Tbh the majority of my FOSS contributions were to fix problems affecting me personally :) but I’m glad that they’re helping others too. This one is definitely the one that goes on my CV though hehe

In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)

For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.

Glad you enjoyed it!

As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was “can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?” so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn’t sure what they meant)

Glad to hear it’s working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it’s more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.

I’m using Fedora KDE on my own PC, and it has been soft-bricked by updates multiple times, or by doing seemingly trivial things like choosing a theme from the built-in store. Seems quite unstable to me so it’s not something I would recommend to someone without the ability to repair their OS from a terminal.

Do you know how mature it is as a desktop OS? I saw the official FAQ does recommend against using it as such. I tried it on a HTPC a few years ago but at that point it didn’t seem very usable outside of Steam’s full screen UI.

It was surprisingly difficult to find, the majority of comments about 6.3 were people saying it was working great, but I guess most people don’t use ICC profiles for their monitors.

My paranoia level: Even though I’m pretty good with computers in general, I would not trust myself to set up a safe public facing service, which is the reason that I don’t have any of those on my home server. If I needed something like that I wouldn’t self host it.

I was expecting more entries on a certain theme for version 420 ;)

Already? I’m still using Fedora 39 since that’s the only version supported by CUDA Toolkit :S

Ofc I know it’s not meant to be literal, but talking about killing black people or not is too direct. The subjects people like this usually want to talk about tend to be more layered, e.g. “what should we do about the Jew problem” so that if you take the bait you’ll implicitly accept that “the Jew problem” exists to begin with.

Personally I’m not looking an OS that is “not so bad”, the initial impression should be “this is great” :)

Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world

That’s also the thing, I switched to Linux because I hated using Windows, and I don’t like how Microsoft operates. The last think I want is a distribution which tries to be Windows made by a company which tries to be Microsoft. It’s of course an exaggeration, and Ubuntu doesn’t do EEE and patent trolling as far as I know, but at least for me it feels like they’re going in the wrong direction when they keep reinventing the wheel, forcing solutions that users don’t want, and generally trying to create a “one size fits all” desktop. I’m not against it, Ubuntu is probably a good choice for some users, it just doesn’t fit me. I used Xubuntu for many years, and I also tried both Gnome and Unity at different points, but currently I use Fedora KDE.

The only certification I have is from the Kansas City Barbeque Society, allowing me to act as a judge in BBQ competitions.

Things are probably different nowadays, but at least 15-25 years ago you could just apply for IT jobs and if someone lied about their skills it would hopefully show during the technical interviews. I don’t know if that counts as getting in very early.

I think a 650 W PSU should be enough for a workload of 490 W idle. Please, correct me, if I am wrong.

You mean 490W under load, right? One would hope that your computer uses less than 100W idle, otherwise it’s going to get toasty in your room :) I would say this depends on how much cheaper a 650W PSU is, and how likely it is you’ll upgrade your GPU. It really sucks saving up for a ridiculously expensive new GPU and then realizing you also need to fork out an additional €150 to replace your fully functional PSU. On the other hand, going from 650W to 850W might double the cost of the PSU, and it would be a waste of money if you don’t buy a high end GPU in the future. For PSU, check out https://cultists.network/140/psu-tier-list/ .If you’re buying a decent quality unit I wouldn’t worry about efficiency loss from running at a lower % of its rated max W, I doubt it’s going to be enough to be noticeable on your power bill.

I’ve always had Nvidia GPUs and they’ve worked great for me, though I’ve stayed with X11 and never bothered with Wayland. If you’re conscious about power usage, many cards can be power limited + overclocked to compensate. For example I could limit my old RTX3080 to 200W (it draws up to 350W with stock settings) and with some clock speed adjustments I would only lose about 10% fps in games, which isn’t really noticeable if you’re still hitting 120+ fps. My current RTX3090 can’t go below 300W (stock is 370W) without significant performance loss though.

If you have any interest in running AI stuff, especially LLM (text generation / chat), then get as much VRAM as you possibly can. Unfortunately I discovered local LLMs just after buying the 3080, which was great for games, and realized that 12GB VRAM is not that much. CUDA (i.e. Nvidia GPUs) is still dominant in AI, but ROCm (AMD) is getting more support so you might be able to run some things at least.

Another mistake I made when speccing my PC was to buy 2*16GB RAM. It sounded like a lot at the time, but once again when dealing with LLMs there are models which are larger than 32GB that I would like to run with partial offloading (splitting work between GPU and CPU, though usually quite slow). Turns out that DDR5 is quite unstable, and I don’t know if it’s my motherboard or the Ryzen CPU which is to blame, but I can’t just add 2 more RAM. I.e. there are 4 slots, but it would run at 3800MHz instead of the 6200Mhz that the individual sticks are rated for. Don’t know if Intel mobos can run 4x DDR5 sticks at full speed.

And a piece general advice, in case this isn’t common knowledge at this point; Be wary when trying to find buying advice using search engines. Most of the time it’ll only give you low quality “reviews” which are written only to convince readers to click on their affiliate links :( There are still a few sites which actually test the components and not just AI generate articles. Personally I look for tier lists compiled by users (Like this one for mobos), and when it comes to reviews I tend to trust those which get very technical with component analyses, measurements and multiple benchmarks.

It’s not that bad. Of course I’ve had a few games that didn’t work, like CoD:MW2, but nearly all multiplayer games my friends play also work on Linux. The last couple of years we’ve been playing Apex Legends, Overwatch, WoWs, Dota 2, Helldivers 2, Diablo 4, BF1, BFV, Hell Let Loose, Payday 3, Darktide, Isonzo, Ready or Not, Hunt: Showdown to name a few.

I use https://www.criticker.com/ for movies because it has a really nice recommendation algorithm based on your personal scores. They also have a section for rating games but I haven’t tried that part

It ought to be mandatory to write this out whenever talking about Linux. I’ve seen more than one person bash Linux in a public forum “because it has digital rights management built into the kernel” after they’ve misinterpreted some news headline.

Everyone’s entitled to an opinion… Unless you have an opinion about someone else’s opinion, then you’re literally Hitler _/s

My wife and I gave a Linux computer to a friend’s kid. I think I used something called Grapejuice to install Roblox, which ran perfectly for about a year. Then it broke because they wrote a new game client or something, but the kid just said “it’s ok, I’ll play other games instead.” Best Linux gamer attitude :)

I wonder how much would break, and how much time it would take to update everything, if all shells decided to implement a breaking change to prevent these kind of scenarios. E.g. make “set -u” default or some other solution