Arch w/ KDE gamer here. I have generally had a good experience with it. I think everything you said is generally accurate. In terms of customization, lack of bloat, and a good wiki, Arch is generally considered to be all of those things. A rolling distro like Arch I believe will also be getting the latest proton updates, which may help with sooner game compatibility/optimization updates on more recent releases.

I say go for it.

Yes, but my larger point is that you are doing the same thing, but in the negative. You are taking your specific problems and then putting forward the conclusion that they are the reasons why "regular" Linux users should not use Linux, as though these were universal problems. I am saying that I do not have those issues and that they are far from universal.

Yes, the modular nature of Linux is both a blessing and a curse. There is legitimate debate to be had on that. But that is not how your post frames the issue.

As stated above, not all of these things are even Linux problems. I would say that if iOS refuses to play nice with Linux but every other ecosystem works fine, the blame lies with Apple, not with Linux. It is not Linux's job to fix the interoperability problems of other ecosystems. The GNOME problems are related to a specific subset of Linux users, and even before today I would have said that I would not recommend GNOME to new users because of how nonstandard it can be.

I am looking through these issues and I cannot say that I can relate on almost any of these. Sorry to hear you have been having so many issues!

I do plenty of gaming and cannot think of a time where I have had GPU driver issues (despite the fact that I have Nvidia graphics on 3 out of 4 of my systems, which is supposedly more problematic).

My bluetooth works fine, and it has been literally years since an update broke something, bluetooth or otherwise (which I cannot say the same for Windows on my work computer).

I use KDE connect, SFTP, and SMB servers and I have never had any issues transferring files between Windows, Android, and Linux. What do you mean about that? (seeing other replies, it sounds like you are using iOS. That sounds like that may be an Apple problem and not a Linux problem, because Apple tend to be terrible about playing nice with other ecosystems)

The scaling is the one point I can sort of relate on. I think there is still some work to be done regarding DPI and scaling on Linux, but it's not enough of an issue to make me want to switch operating systems.

As for GNOME issues and window decorations, that sounds like a GNOME problem. GNOME does things very differently to all of the other DEs and forces programs to manually define their own window decorations rather than allowing standard default icons like other DEs, so my understanding is that GNOME in particular tends to be a source of constant headaches for Linux developers.

And I'm not some sysadmin or CS major. If I have a problem, I do a web search. If I can't find it there, I make a forum thread. I don't post a rant saying that Linux is a bad OS, lol.

I am having a hard time following everything happening here. What is all this about hotspots and your neighbor's router? Do you not own a wifi router? Most wifi routers will also have ethernet connections on the back. I apologize for not understanding. Edit: I am guessing by "I do not have a lan line" you mean that you do not have a working internet connection at all at home? I am confused as to how you intend to run a server permanently over a phone hotspot.

My one thought is: have you gone into your router and reserved a static internal IP on your LAN? (e.g. 192.168.0.##)? Often servers and things will lose communication if their internal IP changes and your devices cannot find them.

Also, if you are porting out onto the public internet, are you using something like a dynamic DNS so that your devices can route to your public IP? your public IP will be constantly changing, so you need some way for your devices to find it.

Because either AUR helper is going to be pulling from the same AUR repository. Whether you use yay or paru, it is fetching the same files from the AUR. I am sure there are minor differences between the various AUR helpers, but all that I mean to say is that for your purposes it is probably not critical and you should use whichever AUR helper you prefer.

+1 in favor of using proton-vpn-gtk-app. That's what I use.

I use yay with regular Arch, but any AUR helper on CachyOS should be the same thing.

I would say that there is not much of a "culture" around green tea specifically, as there tends to be a much stronger culture of black tea, at least where I am on the east coast (Hot black tea in the Northeast/New England, iced/sweetened black tea in the Southeast).

As others have stated, most Americans would be familiar with it in teabags or bottled green tea, and so many who do end up trying it don't enjoy it because they end up trying a bitter, lesser-quality version of it. Others may be familiar with it in Japanese or Chinese restaurants, where the quality is hopefully better, but this probably cannot be rightly called American green tea culture.

In my experience, it is the sort of thing where the green teabags might be the only ones left in an office meeting room because, while someone thought to stock the meeting room with green tea in the first place, all the others have been used up first and then someone has forgotten to refill them.

1. I don't know much about gnome, sorry!

2. The main issues to watch out for are driver issues related to certain peripherals like fingerprint scanners, SD card readers, and certain oddball wifi chipsets. Hybrid graphics with both integrated CPU graphics and a dedicated GPU can lead to poor battery life in some systems such as many gaming laptops. In my experience, Linux runs fine on every laptop which I have tried it with, including 2 with hybrid Nvidia graphics. I'm also 2 for 2 on SD card readers and 3/3 on wifi cards as well, despite no prior research on my part.

