I’m still not a Linux expert myself, but I’m gonna take a shot at answering this question as I understand it so maybe others can help correct me. I use Arch (btw) but the ideas should still apply,

You’ll want to use the Debian packages for anything foundational to your system. These packages are tested to work with the distro and can be considered a part of it, just ones you haven’t installed yet. This would be important for something like bluez bluetooth (or whatever Debian uses).

Aside from the space issues you mentioned, this is less important for heavy apps that sit on top of everything else, like a game. Especially if you’re on a slower moving distro like Debian this may be ideal for more updated versions.

Usually I go: distro repo (HIGH PREFERENCE), AUR (not really an option for you), Flatpak, AppImage, whatever other jank manual install is available (but only as a last resort if I really need the thing and there’s no other option, I like a tidy system). I find this offers the best stability and as someone who obsessively updates their system every day because they’re a bored tech nerd, I’ve had better stability on 3 years of Arch than I have with Windows (but that’s a low bar)

I revisit Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind every few years when I wanna get my guts all twisted into knots.

I think when Kaufman is left on his own he’s too much of a bummer and Gondry on his own is just too far out. But somehow they come together in a perfect balance with Jim Carey in perhaps his best serious role, IMHO. The soundtrack really takes it the extra mile.

I appreciate it because Joel and Clementine come off as just two kinda fucked up people having a kinda fucked up relationship; very relatable. Neither is perfect or completely at fault and the film very much leaves it up to your interpretation if they can or should work together. I don’t think it has a happy ending, do you? Compare that to something like 500 Days of Summer where you’re really supposed to sympathize with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character but mostly I end up wanting to push him into the mud. Hard.

The subplot between the doctor and his secretary is maybe a little unnecessary? But Kirsten Dunst is amazing so whatever.

I wish I had stayed.

Mmm, this is kind of what I’m talking about. I’m certainly not knocking Nobara as a distro or people who prefer it, but taken from their FAQ,

1. Will there ever be other Desktop Environment versions? No. The ‘Official’ modified KDE release layout was designed for myself and my father out of personal preference.

5. I heard Nobara breaks SELinux, is this true? No. We have completely swapped SELinux in favor of AppArmor (this is what Ubuntu and OpenSUSE use).

6. Is Nobara compatible with SecureBoot? No. Nobara ships with a kernel that has been custom patched and is built and hosted on COPR.

7. Can I upgrade from Fedora to Nobara using the Nobara repositories? NO. This is a big large huge NO. The Nobara install ISOs have a ton of packages that get installed which are specific to Nobara, and not installed on Fedora on fresh install.

10. Just how modified is Nobara aside from what I can see? Heavily.

11. This project is quite new, is it going anywhere? Is there anything to say it won’t just up stop development? Is it something that is recommendable to daily drive? (I am quite technical, and can troubleshoot my issues). As long as I am alive and using linux this project will continue. It started because I needed something both myself and my father could easily use from clean install without time consuming troubleshooting or extra package and repo installation.

It’s been around since ~2022 compared to Mint in ~2006

These are exactly the kind of points that a casual, new user would stumble across and in attempting to troubleshoot things from a Fedora perspective could trip them up severely.

My point is that casual users are already averse to making the switch and they are likely going to do ONE install and it needs to be as vanilla and stable as possible. If they turn into Linux nerds who want to distro hop later, they’ll find their way, but we need to keep things absolutely stock and simple.

The biggest issue for most casual users starting remains picking a distro, and to that end I think we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month. Even Bazzite has come up against some recent drama and having to break down distro drama for a new users is an absolute deal breaker.

Based on their skill level and needs just get them into a bucket: Mint, Fedora, or Arch. They’ve been around forever, they’re stable, there’s plentiful documentation and there are no weird opinionated decisions buried in them that’ll go off like a landmine or confound troubleshooting. Install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, I’ve had less issues with those (until recently I dunno, we can revisit this point) but overall just everything simple and smooth for a transition.

Once people are on Linux they can start to come up with their own informed opinions depending on how well they take to the environment but at the same time there’s nothing wrong with starting and ending with the above distros.

(I actually don’t know much about Fedora, there might be a slightly better variant recommendation but it’s gotta be something analogous to Mint. I’m pretty adamant on vanilla Arch though, if that’s the route you want to go. Anyone who starts with Arch will be able to better determine an Arch variant down the road for themselves and are also more likely to do multiple installs. Doing so much as even a single reinstall may be a deal breaker for casuals).

The Slack text corpus is tribal knowledge reified.

