Crozekiel

My biggest hurdle is honestly that GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones… I had one once and hated it and honestly don’t know how much of that was because of google’s android or the phone itself and am reluctant to buy a new pixel phone to try GrapheneOS and find out I still hate the hardware. I’ve had a much better “out of the box” experience with Samsung phones (and love that my current one has an sd card slot and headphone jack - but I know that’s pretty much non-existent on new phones) but am finding they are so locked down and closed off by Samsung you can’t really put anything else on it and have it work properly as far as I can tell.

It’s time for a new phone, and I’m honestly not sure what to do… The easy route seems like getting a pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it before doing anything else, but I just don’t super trust that the hardware isn’t going to drive me nuts…

The wikipedia page linked in the OP says it wasn’t even built until 1939 :(

KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong)

and then…

if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them.

lol. I love it. :P

To OP though, if you really don’t want to “distro-hop”, you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won’t get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the “look and feel” which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.

This feels out-of-touch itself, like you haven’t actually tried in years. Yes, to rebind your mouse buttons, you will have to install a piece of software, and tell it what you want each button to do… Exactly like you have to do in Windows. I haven’t seen any janky work-arounds needed, and the software is a lot more responsive than I was used to in windows with the official logitech software. You don’t need command line in linux any more often than you need to edit the registry in windows - your typical PC user can get by without it just fine and probably should stay away from it. As for game performance, there will always be variability here, but there is no hard and fast rule like “you will lose 20% performance in linux vs windows”. Some stuff may not get along with proton or linux (big one is some of the “bad actor” anti-cheat stuff, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread that just won’t work at all), but the vast majority is running great under linux - imperceptibly different, if it is even different at all. Finally, there are plenty of distros that will handle all the drivers you need with little to no input from the user. One of the primary selling points of PopOS is fantastic graphics driver support “out of the box”, but they aren’t alone - many make the process invisible or butter smooth.

I always love how many people that don’t use linux to do ‘X’ thing, feel the need to tell people that do use linux every day for ‘X’ how bad linux is at doing ‘X’… People going into windows specific communities and shouting about how bad windows is for ‘X’ or ‘Y’ task would be shunned to oblivion if not outright banned, but they come into the linux communities every day to tell us how bad linux is??

Lot of people hating on Garuda here, but I have loved it. Hopefully it goes as smoothly for you as it has for me - it’s been an absolute breath of fresh air. :)

paypal’s business model is basically theft. They regularly “freeze” accounts of people that have money to be taken, refuse to unfreeze them, and then when it eventually turns into a class-action lawsuit they settle for pennies on the dollar (that mostly goes to attorneys anyway). When it happened to me over 10 years ago, I was doing remote tech support and getting paid via paypal. Had a business account that was like 10 years of use. Then one day they froze the account and told me there was “suspicious activity”.

When I appealed and asked what suspicious activity they found, they simply said that there was money in the account and there wasn’t before… Then they asked for, specifically, ebay transaction IDs and UPS or Fedex tracking numbers for the products sold on ebay. I explained to them again that I was not selling on ebay and was doing remote tech support. The person on the other end of the phone just said “ok, well, then your appeal is denied. Your account is staying frozen” and hung up.

I ended up just refunding all the transactions that were recent enough I could (because that was the only thing I could do with the account) and sent those customers a note explaining briefly what happened and that I would rather have done the work for free than have done it so paypal can steal the money…

Eventually got tacked onto a class action and got a low double digit payout almost a decade after losing a few thousand…

That sucks man. There needs to be less division and derision in the Linux community. Not that there is a lot, but there is enough to drive some people away. It’s not as easy as windows to daily drive Linux. It is SO MUCH better than it used to be, but it still isn’t something you can just dump on a family member or friend and expect to not get calls about it.

And worse, it isn’t the same for almost anyone. I’ve had good luck with Arch derivatives (Manjaro and Garuda), but I’ve got friends that tried running the exact same OS and build etc. on very similar hardware and can’t get half the games working that I play regularly with minimal effort - even following the same steps I used with no issues. They install Ubuntu or Mint and suddenly it works fine… Happy it works, but none of us know why or what to do if something similar happens next time…

And somehow, it seems every problem any of us runs into are so bizarre (or we don’t know enough “likely causes” to google specific and correct terminology) that it seems like no one on the internet has ever had it happen before. Thankfully it’s been going great for me, but one of my friends is just having a rough time of it. :(

TL;DR - Thank you to all the actually helpful people in the Linux community that make this journey possible for the rest of us. To the people being dicks: if you have to swing down constantly to feel good, re-evaluate your life choices and leave us out of it.

I agree with this. Also, vast majority of distros come with an option for live environment from the install media which makes it super easy to test drive a few flavors before picking. I bought like 8 cheap 16GB usb drives and then made a not-so-short list of distributions that people were talking highly of. Boot up each one, tinker around for an hour or so, see what it comes with, how easy it is to get the desktop environment the way I like it, what hardware it sees and uses automatically, etc. I landed on Garuda for now, it’s new and exciting but not so scary unfamiliar. I’ve tried Mint, Manjaro, Kubuntu, Zorin, Drauger, Pop!, and Debian. I wasn’t a fan of Pop! personally, but honestly found a way to like all the rest pretty comfortably.