Not irreversibly, but it’s annoying to be forced to spend an hour searching for an answer in forums then fixing to get networking or GUI back before you can do productive work.

Packages for third party apps is the one place we don’t want fragmentation.

No, they’re all orthodox christians now

• Stay clear from nvidia. AMD if you buy a graphics card, if you just use integrated graphics both AMD and Intel are fine
• When picking a motherboard, look what wifi chipset is used and check Linux compatibility. Some wifi chipsets require to manually install drivers, and some just don’t work at all

Private Internet Access is just a VPN?

I’ve had no issues installing the flatpak for ProtonVPN and using it.

There are a few improvements in Aurora over Silverblue that you might like.

It ships with homebrew which is perfect for CLI tools.

It ships with distrobox instead of toolbx which is much better. You can install any distro while toolbx is just a Fedora. For example I’m using Arch in toolbox because of the number of packages and the fact that they’re usually up to date (no need to wait for a major release).

So far I never had to use rpm-ostree, and for VSCode I use distrobox precisely because of the permissions.

For me atomic distributions are the way to go.

You get a rock solid base system that get updated automatically, and every single user has the same image so you can’t get into a bug that’s only reproduced on your system because of your combination of system packages. If for any reason you have a problem with an image update, you can always boot on the previous image from grub.

Then user apps come on top of that, and can’t break the base system.

I know you tried Kinoite and got stuck, but there is always a way to unblock yourself and install what you want. If it’s not in flatpak there is homebrew (for CLI), and if it’s in neither there is distrobox. You can also do a rpm-ostree for native packages if all the others fail.

You can also check universal blue, Aurora in particular if you want KDE. It’s based on Fedora Silverblue but with an improved out-of-the-box experience.

https://universal-blue.org/

If I have a new PC with a blank hard drive, what should be the install order?

Windows, then rEFInd, then Linux?

FILEID.DIZ

vscode without any extension is very performant.

It’s easy to get better performance when you don’t have features.

I too prefer big distros, but niche distros are usually big distros with small tweaks in the default config or installed packages. It’s Debian/Fedora/Arch slightly tweaked.

Most places deploy to Linux, and for those knowing Linux helps a lot. Also a lot of places will give MacBook pro, expect you to know the CLI so a lot of Linux knowledge will be useful there.

Don’t forget the Ubuntu restaurant.

https://www.ubuntula.com/

Just be careful with the silverware, they can Snap if you’re too rough.

I really enjoyed the diversity of WM/DE back then, and the innovation when new ones like Enlightenment were released!

I don’t hate Windows, I don’t care about it. I don’t use it.

I have to say, as a Linux fan in the 90’s it was very cool to see Linux eating the whole server space, replacing older Unix while Microsoft tried desperately to grow Windows on the server market.

Unfortunately boring distributions don’t get recommended because users of boring distributions don’t bother commenting on distribution discussions.

And it’s really unfortunate that obscure distributions have more vocal fans, because boring distributions are much better for beginners.

On a docked Steam Deck, yes sure. It’s a perfectly good desktop replacement.

On any other PC, I would recommend a traditional distribution over Steam OS.

What about upgrades, are they going to switch everyone to KDE?

The point is that saying “pull requests welcome” is still work for the maintainer, because now you have to have these discussions with potential contributors, sometimes explain them why you don’t want to maintain the feature, or explain them why this PR is not the way you want…

So either way it’s work, it’s important to keep in mind before saying “just send a PR”.