Because doubling down on idiocy has always worked in the past.

I agree. Too much handholding for me, imo. However, if I had a Steamdeck I might use it just for simplicity sake. If I wanted an immutable distro for my desktop I’d choose NixOS, tbh, but that’s on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum from Bazzite.

This. I mained Arch for 2 years and still can’t be completely trusted with sudo. Moved to Nobara, would recommend as well. Its a bit more advanced, but you don’t have to touch the command line if you don’t want to and setup is right there step-by-step when you first boot.

I did try Bazzite first. I just couldn’t get used to living the Flatpak life. I know you can force install native packages, but at that point why wouldn’t I just use Nobara, lol.

NixOS is well worth a try. If you know lua and json, its not too hard to pick up nixlang. I know neither and it only took me a few weeks to learn it. But once you get the hang of it, you can make a Linux reproducible on other systems. I made everything modular. GPU drivers for my old laptop? Imported nix module. Neovim? Imported nix module.

Yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve also deleted SCSI on my first Windows PC, lol. I still haven’t learned my lesson and mess with things I can’t handle. I was notorious for destroying my mother’s computers growing up. Then I learned to fix the things I broke.

As of right now, I use Audacious. Its my absolute favorite music client and all completely modular. You head to the plugins section and add what you want. It doesn’t even close to system tray without a plugin, so super customizable. If you can’t tell, I love modular things, lol.

For a quick music shuffle list with a really sleek design, Amberol is a really close second. Especially if you use GNOME, since its designed by default in the GNOME style. I use KDE, so I stick with Audacious, but I did enjoy my time with MPD on XFCE using a plugin designed for that DE. If I went back to Hyprland, I’d probably use MPD.

Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of firewire, but back in the day it was actually pretty nice. 1.5A @ 30v was pretty nuts back then. I had a PC filled with pirated music I got from LAN parties in high school. No idea where that music went… probably destroyed in a Windows reinstall.

lol! I took a Linux class a long time ago and learned on Damn Small Linux. I came back to it years later with Pop!_OS then moved to Arch where I stayed for 2 years. Went to NixOS for a while.

But I never gave Fedora the time it deserved, so as an afterthought I tried it after I messed up my Arch system (yeeted my .local folder by accident). Went with Nobara for the ease of setup for gaming. I didn’t think I’d stay here, but its just too good.

Haven’t gotten around to it just yet, but I did tag all the music with the proper metadata. I can’t rip anything off my iPod 1st and 2nd gens from my collection yet, but they’re stuffed full of music. I just need the proper firewire, but they seem to be more expensive than the units…

I need to order the music by genre folders now. Today I just got the EddieVPN client for Nobara working. I didn’t realize it was as easy as going to the Eddie site and getting the RPM; I’ve been too spoiled with the Arch AUR having everything I need in one place.

I’m almost there, though. I’ll have the music up soon.

I’m going to try and do this… but I have like 14 iPod classics worth of music to genre… Time to break out the old MusicBrainz Picard, I guess, just to make sure all the metadata is right. I have some wild stuff, too, like German Beatles songs and weird classical piano I’ve never heard of.

I was a little leery of how Soulseek works, so I backed out last second. I’ve never been trustful of the whole folder sharing thing, even on LAN. I’m going to go for it, though. The world should hear the weird stuff and the good songs I’ve ripped off old iPods.

Local library worker here. Can confirm we don’t track connections, we only tally how many use our wifi if we can figure it out. Basically the tally just includes whoever brings out their phone in the library.

Just be aware that the state can supply your library with free internet, and I’m not sure how that’s set up. I personally don’t like connecting to random open wifi, official or no.

Friend saw ‘convenience’ and that was it. No more reading, only fists. I thought I was quite neutral. Yes, convenience. I have been known to use a local LLM based on recipes to give me ideas what I could make based on my pantry.

I have a lovely recipe for absolutely delicious chocolate-chip cookies that use pancake mix.

True, true. In this context I mean the LLM craze. The GPU era of AI.

Agreed. Probably where it should have stayed in the first place. Not that its not interesting, just that the scope of AI has widened beyond what it should have.