3. Arch Linux sounds like it would be the closest to what you are describing. Or try out one of the more preconfigured versions like Endeavour OS or Arcolinux, as the install process for Arch can be a bit involved for someone new to Linux.

4. Usually not difficult so long as something is not a hard dependency for some other piece of software. Running something as root in Linux is as simple as typing "sudo" before a command and entering your root password

5. No. Per the above, elevated user privileges are permitted as a normal part of using Linux and do not require you to hack or bypass the OS's security mechanisms like in Android or iOS.

6. If you install more than one, depending on your login manager it is usually as simple as a dropdown menu to select which DE you want to use when logging in.

7. Wayland is a window manager/GUI system used in Linux. It has been getting a lot of discussion lately because the Linux community is gradually shifting from the longstanding but now unmaintained X11 system to Wayland. You probably don't need to worry about it.

A mix of factors for me. Firstly, privacy concerns, settings reverting themselves after updates, and the looming threat of Windows 11 were I to get a new PC. Stuttery performance on my already 3 year old laptop at the time (I still use the same laptop. It is now 6 years old and still runs great with Linux). General bloat, driver problems, and instability issues.

I did not make the switch all at once, but thankfully my laptop has two NVMe slots, which made dual booting easier while I got more used to using Linux as my daily driver. Within about a year, I was booting into Windows less and less, and eventually hardly ever once I found ways to use Linux for everything I needed.

Daily Arch user here. The process of configuring an Arch install is perhaps not as difficult or mystical as you are imagining. I would say it is more like your first analogy: picking what off-the-shelf parts you want for a system and then putting them into a case. I think what you are describing is more like Linux from Scratch.

Installing Arch is effectively taking the steps performed by the installer .iso disks which every distro uses and instead doing it manually with CLI commands. You use CLI commands to partition the drive, create a filesystem, install a basic set of packages, then chroot into your system and use the package manager to install the rest of the packages you want. Aside from editing a couple config files, there is zero coding involved. The exact steps vary from guide to guide, but a basic outline of what I do is as follows:

• First, I download the Arch iso and write it to a USB.

• Once I boot up the install USB, I use iwctl to connect to my wifi for the packages I will need to download,

• then I use fdisk to partition the drive I want to install to with an EFI and linux filesystem partition (You might also make a swap partition at this step but I typically use a swap file on my filesystem partition).

• then you use mkfs to create filesystems on the EFI and linux filesystem partitions.

• Then I use genfstab to make the /etc/fstab file

• Then, I use pacstrap to install the base packages like pacman. Then I mount the filesystem and chroot into the new partition.

• From there, I basically use pacman to install all the packages I need, including the linux kernel (I use linux-zen), the DE (I use KDE), the boot manager (I use Refind), and everything else. There are a few cleanup steps like setting the locales and time zones, etc. but that is about it.

I suggest watching a guide on youtube, which was how I learned, or installing something like Arcolinux or Endeavour, which simplifies the installer into a series of checkboxes to select what DE you want, etc.

I am only a few pages in, but speaking as a Linux user in the 2020s, I am skeptical of the claim that Linux in 1999 would "never, ever break down."

I would say that looseleaf green tea would be a big step up from teabags. A strainer basket that goes in a mug is a very low-fuss way to make looseleaf tea, as they are easy to clean and reusable. Looseleaf Japanese sencha was a game-changer for what I thought green tea could be.

I am personally not a huge fan of the mesh balls as tea tends to escape out from the gap along the middle, and for green tea especially, too much particulate can be bitter.

I also have a teapot with a strainer which functions much the same way, but for when I want to brew more than one cup.

No problem! Glad I could be of help, and best of luck on your project.

I am using lftp and mirror. One server functions as the "main" server, which mirrors the backup server to itself once per day at a specific time (they both run 24/7 so I set it to run very early in the morning when it is unlikely to be accessed).

In my crontab I have:

# # * * * /usr/bin/lftp -e "mirror -eRv [folder path on main server] [folder path on backup server]; quit;" sftp://[user]@[address of backup server]:[port number]

Two old HP thin client PCs configured as 4TB SFTP file servers using vsftpd on Debian. Each one uses software RAID 1 with both an NVMe and SATA SSD internally, and are in two separate locations with a cron job which syncs one to the other every 24 hours.

People who actually know what they are doing will probably find this silly, but I had fun and learned a lot setting it up.

