Slartibartfast

I tend to prefer KDE because I’m a tinkerer, but I don’t hate GNOME or anything. I think it’s good for someone who wants the UI to just work and generally get out of the way without much fiddling, although last time I tried it I did find it needed a few extensions to add some basic stuff for whatever reason.

But ultimately, I think it’s good to have choices for both sides of the spectrum, that’s kind of what FOSS is all about in the end.

It’s got a learning curve to it, but the sheer amount of stuff you can do in Blender is actually kind of mind-blowing.

Honestly, the Steam Deck is my favourite bit of tech that I’ve bought in a long time. For one thing, my SO has a Switch, so now we can both game on the couch together instead of sitting across the room. But also, between Steam, being able to run Epic and GOG through Heroic Launcher, and being able to emulate all the consoles I grew up with, it’s like having my entire gaming history all in one portable device. Plus it’s amazing for travel.

Also being familiar with Linux, in Desktop Mode it’s just a regular Linux PC, so with a bluetooth mouse & keyboard and a dock/monitor (and maybe a bigger hard drive) I genuinely think I could probably get away with just using it as my daily driver PC if I really had to.

Your system will almost certainly get irrevocably broken by something at some point and you’ll have to reinstall. This isn’t a failure on your part though, it’s a rite of passage that everyone goes through at least once, especially if you have Nvidia drivers lol. It’ll happen less and less over time the more you learn how to fix stuff though.

Also back up often!

Yes! I have an entire folder in Joplin that’s just lists of what broke and how I fixed it so I can refer back to it later. It’s saved my ass so many times.

And don’t skip over reading things! I also run Arch with KDE and honestly with almost all problems I have, if I carefully read through either the Arch Wiki (this will probably be your most valuable tool) or the error message that comes up, the answer is usually in there somewhere, it just needs digging up.

Also: if something with a GUI crashes and doesn’t give an error message, try running it in the terminal. So like, if Firefox crashes and doesn’t give any info, try opening up a terminal and running firefox from there and the terminal will tell you everything that’s going on. (It’ll be a different command if you’re using a flatpak but that’s the general idea.)

It really blows my mind how good of a deal reddit has (had?) with regards to content and how determined they seem to be to blow it up.

By that I mean: they make the site, all the content is created for them for free, all the moderation, sifting through horrible porn, nazi shit etc. is done for them, also for free, people create apps to more effectively drive traffic to their site, also for free, literally all they really have to do is run ads to rake in the cash, keep the servers up and try to provide better tools for the free moderators to sort through the free content more effectively.

They only do one of those things reliably, and people still contribute endlessly for free. So really all they have to do is not directly torpedo all the free labour they rely on, and they even fucked that up.