I’ve used linux for twelve years and am still surprised at how easy some things are, not that things were really even that hard before. The improvements to gaming on Linux are pretty well known now, but even things like recording audio are dead simple now. Outside of the super expensive DAWs, I’d say linux is on par with Mac and windows now, especially with things like yabridge.

I’d be very surprised if it can’t do DHCP. If it still can’t, you could always find a cheap router to use as an access point and have DHCP that way.

Sway and hyprland are going to be the main recommendations, especially hyprland because it is pretty feature-rich. I personally have been using River for the last few months, which I’ve been able to completely replicate my five year old bspwm set up with using the rivercarro layout. It’s not as popular, but I’ve really liked it so far.

I’ve used it on my pi before I disabled the display manager because I barely used it, but performance was fine. I could log in from my desktop, phone, laptop, another pi, anything really, which was nice to have.

I found out by accident that Disco Elysium plays surprisingly well with a controller. It’s kinda nice to just lean back and play that game.

I was the same but in 2017. Six years later and I’m still using the same Void install. There’s simply no reason for me to switch, it’s perfect and I have my system tailored exactly to my liking at this point.

To your first point, a huge portion of the use library computers get is from people who don’t own or can’t afford their own computer but just need to print government/work/school docs with some minimal document editor. Sure you could run with LibreOffice or something and hope no one cares, but you’re right that most people would freak out if they can’t open something in Word or have to learn how to print something in Gnome/KDE/whatever.

I run Calibre-web tied into my Calibre server so I can read on every device I own.

I’d love for a Game Master mode like in D:OS2.

I played around with it in a VM earlier today. I liked the overall feel of it quite a bit, even as someone who prefers not to use gnome. But there are quite a few inconsistencies in using the alpha compared to what’s in the handbook, particularly for installing new packages. I wonder if that’s something that’s still being implemented in Orchid.

I liked it though, I’ll definitely keep following it.

Finally, I have been so tired of having to scroll to the bottom of every game’s page to find entries relevant to my hardware.

I don’t boot into Windows often enough so I just reformatted the drive to ext4. When I did use both though NTFS was perfectly usable for both.

NTFS will work, I used it for a few years without even realizing. I eventually switched to EXT4 for my games drive from an old Windows install when I realized ntfs-3g was using a decent amount of CPU and had a small impact on performance.

My first guess is unattended-upgrades is running, especially if this is shortly after booting. As others have said, ps aux | grep apt will tell you what’s running. If it’s holding up all the time there might be something wrong with apt causing the update to hang.

If I had a Deck I’d probably use it more for Calibre than anything else honestly. The thought of having my entire book and game libraries on one portable device sounds amazing.

Rigmar has a pretty large collection (around 500GB when I downloaded a couple years ago) of most of the famous songs you’ve ever heard. If you have the bandwidth and disk space I’d go for that. I use cdgtools to burn to CD-Rs or just open them in VLC.

I daily drove it for a couple years on my last laptop before it broke, but the main draw was it’s the budgie DE and weekly updates that kept things recent but still pretty stable. Overall a good experience, but I felt like trying OpenSuSe when I got my new laptop.

Haven’t had time to try it yet, but I was just able to find a crack for the bitwig v4.3 flatpak by searching “bitwig linux crack” on Yandex. You’ll have to translate the page from Russian, and the obvious caveats apply with it being from Russia.

Didn’t know that about the docker snap but that is insane. It would be straight up unusable at work for me.

I find hours to dollars to be more useful for cheaper indie games or games on sale, where I feel more comfortable taking a chance on the $5 game knowing I’ll only “need” to spend 5 hours playing to justify the purchase to myself. I also don’t really feel bad about not finishing games once I hit the golden ratio of hours to dollars.