I am not sure, then. If you are on a laptop, you might try one or the other of those utilities regardless simply because they can improve battery life, but that is a separate issue.

Interesting. Do you use Powertop or TLP, by any chance? Some power utilities will turn on USB power saving if there is no activity on a USB port for a while, which can cause issues with USB mice. Generally I turn off that specific setting, or I believe there might be some way to whitelist certain USB devices to not have this sleep behavior.

Are there mice which are not supported in Linux? Everything I have used from a junky unbranded wireless mouse to a high end Logitech gaming mouse have all been plug and play for me. Even the RGB settings can be configured in openRGB.

Comfort should always be an important factor in a mouse for any OS, I would think. In terms of build quality, I have had the rubber on some mice start to degrade over time, but that is about it. Even the cheapest mice that are hard plastic can last for decades with no problem.

I would say that switchable DPI would be a must-have feature for me with modern displays. As someone with a 4k monitor, some junky office mice do not have enough sensitivity for me on high resolution monitors even with the setting cranked to max in the settings menu.

For wireless mice, I prefer AA battery mice over USB rechargeable mice, but that is a matter of personal preference. If my mouse battery dies in a AA mouse, I can swap the rechargeable NiMH battery in a minute and continue using it. However, if a USB rechargeable mouse is dead, I either have to use it on a tether for a while or remember to constantly keep recharging it. Also, having an integrated li-ion battery will give any mouse a limited lifespan unless you are willing to open up and solder in a new battery when it wears out, whereas I have some AA-powered mice which are going strong probably a decade later, so long I have had to open them up and re-solder them with new microswitches instead of new batteries.

I think you would need to provide more detail to know what you have. Does it have a model number on it anywhere?

I cannot say that I have done extensive testing, but the Acer Swift 315-51G and Gigabyte Aero WV8 that I have both worked fine with Linux with zero prior research on my part. No issues with any drivers, even the SD card readers, although I have not checked the fingerprint sensor on the Acer. Maybe I have just been lucky.

Both have hybrid Nvidia graphics, though, and 10-series and prior hybrid graphics especially, as I understand, have issues with high idle power usage unless you manually disable the dGPU when not gaming, which I had to do using envycontrol and nearly doubled my battery life on both. I might avoid hybrid dGPUs and especially older ones unless you need that.

Used laptop-wise, I agree with others that a used business laptop like a Dell would probably be your best bet.

No problem! Mint XFCE sounds perfect to me.

That covers a pretty wide range of hardware, but that era would be around 2009-2015, give or take, so you would be looking at around Intel 1st gen to 6th gen most likely (Let's be honest, there is nearly zero chance institutions would be using anything but Intel in that era). Pentium-branded CPUs from that time range, unfortunately, likely means low-end dual core CPUs with no hyperthreading, so 2C/2T, but I have run Linux on Core2-era machines without issue, so hopefully the CPU specs will be okay.

2-8GB of DDR3 RAM is most likely for that era, and as others point out, will be your biggest issue for running browsers. If the RAM is anything like the CPUs, I am assuming you will be looking at the lower end with 2-4GB depending on how old the oldest machines you have are, so I second the recommendation of maybe consolidating the RAM into fewer machines, or if you can get any kind of budget at all, DDR3 sticks on ebay are going to be dirt cheap. A quick look and I see bulk listings of 20x4GB sticks for $26.

In terms of distro/DE, I second anything with XFCE, but if you could bump them up to around 8GB RAM, then I think any DE would be feasible.

Hard drives shouldn't be an issue I think, since desktop hard drives in the 320GB-1TB range would have been standard by then. Also, you are most likely outside of the "capacitor plague" era, so I would not expect motherboard issues, but you might open them up and dust them out so the fans aren't struggling. Re-pasting the CPUs would also probably be a good idea, so maybe consider adding a couple $5 tubes of thermal paste to a possible budget. Polysynthetic thermal compounds which do not dry out easily would be preferable, and something like Arctic Silver 5 would also be an era-appropriate choice, lol.

I am not sure that I can really call what I did distrohopping, but

Mint w/ Cinnamon (several years ago on an old junker laptop and never ended up using it as a daily driver) -> Manjaro w/ KDE Plasma (daily driver for ~1 year) -> Arch w/ KDE Plasma (~2 years and counting).

I have also used Debian with no DE on a file server I made out of an old thin client PC and I have used Rasbian on a raspberry pi.

For most things it has not been an issue. Mice and keyboards have all been plug and play for me. Bluetooth headphones also work just fine for me. Setting up a printer was probably easier to do than in windows. My USB DAC, external hard drives, USB SD card readers, etc. have all been plug and play.

