You’re overthinking the hell out of this. Just plug it in and go. My 8700x3d is insanely fast during any load I’ve ever thrown at it, your new chip will be even more so.

This is the answer OP, your flavor of Linux matters when it’s your daily driver work/play machine. But for a server OS? You’re not missing anything using Ubuntu, and your experience won’t change much with another distro.

I think something I’ve learned over the years from several harsh breakups and big time abandonment issues, is that the pain you’re feeling is an actual physiological response to the loss of someone you are chemically bonded to. This is old biology at play, older than civilization, older than our species, because apes and various other animals exhibit grief.

There is no easy way out of it. Your brain has to unravel connections that once provided positive happy chemicals from your proximity to that person. It makes sense, oxytocin and other hormones reinforcing pair and family bonding, as they were once critical to survival. You just have to let it hurt, until it doesn’t anymore. It could take a long time, but one day you’ll be at peace with it.

My solution? Run Linux. If the game won’t run on Linux because of kernel level anticheat bullshit, DRM, or lack of proton support, refund that shit and never purchase a game from that developer again. If they do data collection, and it still runs on Linux, it is my understanding that all they can gather is what the proton compatibility layer feeds them, which is basically fiction. Proton is already tricking the software into thinking it’s running on windows, and is sandboxed from your bare metal system. Correct me if I’m wrong.

The games I already owned before my time with Linux? Whatever. I’ll take the loss. I’ll probably never play PUBG again and I’m fine with that.

I really agree with you about immutables. Not only are they awkward to use as far as managing and installing software, I feel like they prevent people from learning how a traditional Linux system works by keeping them in the padded cell of read only root.

As far as arch, it only really took me a year of fiddling and learning on Fedora and mint before I managed to get arch running. Yes there were hurdles and growing pain, but it made me a better user.

I commented elsewhere about endeavourOS, but I have some other wisdom to pass along.

Keep good backups of your personal files, stuff you don’t want to lose, and don’t be afraid to try something new. You dont like something about how your system is running? Nuke it and install something else. Installing Linux is a cakewalk in most distros and rarely takes longer than half an hour (your mileage may vary with the low specs on the laptop)

I’ve learned a ton about Linux by trying many different distros, breaking things, fixing things, and occasionally distro hopping to see how I like a different offering.

There’s a lot of great content on YouTube that can help you learn, and reviews of various distros so you can get an idea of how things work without having to install it yourself. Have fun and don’t be afraid to fiddle with things.

Absolutely. The desktop environment you go with will be the biggest factor for ram usage. Check out endeavourOS, it’s basically Arch with an easy installer with some basics preinstalled that vanilla arch doesn’t come with. It has a great community and runs like a champ for me. You’ll have to learn how to install software from the command line but a brief YouTube video can help with that. It also has one of the widest selection of desktop environments I’ve seen in a distro. XFCE would likely be your best bet for low ram usage.

Install your software from official repositories and flatpak and you shouldnt have any issues. My latest install has been going strong for about 6 months without issue. Linux in general is quite stable unless you’re mucking about with things you don’t understand, and if you do like to live dangerously in that regard, it’s a great way to learn a lot.

If you’re worried about stability, keep good backups. Back up your important personal files, as well as your config files so you can reapply any customizations you had in place.

If anything happens that’s too tedious to troubleshoot, reinstall, it takes like 20 minutes tops and gets you back to square one.

You could also use time shift to create system snapshots.

I highly recommend Hyprland if you want a truly infinitely customizable UI. But, there’s a big learning curve to even using it, let alone installing it and setting it up.

You could use endeavourOS as your operating system, which is Arch based yet easy to install. I can’t speak to setting up Hyprland on other distros as I haven’t done it, but I’m sure if you look around you’ll find out what you need to know.

The part about preferring mania? Super accurate. During the year or so of dialing in the meds, my wife alternated between numbness and depression, and eventually climbed her way up to “Normal”

She hated normal. I had to explain that this is how life is for everyone else. Sure there’s highs and lows, but not every day is an explosive rollercoaster of emotions, and that’s a good thing. Stay here with me a while and see if you can learn to love it. Well, she did. And life is good. But there really has to be a lightbulb moment where it clicks that life without the meds is chaotic, destructive, and unsustainable.

My wife of 3 years, together 6, I could basically copy and paste your explanation here and it would be 100% true.

We work together making sure the meds are on track, therapy and psych appointments are regular, and she’s a lovely, bustling, fun individual and our relationship couldn’t be better. We have contingency plans in case things go off the rails. I have phone numbers to her care providers for worst case scenarios.

My greatest fear is economic or political turmoil limiting access to meds, because the meds are key.

Big 2nd for Fedora. Fedora isn’t Debian stable but isn’t exactly unstable either, and I think having fresher packages in your main repo is worth it.

Yeah. But for a kid who’s not going to give a shit about the difference between snaps and flatpak, just install mint or Ubuntu and call it a day. Unless you’re popping the hood and rifling around breaking things, they basically install and administrate themselves.

Maybe I’m on one about it because the last time I was on this subject someone was suggesting Debian for a young kids first computer to play Minecraft on. Debian is good for a lot of things, but not that, and when someone says any Linux distro is “easy” I think “someone who knows nothing about Linux can run it just fine” easy.

To us it’s easy, but not to the computer illiterate. Debian is at least as difficult to a Linux illiterate newcomer as Fedora is. You want functional multimedia codecs? Thumbnails for video files? Drivers for your Nvidia card? Drivers for peripherals that aren’t directly supported by the kernel? Distributions that people like us avoid, mint, Ubuntu, etc, make all of that happen for you, or at least guide your hand. A newbie installing Debian for the first time isn’t even going to know what they don’t have and need to find.

I see this attitude a lot, and it does nothing for the Linux community. We’re about to be flooded with ex windows users in a few short months, and they arent RTFM certified Linux users like we are. Repeating the mantra of “read the documentation” and “it’s easy already, duh” is just going to leave those people begrudgingly buying new hardware that they don’t need when they hit those early Linux speed bumps and see comments like yours making them feel like idiots.

Another way to fix this, would have been to navigate to the pkgbuild file in question, right click, open with, Kate. I’m more familiar with Gnome than KDE but I assume there’s an option to make Kate your default for opening files of that type.

I could be mistaken, but that editor looks like nano, which is just a super simple text editor. Ctrl-x should bring quit the editor and ask if you want to save.

How were you editing PKGBUILD files before? A GUI based editor?

lol, my riced out EndeavourOS install running Hyprland could probably be considered aggressive modification, but with the right wallpaper and settings it looks pretty clean and minimal. I’ll see about getting some screenshots when I have time for a post.

But yeah, I like the idea you’re running with. I’ve been all over the linuxsphere distrohopping and there are a lot of very pretty desktop environments out there. Even just Linux Mint Cinnamon without any modification is a gorgeous desktop.

I’m gonna get some screenshots together for a post, leaving this comment as a reminder to myself.

But yeah, if this community could have a few less chibi anime waifu wallpapers than UnixPorn does, I’m totally down to support it.

Yep, I guess I should have lead with that, but I’ve been on an AMD GPU for so long I almost forgot what a pain closed source Nvidia drivers can be.