I’m a hybrid user. I love to use the keyboard, but sometimes I just want to go in a GUI and click click done. It depends on what I need at the time. I love TUIs the most.

Need to move a handful of files over somewhere? Forget dragging a reticle and dropping them all five subdirectories away, I’m going to boot up Midnight Commander, Zoxide over to where I need to go, select and move.

A mass amount of files? Gonna mv those puppies.

Need to move that one piddly file to the next folder down? I’m going to open Dolphin, do a quick move, and call it a day.

However, for anything programming or note-taking, Vim is love. Qutebrowser or Vimium extensions so I can Vim-ify my browser. Vim everything. We don’t need to bring a mouse into that equation.

If I had to make a guess, I say it probably will. The convenience of AI is probably here to stay, but the craze of replacing everything with AI will go out the door.

AI will become exactly what it should have been in the first place: an assistant. Not your friend, not your doctor, not your therapist, not a replacement for artists/authors/programmers, and not inside every piece of tech post 2025. It has a place. That place is over-embellished right now, not to mention unsustainable.

Don’t forget Lutris. It may take a bit more tinkering than Steam, but if you have loose games or use multiple games launchers, Lutris can combine them all into one neat and tidy launcher.

And I rest my case, lol. I don’t even know the difference between init and initramfs. It’s definitely a hole in my knowledge and I should know it going down the line, but I need the right time.

I’m here and there on what I want to learn at any moment. It’s not like I can’t learn, but it’s all about what interests me at the time. I learn things in a scattered manner, which admittedly is a horrible way to learn but its just how my brain works.

I’m a very mid-level Linux user. I use systemd because I’m just not familiar with how init systems actually work. I love that the choice is there, but I think systemd has it’s place with users like me that get confused.

That being said, I did run Dracut on EndeavourOS because it was recommended for that distro. I never dived into it to see what the exact difference was, though I do remember running into some things I needed to do that Dracut did differently. There may come a day when I dive into inits, but for now I’m just happy if my system boots to desktop.

You’re not wrong, though. If you want all your packages to work correctly, you gotta stay up to date. I know some of my packages will break if I go more than a week.

Yesterday I read about RATs becoming more frequent in the AUR in some packages. They predict that they’re going to become more frequent soon. I’m wondering if it might be time to switch my main machine to NixOS now. I may check out Bazzite and Nobara first, though.

However, I guess Arch is doing something to protect against these? It’s going to be part of BumpBuddy.

Yeah, that checks out. I think there’s other ways of doing it, I just never manages to get it working. I’ll have to check again, but I thought KDE had something in the system settings that let you swap versions. I could be just misremembering the kernel swap settings though.

There’s also some nvidia command hoodoo I tried and everything went well except at the end where I wound up with no graphical output at all, lol. I did a lot of messing around on fresh installs until the cord swap finally worked.

Yeah, it does make sense that you can compare them in that sense, but as far as actual system setup goes, I don’t think they’re comparable. Don’t get me wrong, I love NixOS. When I was learning nixlang and setting up everything to be modular and reproducible, I was having a blast.

However, I also had a blast learning Arch and figuring out how my system works the way it does. I’ll be honest, though, NixOS helped me learn how Home was separate from Root. That alone really helped me learn how the general Linux system file hierarchy worked.

But there are also things I would have never learned about Linux if I never messed with Arch, such as essential system symlinks, how they work, and how to use chroot in the live environment to fix broken ones (thanks to a botched Arch update, lol).

If you like it, learn it-use it. All this comparing and inter-distro warring seems pointless. There’s not a distro I’ve used that I haven’t had things I really liked and really hated.

I had some weird artifacting issues in an older version of Nvidia proprietary. While viewing certain windows or colors, my screen would flicker, or else I would get weird diagonal lines across my whole screen.

I went nuts trying to figure it out. In the end since I started on Pop!_OS, I just easily rolled back to a previous version of the proprietary drivers and called it good. Well, later I wanted to try EndeavourOS. I was too noob to figure how to roll back the drivers there.

So a friend asked me, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try the other one.” I highly doubted that would fix anything, but for the sake of trying everything, I switched to HDMI. And well… fuck me if it didn’t work. I’ve just been running HDMI ever since.