A persistent issue in Linux, however, are gaming peripherals. Anything which requires proprietary vendor software to configure RGB settings may be an issue. OpenRGB detects and allows me to configure the RGB on my Logitech G Pro Wireless Mouse, and I picked up a secondhand Drop CTRL mechanical keyboard which I was also able to reprogram in Linux, but broadly speaking any peripheral which requires dedicated software to program may or may not allow reconfiguration on a case-by-case basis. The last time I had to boot into Windows was to re-bind the key-map on an off-brand USB footswitch, which was a one-time fix and then it has worked fine since then. Similarly, the RGB on the keyboard in my Gigabyte laptop can only be configured from Windows.

On the laptop side, the main things to watch out for will be compatibility issues with fingerprint readers and certain oddball WiFi chipsets, but generally speaking my peripheral experience has been good.

I had a similar issue. I actually wrote myself a text document listing out all of the programs I generally use post-install and any additional setup I did, so that way whenever I am setting up a new system I can quickly refer back to it and save myself a lot of time over doing one-off installs as I run into them.

Welcome! Coming from Windows myself, I made the jump to Manjaro (It has certain issues and I do not recommend it), then to Arch less than a year after. I have been on Arch full time for around 2 years now. After the initial setup, I have found Arch to be pretty low-maintenance and no harder to maintain than any other distro, hardly requiring more than the occasional yay -Syu --noconfirm in the command line to update things. As someone with less computer knowledge than an IT professional, I think Arch's reputation for being difficult is overblown IMO, and I suspect mostly due to intimidation from the more involved setup process prior to the availability of the install script.

I don't know if you have any familiarity with Linux already from your work, but regardless of what distro you go with, I would go into it with a mindset that you are learning a new skill. Some things are simply done differently in Linux than Windows and will require getting used to, such as how drives work using mounting points rather than drive letters.

Realistically, setting things up for the first time often requires additional steps and may not "just work," but when using my laptop and gaming desktop from day to day, it works just like any other OS. Gaming has been great for me generally, and the work Valve has done to improve game compatibility on Linux has been spectacular. Most Steam games do, in fact, "just work" for me.

In the 2-3 years I have been using Linux, I have rarely had things spontaneously break as many folks seem to worry about, or if I do it is because of companies not supporting their Linux communities, like Discord not pushing out updates on time, or major-event changes like the move to the Wayland graphical stack on KDE 6 which undid some of my desktop customization settings.

Oh no, I've been caught, haha. Good memory!

To my defense, the story seemed relevant to OP's question, and the post that it was originally in has been deleted, apparently.

The Arch installation tutorial I followed originally advised using LVM to have separate root and user logical volumes. However, after some time my root volume started getting full, so I figured I would take 10GB off of my home volume and add it to the root one. Simple, right?

It turns out that lvreduce --size 10G volgroup0/lv_home doesn't reduce the size by 10GB, it sets the absolute size to 10GB, and since I had way more than 10GB in that volume, it corrupted my entire system.

There was a warning message, but it seems my past years of Windows use still have me trained to reflexively ignore dire warnings, and so I did it anyway.

Since then I have learned enough to know that I really don't do anything with LVM, nor do I see much benefit to separate root/home partitions for desktop Linux use, so I reinstalled my system without LVM the next time around. This is, to date, the first and only time I have irreparably broken my Linux install.

I have not played CS2, sorry.

Arch gamer here. I can confirm that it works well.

What is your use case? For me, something like a fileserver which I am mainly SSH-ing into anyway, I may not install a DE at all, but if this is going to be a general-use desktop, I see no reason not to install the DE right from the beginning, and selecting a DE will be part of the install process of most Linux distros, or some distros have different install disk images that you can download with any given DE which it supports.

If you are very concerned about keeping your system lean and want full control of what gets installed, you might want to look up guides for installing Arch Linux. The initial setup process is more involved than other distros, but once you have it installed, I think its reputation for being difficult is overblown.

Thanks for the reply!

I tried this, and it does not seem to have helped much, if at all. Visual elements like scroll bars and text boxes in Steam continue to flicker, and apps like Discord flicker or go completely black randomly. My main use case for this desktop is gaming, so sadly without more of a fix I am not sure that I can move away from X11 yet.

I do not think your issues are in any way unique. I am also using Plasma 6 on Arch with a 3080 Ti. Initially, it simply booted to a black screen with nothing but a cursor, and no ability to do anything.