I absolutely did read it and everyone that talks like this needs to be ostracized from polite society.

Reading this article inflicted heavy psychic damage. I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself.

In some ways it’s important just to be here, now, screaming on the internet. Leaving a record, however fleeting, that we knew it was dumb even now and objected. We’re all waiting for the bubble to pop and when it does, do these idiots just get to walk away like they never said this shit?

I have an R36s that I installed Rocknix on to give it a tiny bit of an optimization and performance boost and that thing still kinda choked on some PS1 and most PSP games. The thought of it running Dead Cells 💀

Massive props!

I have considered that possibility, yeah. I’m not an expert by far, but it seems less likely.

Breaking from the US is going to cause an initial upheaval to the tech industry that the EU won’t be able to just immediately assert new anti-circumvention on while they are in the active process of a smash and grab. It’s going to take at least some amount of time for them to re-establish that on their terms during which people will become a lot better familiarized and practiced at what all this jailbreaking is going to look like.

People can resist during that time and while I don’t necessarily delude myself into thinking that’ll be super effective, it will also require legal coordination and brand new anti-circumvention tech. Could still be wishful thinking, but I don’t assume it’s just a done deal.

I am personally betting a lot that this is where it’s going (career development-wise, not prediction markets, ugh)

US tech has been absolutely awful and stagnating for awhile. It’s one thing to continue to deal with it when it’s actually offering good value, but it’s not. Between the data sovereignty concerns and tariffs, the EU is positioned to jolt its own tech market if it’s ready to take the opportunity, and I think they are.

I’m not sure I’d expect anything big or grand, much like the “year of the Linux desktop” I don’t know that there will really be a breaking moment. Just slow building of momentum in that direction. And that’s all it really takes, once that momentum takes hold it’s not going to start flowing back to Microsoft. These greedy corporations overplayed their hand, they broke the agreements, and now there’s really no going back.

So I hope …

OK, I apologize. That first post was overly negative so allow me to offer some real hope and advice. (I was sitting in the middle of class when I typed that up and needed to get it off my chest. I moved to a new country and started uni again, which is maybe not the best way to deal with burnout. It’s helped in some ways but hurt in others. That’s my problems though, a story for another time.)

Let’s go back to the fire metaphor for burnout, I think it’s more apt. Not necessarily through any fault of your own, that fire is burnt out now. Someone careless came along and doused it in gasoline until it flared up and dissipated. That first fire was built out of the kindling of you, not intentional but incidental over a lifetime as you slowly piled things onto it. This new fire you need to build is going to have to be more intentional. You’re going to have to pay attention, put thought and care into it. That’s going to take practice and possibly several failures first until you get the hang of it, don’t give up.

This new fire won’t be the same. Not in composition or how it burns; that’s just life. It’s OK if you need to take some time to mourn that, I think it’s only natural. But just like a forest fire sweeping through it leaves fertile ground for new things to grow again. Time and patience which sucks because it runs counter to a lot of what we’re dealing with, but just know it as a fact.

For something concrete to begin with, focus on your self and your interests. It’s hard to sit down and focus on just reading a book when you feel like there are so many dozens of other things you need to tend to, but just take that time for yourself. Speaking personally, if you’re anything like me you got some part of yourself wrapped up in that job/career even though you didn’t want to, even though you didn’t ever see yourself as that kind of person. You need to fill that back in with yourself and if that takes the form of books, or comics, or movies, or videogames, or bike rides or whatever silly thing it is that makes you happy, you just need to do it. Trust me, this is important.

Keep going, you got this.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long while. I like to use the analogy of RAM because I’m a nerd.

When I was younger I felt like I had 32GB. I couldn’t even fully load it, I was into so many things I’d stuff it full and still be running at half capacity.

As I got older, more processes began to run long. Taxes, relationships, the tedium upkeep of life. Then work takes a big bite. You have the space so you run it. 24GB, 24/7. And they run it hard.

But then it gets burnt out. It’s just … fried. You can’t load things into it anymore, they don’t hold. Your memory or attention or energy or some combination of all three fail and the task fails. You had 4x8 but now you’re running on 1x8. For everything. The life tasks build and then there’s more: all the services, the nags, the endless notifications on endless apps, a million group chats buzzing by and the ever growing fascism.

But it’s not RAM. You can’t just go to the store and buy new stuff and replace it. You can’t just take a week off and relax and expect that it’ll start working again. It’s … unclear what will make it work again. Is it just broken now, forever???

