In my experience, the Debian installer is just confusing. Once you’re past that, the userbase is smaller than Ubuntu’s. Their repos are different too, meaning software packaged for Ubuntu isn’t guaranteed to work on Debian. Ubuntu itself is pretty terrible for its own reasons, so when asked for a desktop Linux distribution “close to Ubuntu” I’d put Mint first. (For general recommendation, I’d probably say Fedora now.)

Debian 13 is still relatively new, so the problems of it being out of date aren’t showing yet. Debian 12 just before 13 released had tons of these issues, like glibc being too old for some binary programs, or the kernel not being new enough for some “gaming” features.

For reference, I am on Arch Linux. I feel I have a good understanding of how to manually install Linux. The Debian installer confused me in many ways, the main one being that “language and region” are closely tied, and selecting en_US “language” forces you to choose an American timezone later in the installer. In general it was a slow install process too. This is something other “user friendly” distros handle much better. A default live environment, a quick installation, and options being there, but having the defaults automatically correct (like timezone).

Like (almost) every other distro, Debian has its own benefits and downsides. These make it a good fit on desktop for slightly more experienced users, or users familiar with apt. This means it isn’t in the list of distros I’d generally recommend to people when they’re not familiar with Linux.

I use whatsapp for communicating with a few groups of people who are refusing to switch over. I’m not getting them to move, they’re a mix of tech illiterate, ignorant, or just unwilling. These groups have important annoucements in them, that I’m unable to receive any other way. Sometimes there’s just no way around services like these.

I do my best to protect myself (no proprietary facebook code ever runs on my main device), and keep personal information I provide to a minimum (as I don’t trust Facebook’s E2EE claims). There’s not much more I can do besides not receiving important announcements.

CachyOS has a structure that’s much closer to Arch than Manjaro, but they still replace the majority of Arch repos with their own. I’ve seen both their repos and the optimizations they apply being the root cause of issues on some friends installs.

Use whatever you’re comfortable with, and what you know works.

On that note, Manjaro and CachyOS don’t work. You should avoid them. They both make changes that harm reliability, and both frequently make avoidable mistakes (especially Manjaro). If you need something like those two, EndeavourOS is a better option, or just base Arch Linux.

Arch Linux itself is a good distro, but made for a specific target audience. If you want to tinker with your system and learn along the way, it may be a good option for you. If you want to “set and forget” your media center PC, a stable-release distro like Debian or Rocky might be better options for you.

I don’t think this has happened yet with video games, however it is in no way illegal for Valve to do this. There’s been plenty of examples of other media being ripped away from consumers, like “purchased” movies and music.

On Steam, you are purchasing a license to play a game, not the game itself. At any point and for any reason, Valve can legally revoke this license or restrict access to it.

This website has some good resources for Linux VR and links some support channels: https://lvra.gitlab.io/

A device driver needs access to the system to control a device. There’s a couple ways of going about it, but GPUs are effectively required to use a kernel driver. A kernel driver runs as part of your system, and crashes have different effects from normal programs. If a normal program crashes, the system handles that, the program closes, too bad. If the kernel crashes, nothing can catch that, and your whole computer crashes.

That being said, with this little info on the crash there’s nothing anyone can do except speculate on the cause. It could be hardware, it could be the kernel. Whatever it is, you’d need more information (journalctl -b -1 after a crash and reboot) to diagnose this issue.

Though important to note; if holding the power button for an extended period of time (30s) doesn’t shut down the computer, it is most likely a hardware fault.

It depends heavily on headset. From what I hear, standalones with WiVRN or Steam Link work fine ootb, not much different than desktop gaming with Proton. I have a Valve Index, a PCVR headset. Getting it to run (properly) is a pain. Monado is making it easier, but it’s not 1 to 1 the same experience as on Windows.

Been using it for a couple years, my main ones currently are:

• VR. SteamVR is a broken mess, Monado is pretty much functional, but I haven’t switched yet. Mesa or the kernel sometimes forget about VR and break it in an update.
• QT5 to QT6 transition for my favorite Matrix client, Nheko. Scrolling is a pain, and the clipboard randomly stops working.
• Wayland freedom and featureset is nowhere close to X11. I can’t choose a window manager without locking myself in to a specific featureset on my display server. Stuff like global hotkeys isn’t supported in most applications. I’m still on the godawful GNOME desktop portals, which is most annoying for file picking. I have no HDR support because my window manager isn’t from KDE or GNOME.
• GTK4 apps looking like shit (there are patches luckily), I try to avoid them just because of libadwaita and GNOME’s awful design.