Adding the changes to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf per @markus@hubzilla.markusgarlichs.de 's reply as well as adding those kernel params to my /boot/refind_linux.conf, and now it boots into a desktop, but I am seeing large amounts of flickering, windows going black, or visual elements flickering in and out. Looking at my installed packages, I already had both xorg-xwayland and wayland-protocols (per @Varen@kbin.social 's reply) installed.

It seems like there are still more steps before what I would consider a usable result. Personally, it was not "obvious" to me when Plasma 6 rolled out that I needed to do any of this.

Sorry for the late reply. It sounds like it could be due to the dGPU if your battery life is terrible. I don't know if that method would work or not. I had to try a couple different things before I eventually settled on envycontrol.

I am not sure what graphics you have, but I have an older-ish laptop with hybrid 10-series Nvidia graphics which do not fully power down even with TLP installed. I was finding that it continued to draw a continuous 7W even in an idle state. I installed envycontrol so that I can manually turn off/on hybrid graphics or force the use of integrated graphics. I noticed my battery life jumped from 2-3 hours to 4-5 hours after I did this, and unless I am gaming (which I rarely do on this laptop) I hardly ever need the dgpu in this.

I also use TLP. I have tried auto-cpufreq and powertop, and I found TLP offered the most granular control and worked the best for my system/needs.

I have a laptop with integrated Intel graphics and a desktop with Nvidia graphics. I use Wayland on the former right now as of KDE 6. I have noticed some odd behaviors, but overall it has been fine. The latter, however, just boots to a black screen. I have neither the time nor the desire to debug that right now, so I will adopt Wayland on that machine when it works with Nvidia to a reasonable degree of stability.

Yep, I dual boot on my laptop so that I can run certain programs for my schoolwork as well. I use Refind as my boot manager so that I can easily select one or the other on startup.

Blah blah blah blah blah...

tl;dr the author never actually gets to the point stated in the title about what the "problem" is with the direction of Linux and/or how knowing the history of UNIX would allegedly solve this. The author mainly goes off on a tangent listing out every UNIX and POSIX system in their history of UNIX.

If I understand correctly, the author sort of backs into the argument that, because certain Chinese distros like Huawei EulerOS and Inspur K/UX were UNIX-certified by Open Group, Linux therefore is a UNIX and not merely UNIX-like. The author seems to be indirectly implying that all of Linux therefore needs to be made fully UNIX-compatible at a native level and not just via translation layers.

Towards the end, the author points out that Wayland doesn't comply with UNIX principles because the graphics stack does not follow the "everything is a file" principle, despite previously admitting that basically no graphics stack, like X11 or MacOS's graphics stack, has ever done this.

Help me out if I am missing something, but all of this fails to articulate why any of this is a "problem" which will lead to some kind of dead-end for Linux or why making all parts of Linux UNIX-compatible would be helpful or preferable. The author seems to assume out of hand that making systems UNIX-compatible is an end unto itself.

My particular testing was with an SSK SD300, which is roughly 500MB/s up and down. I have benchmarked this and confirmed it meets its rating.

I have thought about buying something like a Team Group C212 or Team Group Spark LED, which are rated at 1000MB/s. The 256GB version of the C212 is available on places like Newegg and Amazon for around $27 USD at time of writing, but they make variants as high as 1TB.

I have done some basic testing, and the speed of the USB stick you use does make a noticeable difference on the boot time of whatever you install on it.

If I recall correctly, A low speed USB 2.0 stick took around 30-60 seconds to load (either time to login screen or time to reach a blinking cursor for something like an arch install disk). If this is something for occasional use, even this works perfectly fine.

Slightly faster USB 3 sticks in the 100MB/s range can be had for only around $5-15 USD and work significantly better, maybe 7-15 seconds. These usually have assymetric read/write speeds, such as 100MB/s read and 20MB/s write, but for a boot disk the read speed is the primary factor.

Some high end flash drives can reach 500-1000MB/s and would load in only a few seconds. A high speed 256GB stick might cost $25-50, and a 1TB stick maybe $75-150.

An NVMe enclosure might cost $20-30 for a decent quality 1GB/s USB 3 enclosure, or $80-100 for a thunderbolt enclosure in the 3GB/s range so long as your hardware supports it, plus another $50-100 for a 1TB NVMe drive itself. This would of course be the fastest, but it is also bulkier than a simple flash drive, and I think you are at the point of diminishing returns in terms of performance to cost.

I would say up to you on what you are willing to spend, how often you realistically intend to use it, and how much you care about the extra couple seconds. For me, I don't use boot disks all that often, so an ordinary 100MB/s USB 3 stick is fine for my needs even if I have faster options available.