Also a good point, this isn’t to knock products like the Fairphone since they’re offering extremely long product support windows, which should drive down demand for new devices and reduce their carbon footprint.

I just use a kb/mouse combo device and treat it like a PC and use VLC/online services/DVD drive to play media. It’s not super traditional but it feels pretty easy since most of it is in a web browser!

I would just use a tiny PC and connect it to the Internet, then use Linux and pirating services to build a library of stuff. Works well for me.

Of course Linux is better for custom, purpose-built hardware. That’s like, its main advantage for the commercial sector.

If it works on your setup, DaVinci resolve. If not, Kdenlive. Those are the only really professional video editing programs available at the moment.

Realistically just use what you prefer. The differences between distros, even when it comes to performance, are very small when it comes to gaming. The most important things IMO are good Wayland support, stability, and consistent updates.

For Nvidia I would recommend Pop!_OS since it makes things really easy. Either that or Debian with KDE. More mainstream = more users = better support.

Waiting for it to have Wayland support and then I might switch lol.

I think it’s already a great system, its philosophical foundation of being built around user freedom is fantastic. It just has a few things that are definitely still problems for desktop users. Namely,

• Sensible defaults
• Proprietary driver management
• Distros needing to distribute software in their repos instead of authors doing it themselves
• Too many competing application formats, each with glaring issues
• Inconsistent theming with GTK vs QT (mostly app developers’ faults tho)
• Both popular display servers have huge issues
• Lack of manufacturer support for hardware (this will come with time if Linux continues to become more popular)
• Incompatibility with existing standards, especially Microsoft products
• Lacking proper professional applications for things like video editing that actually work consistently
• Gaming anti-cheat compatibility
• Generally being easy to break the whole system on accident
• Power consumption on mobile devices

I guess that’s a lot, but it’s still a great system ha.

I guess it’s just weird since you’re the first person I’ve ever seen complain about them! Sorry you had a bad experience.

That’s bizarre, I have the opposite experience ha. Nvidia drivers with my 1660 produced buggy video output nearly 100% of the time, even idling on desktop would randomly cause black bars to appear every few frames. I tried 3 different driver versions but each one broke something different. Both X11 and Wayland sucked. On the Nvidia forums the devs were basically apologizing and saying it would be fixed later in these huge threads of people documenting similar issues. To my knowledge a lot of my issues still exist with my hardware.

My 5700 worked flawlessly OOTB without any tinkering. Open-source MESA drivers were packaged with my Debian 12 install and they have never stuttered or bugged out on me. I literally do not even think about my GPU setup anymore, it just works and required 0 configuration on my end.

Did you just have a different hardware setup? Was this a brand new release of an AMD GPU that just didn’t have good driver support on your distro yet?

On Linux all the drivers are included with the kernel. No software to manage either, it just works. Nvidia drivers need to be installed separately on Linux and are generally very low quality with performance and technical issues.

Idk about Windows though, never used an AMD GPU on it personally. My Nvidia GPU has always worked perfectly on Windows.

So I guess it’s just your OS choice really.

Unicomp makes copycat Model M’s that are very high-quality and popular.

I would say try Gnome. If you don’t like it, use KDE. Those are the 2 big ones right now so they’ll be the most reliable. Gnome is either love it or hate it, KDE is very vanilla. I personally use Gnome, because I love the workflow.

It’s modern and faster, has more features, and supports X11 apps. If your hardware is friendly with it, it’s pretty much a straight upgrade. Problem is not all hardware supports is well.

Mint is hugely over-recommended to new users imo. The fact that it doesn’t have an option for a DE like Gnome 3 or KDE just kinda sucks at teaching newbies what to expect. Cinnamon also feels kinda jank in my opinion, looks old and unattractive.

By this logic, Linux will have 100% market share in 1000 years. Can’t wait!

Tyrell (standing guy) was talking about his preferred DE. This show got a lot of stuff right about the nitty-gritty of linux that really impressed me.