Your hardware is nearly identical to mine. On my gaming PC, I use Nobara.

It’s a distro created and maintained by the developer who works on the Glorious Eggroll version of Proton, so very well known in the Linux gaming community.

It’s based on Fedora, but has a ton of Linux gaming tweaks for extra performance and compatibility patched into it and pre-installed.

It’s very easy to download the ISO and install, and requires basically zero configuration out of the box to start gaming and using the PC.

The only thing I would caution you about, is the only use the built-in Nobara updater app to update your system. Don’t use Fedora commands like DNF to update stuff, it will cause conflicts.

As long as you do that though, you should be fine. I’ve been using Nobara on my gaming PC for about 2 years now, and it’s been awesome.

I love this so much. It reminds me of how AMD Threadripper came to be.

Apparently Threadripper was a skunkworks project by some of the engineers at AMD that they worked on in their spare time. They wanted to see if they could basically slap together a bunch of normal CPU dyes into on mega chip with a high speed/bandwidth interposer connecting them together.

It was almost abandoned and they had to fight to get it taken seriously. But it proved to be a viable product, and singlehandedly was responsible for decimating what was left of Intel’s place in the HEDT market so badly, that after several years of failed attempts to keep up, Intel officially announced that they wouldn’t be competing in that space anymore.

It’s such a cool thing when talented and passionate people come together without having to be subject to strict marketability and just try to create something awesome and revolutionary.

The Steam Deck kicked off an entire new market for handheld gaming devices that had real power to play modern PC games. And despite a bunch of competing and copycat products, the Steam Deck is still king.

I love mine, have close to 200 hours on it, which for me is a ton. I’ve barely gamed on my main PC in the last year, it’s just so much more comfortable to play on the couch or in my bed.

Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.

And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.

I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.

My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.

I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.

One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”

I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.

After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.

He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.

My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.

I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.

Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.

I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?

Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.

Totally agree. If I was an experienced Dev, I would love to work on that as a feature/plugin.

Permanent kiosk is the use case I am looking for. I am aware of cage, it looks pretty interesting and I am planning on trying it sometime soon.

I should clarify, I don’t think that Windows kiosks are better than Linux kiosks in their general functions, I would say Linux kiosks take that crown too.

I’m referring specifically to the ease of setup in Windows vs Linux. With Windows, I can convert any machine to a kiosk in less than 5 minutes. No scripting, no changes to login credentials or permissions, no extra packages installed.

I just wish Linux had something that easy. I would even be happy if it was tied to a specific distro or desktop environment, like a special mode in Plasma or Cinnamon.

Nice.

Early this year, I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Linux Mint.

Very old, low power desktop, it was already running super slowly with Windows.

It’s been great, the computer is much more responsive now, everything works just fine. Browser is the same, Spotify app from the store is great, printer/scanner, icons on the desktop, their ultrawide monitor, it all #justworks.

I also don’t have to worry now about my dad clicking every weird and sketchy email link and ad.

Automatic updates are set up, and Timeshift snapshots are too, in case something breaks and needs rollback.

It’s my IDE of choice, I love it!

Happy birthday! KDE is my favorite DE and it just keeps getting better every year!

He’s an old time Linux guy who went off the deep end and became a conspiracy theorist. He’s one of those people who cries about things “becoming political” just because people decide to make a statement about being inclusive of LGBT folks in their code of conduct.

He’s also been caught just straight up lying about things in his various “investigations.”

Here’s a long video on some of it if you are interested: Video on Lunduke

Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.

About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)

lol, fixed it now :P

For me, Mint offers everything good about Ubuntu without any of the bad.

That being said, I don’t hate it, but I also don’t recommend it ever to people. The pitfalls that can come up from Snaps, plus the default layout of Gnome, are reasons why a brand new Linux user might struggle with it unless they are already somewhat of a techie.

For ex-windows users like my parents who aren’t tech savvy, I just install Mint, set up their shortcuts and desktop icons, and away they go, happy little penguins.

Awesome

For another useful resource, this site is really helpful for decoding what cronjobs are in plain language.

Cron Job Translator

I doubt this is a real post, but on the off chance it is, sorry you’re having issues, but Linux probably isn’t for you.

You’re obviously very enraged and not really interested in actually getting help for any issues you’re having. You started your post screaming at Linux for not making sense to you, you haven’t described what hardware you are trying to use.

You only described your issues with Debian and Manjaro, neither of which are beginner-friendly distros and aren’t often suggested to brand new Linux users.

If you want to describe your issues in more detail, one at a time, with info about your hardware, your distro and version, and what the exact errors you are getting are, you might get some folks chiming in to help. But coming on here, posting a rage-filled wall of text ranting about how angry Linux has made you, that’s not productive for anybody.

If that seems like too much work, then sad to say, Windows will be your home for the time being.

That’s a pretty weak machine. Linux Mint is my #1 recommendation for new Linux users, especially former Windows users. It’s what I moved my parents to on their very old computer and it works great.

Try the default Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop first, but if it seems really slow, go with the XFCE version.

You really need to use an SSD in that laptop if possible, it will speed things up to a usable level. Also, if the RAM is upgradable, you should put 8GB minimum in it. DDR3 laptop sticks are dirt cheap, you can get them online for $20-$30 for 8GB sticks.

Same with SSDs, get a 1000GB brand new SSD for $50-$60, it will make everything much more responsive.