It means nothing, it’s just a paycheck you sign and then you get to say “I certify my OS is Unix”. The little bit more technical part is POSIX compliance but modern OSs are such massive and complex beasts today that those compliances are tiny parts and very slowly but very surely becoming irrelevant over time.

Apple made OSX Unix certified because it was cheap and it got them off the hook from a lawsuit. That’s it.

Digging on Concord was funny for longer than its server were online.

Bazzite comes with wine all setup by default. KDE’s file managerl can integrate running exe with wine on a default prefix automatically.

Most distributions and DEs already package wine in a set it and forget it configuration. Wine by default has a system wide prefix such that clicking on any exe in the file system automatically runs it on the default prefix. This way of doing things predates wsl by a long time. It is just safer and better practice to setup a new prefix for every software, specially if they are games.

True that, the tri-core PowerPC is quite a unique challenging mess. But underneath it is just the same processor.

I know it is hard to believe. But the gamecube, Wii, and wiiu are the same machine. Same architecture and family of processors (IBM’s PowerPC). That’s why the wiiu is just a Wii with a beefier CPU (three Wii cores slapped together), and then a newer more powerful GPU sticked to the side. Thats why a single emulator can target all three consoles. The switch 2 will just be a newer version of the Tegra chip.

Have you ever sat in front of a casino’s slot machine. They are also trash, awful and disgusting. But they’re also engineered with the worst dark pattern psychology to manipulate any human being that sits on it to keep playing and be so addictive that people will burn their money just to keep playing. The qualities of fun, and additive are independent of each other. A game can be very addictive and really bad at the same time. Unlike slot machines, they have the advantage of constantly sitting in your pocket and going with you everywhere you go.

Please remember that no one is taking anything away from you. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. Traditional package managing isn’t going away any time soon. You are safe. Others can have their preferred tech, and you don’t have to like it. It’s ok to have different tastes.

It’s not a flaw. Ostree is a last resort, you should be using containerized software. Layering a package should only be done when strictly necessary and not as the regular way to manage packages. If you need an overtly customized system, you use Nix or universal blue to design your new system declaratively and create your custom image.

Then just install KDE in your Arch install. Or use endeavorOS with KDE, or any other Arch based OS with KDE. Don’t be dismissive of other people’s interests.

Settings live in user space. Software exist in containers like AppImage, Flatpak or Distrobox. If something need deep system integration, they can be layered on top of the system in the user layer. Immutable does NOT mean less control. Just exerting control over the system in a different, usually more systematic, automatic and deterministic way.

your base distro is immutable, then any extra changes go on an additional mutable layer

That is exactly how OsTree and other layering solutions work. Only Nix requires a whole distro rebuild.

There’s KDE Neon already. The whole point of this distribution is the atomic immutable part.

Maybe they’ll fix the sddm custom theming? It’s currently broken on all immutables and doesn’t allow custom themes.

SC is a scam. Of course they’re willing to break the law to keep the money they stole.

Well, there’s much more to it than just installing steam. That’s highly dismissive of the effort it takes, including kernel level optimizations and driver space configurations required to guarantee top performance. To suggest it is pointless is insulting to a lot of people and not constructive criticism, at all.

Bazzite is just Kinoite with gaming things out of the box. Which in turn is just Fedora with KDE Plasma but atomic and immutable. It doesn’t get any more general purpose than that. Bazzite even preinstalls a lot of stuff that Fedora users have to add manually, like proprietary drivers. If you don’t want a gaming centric OS, then there’s also Aurora which is the workstation version. I guess my point is that, there’s not an objectively best choice in Linux. Something we often tend to forget is that personal taste also plays a role. I personally used Mint for 5 years and supported the project monetarily. But my tastes changed and I think atomic and immutable is a good path for adoption, since it all works more or less the way people have come to expect smartphones to work. But, with the power and flexibility of x86-64 computing. It perfectly fits the management model of set it up once and forget about it. Specially since OP is specifically mentioning his interest on having a system focused on security. A system that is working just works, no doubts, buts or ifs, it always works and if anything happens that make it not work anymore, you just rollback to a working state immediately without fuzz, it is a pretty neat feature.

Depends on your risk model. Almost all VPNs have a linux client available, most installers can setup whole disk encryption, and they even support secureboot. There’s also antivirus that detect malicious software that target all OSs.

Linux is also far more private and secure than Windows. If you felt safe torrenting on Windows you were misled.

Since you mention gaming and learning how to troubleshoot games on Linux. This conditions your questions to whether that laptop has an Nvidia graphics card or not. Nvidia has an awful support in linux which creates all sorts of problems and limitations.

Regardless, I would suggest to use bazzite, but be warned, this is an immutable distro. They’re entirely different from traditional distros and relatively newer. So there’s a bit less support history on the web. Nevertheless, they provide a strong secure and stable system that should make having rescue tools less critical and keep your system alive and healthy indefinitely. Bazzite also sets up everything for gaming automatically from install.

Just tried Heliboard, its glide typing support is experimental and requires hacking GApps to extract libraries or download someone’s else glide library from the internet. I guess my threat model remains for the time being.