescope) and is htpc capable. Also, it’s based on Fedora, which I’m familiar with.

Fedora: I like gnome and it’s always fairly up to date and rock solid. Great on my laptop.

Have considered switching to openSUSE though. It’s German (as am I), it’s the first Linux distro I ever used (on my granddad’s PC, more than a decade ago) and I’ve heard a lot of good about tumbleweed.

Old games being open sourced is a trend I can get behind.

Not having to pay for hardware transcoding/tonemapping is the biggest „selling“point for Jellyfin. I used to have plex before. It worked well but I didn’t want to pay 100€ for transcoding. Never tried emby for the very same reason.

Yep. The reason Windows and macOS are way more accepted than Linux is because they’re essentially idiot proof. Linux is not and that’s not necessarily a good thing if you want the year of the Linux desktop to actually happen one day.

Ok, so arch doesn’t break because it’s unstable, it just breaks anyways. And it doesn’t break more in general, it just breaks worse more often. Got it.

I’ll still stay away from the bleeding edge.

That’s still exactly what I meant? Sure, arch may never break even though it’s unstable but it being unstable heightens the risk of it (or some program) breaking due to changing library versions breaking dependencies.

Dependency issues happen much more rarely on stable systems. That’s why it’s called stable. And I very much prefer a system that isn’t likely to create dependency issues and thus break something when I update anything.

I‘d rather have a system that is stable and a few months out of date than a system that is so up to date that it breaks. Because then I cannot, in a good conscience, use that system on a device that I need to just work every time I start it.

Second this. Am not a huge fan of ubuntu itself and I have had issues with other debian based distros (OMV for example) but mint has always been rock solid and stable on any of my machines. The ultimate beginners distro imo.

Larger downstream distros like manjaro (and steamOS for that matter) can be stable. I wouldn’t call manjaro a beginners distro though, like mint would be (No Linus, there’s no apt in manjaro) but it’s very daily-driveable.

Although, if you’re most people, just stay away from rolling release distros. There’s so little benefit unless you’re running bleeding edge hardware…

If it‘s your first time trying linux, go with mint. It’s stable and almost every tutorial will work for you. If you know your way around a terminal already, the choice is all yours. I personally like Fedora.

That’s why I recommend mint. You have all the benefits of ubuntu but without the corporate stuff. And flatpak instead of snap.

Wasn’t that one of the main critiques of snap/ubuntu/canonical a few years ago already?

Among my personal dislike for its shade of purple, that has been my primary reason to not recommend ubuntu for a while, at least.

No, HDR can’t make your monitor brighter than it is. But it can take full advantage of the brightness and contrast of modern displays in a way SDR cannot. In almost every case HDR looks better than SDR but brighter and/or more contrasty displays take the most advantage.

In a more technical sense, SDR content is mastered with a peak brightness of 100 nits in mind. HDR is mastered for a peak brightness of 1000 nits, sometimes 2000 nits and the resulting improved contrast.

If you don’t watch movies in HDR on a modern TV, you’re not taking full advantage of its capabilities.

That’s incorrect. While it can be assumed that HDR content supports at least 10bit colour, it is not necessary for monitor or content. The main difference is contrast and brightness. SDR is mastered for a brightness of 100 nits and a fairly low contrast. HDR is mastered for brighnesses of usually 1000 or even 2000 nits since modern displays are brighter and capable of higher contrast and thus can produce a more lifelike picture through the additional information within HDR.

Of course you need a sufficiently bright and/or contrasty monitor for it to make a difference. An OLED screen or displays with a lot of dimming zones would produce the best results there. But even a 350nit cheap TV can look a bit better in HDR.

Exactly. $100 is a lot of money, however games are cheaper than ever these days (adjusted for inflation) and $100 for no micro transactions sounds fair.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t buy it at that price either. I‘d wait for a sale…

Well, they haven’t so far removed denuvo from a single game, even those that have been cracked already. Ubisoft is big enough, that they might have their very own deal with Denuvo

On hiatus, apparently. Hasn’t cracked anything since July 2023. Not sure why.

Thanks to denuvo and there currently not being any active group capable of cracking denuvo, it’s not a guarantee the game will be cracked. Assassin‘s creed mirage took until last month, over a year after release, for a pirated copy to be available and it uses a debug executable, which may not become available for any other games or at least not in a timely manner. It might not be possible to play those games without the BS. Or on Linux, if it doesn’t run without kernel access for RAM monitoring