It used to be a pain. Multiple versions that didn’t all work. Today it’s pretty painless. A lot of installers will actually do it for you now.

In arch (at least the last time I did it), it was just a matter of picking the right package and installing it with pacman

EndeavorOS’s installer will do it for you

I use Fedora these days. It didn’t do it automatically the last time I loaded from scratch (not an upgrade), but the rpm fusion team/repository made it simple. I just followed the crystal clear instructions on their website.

I think mint does it automatically with the installer…

Honestly I really don’t even think about nvidia drivers anymore.

Hard

94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.

But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.

Another vote for fedora here.

I use regular workstation. I like gnome so that fits. And I found when I set up arch exactly the way I liked, I was just recreating the fedora experience ;)

It’s not bleeding edge but I don’t think anyone really needs that unless you just bought a brand new vid card or mobo etc. If your components are common and 6mo+ old fedora is new enough.

I really don’t have issues with it. It seems to have become the new Ubuntu (install it and it just works).

Openrgb is what you want. It’s tricky to figure out though. It’s not just going to recognize the device and poof magic. You’ll have to fiddle with HOW it’s connected - through your rgb header, bios settings, separate controller etc. Once it’s recognized, you may have to play with the settings for how many lights it has etc.

When I first used it, it thought it didn’t do anything. Then I learned and got it to do everything.

Yup. Go ahead and try turning that cell phone radio thing off. Why do you need an app for remote start? Why can’t it be on the keyfob anymore? But again, nothing to see here - just the continued enshittification of everything.

I’ve been telling people since this dna testing started that sooner or later that data will be for sale, an insurance company will buy it, and then get used against people to increase their health insurance rates or deny claims.

But I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist according to everyone ;)

Same reason I don’t want to buy a new car anymore…

I will try it! Never heard of it. I also hate the markdown nonsense.

When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)

Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.

Wow really? I’m fascinated :)

Generational thing maybe? I still communicate with doctors, family members, and like support for orders/inquiries via email. Not all the time, a lot with text too. But it’s still like 50/50 email / text.

Proton works fine for me. Email client works as you’d expect in iOS and the webmail is the same as any other. I don’t use the calendar though so can’t comment there. I DO use the vpn heavily. I don’t understand the issues people have with it because it’s always been good for me. I use it on my phone and multiple computers - even Linux (the unofficial flatpak also works well).

The thing I wish I realized earlier (keep in mind that I started using it like 10 years ago) is that it’s impossible to degoogle your life. Yay I use proton - but everyone else still uses Gmail so google gets it all anyway. Not everything, but you get the idea.

Their insistence on sueing the world of emulation ensures I’ll never buy another Nintendo console ever again. (And I’ve bought all of them so far). Their actions cause the opposite effect of what they want - they are creating pirates.

The cost is insane though. I think there’s a disconnect between what they want and what they can afford. I think it’s like a 10x adder per user license to go from regular office 356 to a copilot enabled account. I know my company wants it hosted in the cloud - but we aren’t going to pay the going rates. It’s insane.

Meh we’ll see. But I do wonder what happens when they get packaged up easier as a program.

I think local compute will kill these huge data centers for AI. It’s amazing what you can do with free tools like ollama or rag agents like n8n. Even on a business laptop with only 16GB of ram. If you’ve got a 4090 at home in your gaming pc and some big ram sticks - well, you’d be surprised at what some models can do (and how quickly they can respond).

You all know how the internet works - in a short time someone’s going to put together a free tool that’s as easy as “click this button to install” and it’ll do 80% of what ChatGPT can do. ie probably enough for the average user - for free.

So how are they going to recoup all these billions spent on data centers if peoples personal computers can mostly do the same thing? How do they monetize your information and sell you ads if it’s all done locally?Go download one and ask questions-sure it’s not perfect but it’s surprisingly good locally hosted.

I think the people spending these billions are starting to realize that…. Meanwhile I think this keeps video card prices high unfortunately…

It’s much better these days - at least it works fine on arch and fedora. I wouldn’t worry about nvidia on Linux. That said, I’d go AMD for another reason - $. There’s just no reason to spend the kind of money nvidia wants when you can get something just a tad slower for 1/4 the price. AMD makes cards that can drive a huge monitor at high fps.

Bottom line: whatever is fine.

Love mine and daily drive it. Not janky, zero issues. Everything works on Linux. Not sure what you’re referring to.

Can you get more bang for your buck? Yes, to start. But let’s compare after a couple of upgrades on mine vs whole laptop replacements with other brands.

And the sunk costs aren’t even a thing tbh. You can just go pirate your books with zero moral dilemmas since you actually paid for it and they took it away.

I’ll wait until it’s heavily on sale and that it’s proven itself to actually play on Linux. Just like I did for Elden ring. Otherwise I’d pay them full price on day one.

This WAS a day one buy for me. Now I’ll pass thanks.

My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”

Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.

This is good advice imo. Some further comments:

• Its easier to make a vm out of a bare metal or “real” install. It’s much harder to go the other way.
• you seem to have some fear about installing or reinstalling OSs. It’s much easier than redeploying vms. I’d banish those thoughts and jump in. Again the above advice is solid because you can mess up or change your mind, and you can always revert. Cloning a drive and redeploying that image to the original drive is simple.
• dual booting gets a lot of flak. Most of that comes from windows not playing nice with boot partitions when windows is installed on the same drive. Another source of issues is secure boot. If you have two internal drives, installing an os on each one works great. I like turning secure boot off and simply pressing F8 upon boot up if I want to switch. (But you totally can get it working with secure boot and adding other OSs to grub.