For a good moment I thought this was a draft of #UnixSurrealism

Cool! Saving for later.

!aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

Gay and bi men are often excluded from donating due to higher HIV risk I believe.

Right, my mistake, I assumed OP was asking for advice!

Comes with a bunch of warnings for Steam, is there some postinstall setup needed before gaming is convenient on opensuse? Or am I out of loop, I was under the impression that it’s not that good for that https://en.opensuse.org/Steam

Hyprland isn’t officially supported on that nvidia card

Yeah, I would feel bad keeping all of the money from that, too.

If you have an nvidia card, which is very common and can’t always be avoided, there is significant benefit in newer drivers, for one

Huh.

There’s a time and place for a DIY solution and academia can well be like that sometimes.

The latest Mac Mini can’t run Linux though. It’s M4 and asahi doesn’t even support M3 chips yet. But if you actually got the previous model with M1/M2 you can do Linux if desired. I might not attempt, and just use the Mac as a server as-is. It’s not too different from Linux. Asking the duck for “how to xx on Mac” when you already know the Linux equivalents should make your life tolerable.

I mean, there are quite a few others than Arch+family that package a very recent kernel too. Fedora as you mentioned, but also NixOS, openSUSE Tumbleweed and even Gentoo if you’re that kind of a person. I bet I missed some.

But yeah Ubuntu is not necessarily one of them

Right, okay. If you want to fool around as you have a stable daily driver already, sure get a more DIY distro or just try out multiple things before settling. Debian should do the trick though, it’s somewhat DIY while being very stable so the updates rarely break anything. But you might also like Arch, or NixOS, or just Mint. I think the point is it’s just not very easy to predict how each of these is gonna actually run on your actual hardware. So to really find out you’ll have to install something and acknowledge you may need to re-do it a couple times before finding something that works for you.

Thanks for the recs!

Idk about that, for me it just now refuses to play .flv files that it previously had no problem with. Says Codec not supported (mpgv). The files open fine on mpv player.

As you already use Pop, why change? Is there something bothering, or something does not run well? How old is this laptop?

If you don’t feel like continuing with Pop, I’d try Debian as you value stability. It may be a slight pain to set up initially, but when it’s done it should generally Just Work until eternity. The expert installer allows you to enable non-free repos for any proprietary drivers by default.

Mint has the downside of not coming with mainstream desktop environments. Otherwise a great distro, but the message it gives to newcomers is that Linux still looks like it looked 10 years ago. Still very worth for some installs, and op is not a newcomer, but anyway.

Arch defaults to pipewire I think even if you select pulseaudio in archinstall (might have changed by now ofc) If your laptop is older pulseaudio might work much better (did for me)

Get base Debian, you’ll have more options for desktop environment. Once you get past the installation hassle it should just work for the rest of times. MX has its place but it’s specifically made to have no systemd which may not be something a new user is looking for. It feels very opinionated, is what I’m trying to say. May be your thing of course, but I’d recommend reading more on its philosophy before picking.

8 years is probably not old enough to require lighter desktops if the machines were at least mid range at the time. You should be able to use gnome or KDE as you please. Nothing against XFCE in principle, but it can be a little clunky especially for a laptop. No touch gestures, for example.

Me, because someone at my work picked it for servers back in the day

I’d expect so, but you’ll need to test with your exact router model how it behaves. Some have a ‘DMZ’ function that you can use to pass all ports to a certain host. I use it to expose the WAN interface of my opnsense router to the internet through the ISP router. Then I can fine tune the open ports further in opnsense which is better designed for that than the usual ISP box.