On the note of Wayland, I have switched, and for good reason. Besides unimplemented features, things “just work” a lot better than X11. Still wish I could have effectively bspwm window management with kwin featureset though. (Plugins for tiling are not the same experience)

Bokura, 2d puzzle platformer played with 2 players

It requires Steam, both players need to own the game, and two separate devices to play on (one for each player). Iirc networking goes through Steam, no way to selfhost.

Most likely yes, and if it works, this is one of the easier options (without needing to develop anything or change workflow). However, not all devices work properly with this. iPhones on iTunes are particularly difficult, as (iirc) they sometimes change device ID immediately after connecting/initializing. If you pass through a specific “USB Host Device”, an iPhone connected to a Windows VM with iTunes may not work.

If you pass through an entire USB controller, like an extra PCIe card or one from your motherboard (if it has multiple), this method should work on any USB device with any Windows tools/drivers.

If a Linux native method exists (which it does according to other comments), that is usually easier to set up than a VM with USB passthrough, but it might change the workflow.

You need a couple things:

• The kernel driver (dkms)
• Userspace component
• Kernel headers (for dkms)

First get your kernel headers, this is easy enough, but varies based on which kernel you have installed. The format of the package name is {kernel}-headers. If you have the linux kernel, get linux-headers. If you have linux-lts, get linux-lts-headers. If you’re not sure on this, the command pacman -Q | grep linux searches for installed packages containing linux in the name. If you have multiple kernels installed, get the headers for all of them.

Then install (from AUR) at least nvidia-580xx-dkms (display out) and nvidia-580xx-utils (Acceleration, like 3D and video decoding). If you have Steam or play Windows games under Wine, be sure to get lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils too.

Also of note is the order in which you install things. Having the kernel headers installed is important for the DKMS modules to install succesfully. If you already have nvidia-580xx-dkms but were missing your kernel headers, you should reinstall it after installing your kernel headers.

My apologies, I was on mobile. Thank you for including it.

According to its wikipedia page, WaterFox is owned by an advertising company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox

It’s an old blog post, but this doesn’t look very good for System76. At the same time, GNOME (and GTK) is refusing to implement basic features. Stuff like server side window decorations, because they can’t “tolerate” SSD. The hard enforcing of Adwaita theming might make sense in GNOME, but on devices not 100% in the GNOME ecosystem, libadwaita apps have awful UX. I do not want shit like Zenity to take up 50% of my screen space for 3 words and 2 buttons, yet libadwaita enforces it.

As long as you use an AUR helper to update your system (replace pacman -Syu with yay -Syu), and keep the kernel EOLs in your calendar, it shouldn’t be constant babysitting. Updating a (non -bin) kernel from the AUR requires compiling the kernel, which makes updates take way longer, but doesn’t require extra manual maintenance.

You can find when a kernel is EOL on kernel.org. When your chosen LTS goes out of support, you should update (for security reasons). You’ll have to hope the 580 nvidia drivers still support the newer kernel version you move to.

This path allows you to run your setup for as long as possible on Arch, when you run into issues with nvidia support, so does every other distro.

Unless Arch’s lts kernel switches to a newer lts (in a year or two?), you can run nvidia 580 dkms modules and the lts kernel with basically no maintenance.

After that, you can consider something like linux-lts66 from AUR, or switch to another distro if desired. The first option requires compiling the kernel (no maintenance, just processor time), and will keep your system security patched until the last LTS kernel supported by nvidia 580 modules stops being supported.

Whatever kernel you choose, ensure you have the -headers, like linux-lts-headers. That way, the nvidia-580xx-dkms package can install properly.

If you haven’t yet, look into an AUR helper like yay or paru. These significantly improve quality of life when using AUR packages.

There’s always the option of gathering device info first, then using the appropriate driver. Either the SSD is in a “known supported models” list, or it reports support for whatever feature the new driver needs.

It’s technically possible that straight up trying an unsupported driver can cause physical damage, but this can be avoided by carefully selecting the driver. From MS pov, they’d have to extensively test this driver on a bunch of SSDs and configurations, but it would lead to a performance improvement.

And obviously, there’s been no possible way to try loading the modern driver and if that fails, falling back to the legacy one.

This is once again Microsoft refusing to improve performance, because that doesn’t directly increase profits.