Maybe Linux just isn’t for you, and that’s okay. Go use Windows or Mac and enjoy your “just works” setup and lack of involuntary learning.

I think with a self-hosted mastodon instance, the main downside is poorer discovery across the fediverse as a whole.

When you scale up to the thousands of users something like mastodon.social has, it’s not really an issue because other users have already established connections between instances by following or replying… but if your instance only has a single user, you only see and share posts with the instances you’ve directly interacted with, and it can be really isolating. You have to already know what external accounts you want to follow, because your instance is initially blind to them.

I feel like more instance connections leads to way larger amounts of data consumption too. I follow 120, and am followed by 12… my instance is currently using 24.1 GB for Media Storage.

What I feel would be acceptable:

If you’re proud of your Framework laptop and want to brag about it, we’ll give you some swag for free that you can show off with when you’re out and about!

What this looked like to me:

If you’re attending a conference we’d be paid to attend, but can’t go to, will you show off your Framework laptop to attendees in an effort to convince them to buy one from us too, and we’ll send you some stickers?

The issue isn’t even what they’re asking for, but how their asking it.

and a Nvidia 2080ti

Do you know which Nvidia driver you’re using currently?

There’s an established open-source Nouveau driver that Ubuntu & Mint probably defaulted to, a bleeding-edge open-source NVK driver that is still very early in it’s development, and a proprietary Nvidia driver that Nobara probably tried, as it’s kinda what you’d want for gaming.

The other question would be if you’re using Wayland or X11 underneath your desktop environment?

It should be listed in Settings > System > System Details, under the heading “Windowing System” if you’re using GNOME.

Wayland has better multi-monitor support than X11, but the proprietary Nvidia driver has a few teething problems with Wayland at the moment - a new 555 beta driver update should be coming this week with proper fixes for the sync/screen-tearing issues people have been experiencing.

I would’ve suggested MusicBrainz as a metadata library to pull genre tags from, but I’m pretty sure beets uses that as it’s source too. I tried beets on my collection, but ended up just using MusicBrainz Picard and tagging things manually because beets would basically pick the first match it found a lot of the time, and there was usually a more correct option in the database.

As far as bulk downloading diverse music catalogs, I don’t really know of any good sources, but there probably are music-focused trackers out there that could provide that. I’ve just slowly build my collection up album by album as I found things that interested me. Maybe check the likes of last.fm and ListenBrainz for most played music in their stats, and start collecting those?

How do you intend to access your music collection? Navidrome? or are you just building up folders of music?