You try to load stuff into it anyways, because you have to. Hobbies you used to enjoy. But the memory is still no good so it gets corrupted. That thing you used to enjoy now feels like an obligation and trying to engage with it feels like the memory of touching a hot stove. It slips away. And the entire social group you built around that interest? That slips away, too. It’s all too hot to touch, you don’t have the room and it feels bad: it’s tiring and draining and too much for you anymore.

I used to think burnout was a check engine light. I’d notice it go on, I’d recognize it happened, then I’d get to the shop and fix it. It took me years to figure out what was wrong and I still don’t know what to do about it. And the work just isn’t designed to let you deal with this stuff.

Games are a modern media and I think suffer from a lot of modern engagement mechanics.

We need to stop viewing them as a constant stream of “new content” and more as an established library.

My brain just shuts off when I read stuff like this.

Man, I dunno. Fuck AAA gaming, I’ll go play something else.

It’s kind of a weird phenomenon that’s been developing on the internet for awhile called, “just asking questions”. It’s a way to noncommittally insert an opinion or try to muddy the waters with doubt, “Did you ever notice how every {bad thing} is {some minority}? I’m not saying I believe it, I’m just asking questions!” In this instance it seems that by even asking for a clear statement of value you are implying there may not be one, which is upsetting.

To be clear, I’m not accusing you of doing this, but you can see how stumbling into a community that takes their own positions as entirely self evident would see any sort of questioning it as an attempt to undermine it. Anything short of full, unconditional acceptance of their position is treacherous.

It’s worth thinking about because it’s a difficult and nuanced problem. Some things are unquestionable like when I say I love a bad movie or that human rights are inalienable. Still, I should be able to answer sincere questions probing into the whys of that and it really comes down to an assumption of bad faith or not.

“since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family”

Yeah, because cats know how to evade the fascist state. All Cats Are Beautiful …

I can’t believe I watched that as many times as I did …

Everyone pointing to ~0:34 for the initial shittening, but there’s a very wet plbrt follow-up at ~0:47 that I cannot attribute to any other sort of background shuffling or noise. He shit his pants.

Enshittification, as always, is the word here. It’s important to point out because to disenshittify(?) the product would need to turn back the wheel, including profits. Line go down.

With all the other lines going down, they literally cannot course correct here in any way that would matter to the consumer to rebuild trust. So much of their model is built off of force feeding users and directing their behaviors, the thing they absolutely hate.

There was a crow that hung around the parking lot of my old apartment a lot. I saw him every day and started offering food for him. He used to follow me jumping from tree to tree and would often call out for my attention if I didn’t notice him at first. I won’t claim to have really understood him, but you spend enough time around crows and you can kind of start to tell what they sound like when they talk to each other, when they’re talking about you (or nearby humans in general), or when they’re trying to talk to you.

Eventually I taught him which patio was mine and he’d come up to the balcony railing and eat treats. One day I noticed him there just chilling with his girlfriend, which was kind of weird. You can’t really tell crows apart well unless they’re sitting next to each other but he was big and fat like an American football and she was sleeker like a fighter jet. He eventually left and she hung around for another hour or so, very strange.

Well, next day they show up with their new fledglings. He proceeded to pick up the crackers I had left out for him, dunk them in the nearby bird bath to soften them up, then feed them to his kids. And yes, it was him doing the feeding. I think he was just showing me off to his girlfriend like, “It’s cool, I know this one. It’s safe here.”

https://youtube.com/shorts/ilKrUOOEUwU

I’ve been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully … I do most things without the terminal.

I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don’t know if there’s a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I’m just browsing and gaming.

I really don’t think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it’s been minimized to a point where it’s never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they’re comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they’re more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.

This misses the point. Dankpods intentionally tested this way, and used Bazzite, to try and show what this would be like for the average gamer schmuck without a ton of technical skill interested in switching to Linux. Out of box experience matters in this situation, even though it’s not quite fair to compare that between free opens source distros and an OS created by a megacorp. To the average end user, it won’t matter. They just want it to work.

From the post itself and when I specifically referenced the OOBE in my own post. You need to read and make certain connections yourself, I can’t connect every point for every one.

While there is a point to be made about the performance directly out of box, this assumes that the user would not eventually seek to resolve the issues to improve performance. While there is a valid point to be made on the overall experience and the difficulty of correcting these issues, comparing the performance between sets of correct and incorrect drivers does not provide valuable data. It just underlines the OOBE point over and over again, I don’t need to watch an hour long video for that point to be made.

Clear enough?