I wish these decisions would cause a domino effect around the world.

Looks like a Scrin building from Command & Conquer 3.

I don’t think I can eat whole watermelon by myself but I’ll try.

Depends on your gaming habits. Check ProtonDB for Steam games compatibility, check Lutris for others. Some anti-cheats (especially kernel level anti-cheats) don’t work on Linux, if devs decide to make it work on Linux, they can. For example they enabled Linux version of anti-cheat and Hell Let Loose works fine for some time now. If you mostly play single-player games, you’ll probably be fine.

If you want every possible gaming related programs to be pre-installed, you might wanna go Bazzite. If you want to explore on your own pace, Mint is a solid choice. If you want something like Bazzite but mostly empty, there is also Aurora.

Probably a death star.

I see. Well, while GUI has improved a lot on Linux in recent years, if you still want to know it fully, you’ll need to learn the CLI part. CLI on Linux is really powerful and that’s why you usually won’t find any forum replies related to GUI. That might seem a down part for people who are new to Linux, however it makes it easier for the people who are trying to help. Sadly you can run into jerks and gatekeepers everywhere but fortunately they are not a big portion, they just talk loudly.

Once you learned the CLI, it’s almost always the same and it changes very little in time. This is the hard part and normal user don’t need to know CLI anymore, which is why the desktop Linux adoption gets better nowadays. But if you’re a power user, you’ll need to learn the CLI, at least the parts you require.

what is a DE?

Sorry, I should’ve mentioned it at least once. It means desktop environment. You may also see people talk about WMs, those are window managers. Every DE has a WM, but if you decide to use a standalone WM, you’ll need to install every other software yourself which normally come as bundled in a DE. Of course, I’m not talking about distros that come with WM options. Those usually cover the software part pre-installed. If you don’t want to configure anything on yourself, DEs are the safe choice here. If you enjoy configuring everything (at least I’m looking at it that way) to your needs, you usually do that once (and upload your configs to your personal repo, that way when you need a reinstall, you just pull your configs from git and you’re ready to go). That’s why Linux veterans seem to prefer WMs a lot. There is no limit to configuration, this is both pro and con, depending on where you stand.

Regarding not auto-mounting, the main reason there most likely security related. Again, I agree that more distros should offer more visible options related to that, though some distros already do that. But it should stay as a choice. There are differences between Windows and Linux and this is one of those. If you’re talking about the filesystems on the disks installed in your PC case, they’ll auto-mount if they’re a Linux filesystem. As default, this won’t happen with NTFS partitions.

Fragmentation is not a bad thing but I agree that instead of making programs deeply related to their DEs, they should keep that minimal if that’s possible. Like I mentioned, Flatpak mostly solved this issue. Bazzite uses almost everything from Flatpak which is actually good from this point of view (while it might have other challenges on its own, like not everything is on Flathub, gets better though).

I would say even Ubuntu with telemetry is leagues better than a cleaned Windows 11 when it comes to privacy, but I understand what you mean.

Not sure when did you switch but if you’re kinda new with Linux, it just needs time to recalibrate your knowledge. Once you learn the best for your every need, things like these won’t be an issue. I wish the defaults would always be the best. Some distros actually pick their pre-installed programs really well, but most distros usually go with default suites, like if it’s KDE, then everything is KDE because of the integrity.

Usually both KDE and GNOME includes all kind of programs as default for many tasks, however both side have a better program for something than the other. As a result, going purist is not the best option all the time. Distros that choose KDE or GNOME try to minimize the package size by not mixing these two a lot because nowadays many DE related programs come with a lot of dependencies. Naturally Gnome Disks also has dependencies that you will only install because of it, unless you already have other Gnome programs.

I always choose the best program that does the job so I end up with both KDE and GNOME dependencies. Flatpak kinda helped with this issue though. I tried going purist once years ago but when it comes to productivity, I always ended up with the program that works the best, so a lot of dependencies. I don’t care anymore since I started using SSDs.

I’m using Gnome Disks and never had to edit fstab for years.

We will be able to play Half Life 3 as a curated dream.

Will we also get a control valve back on our heads?

even with eyes closed

Not sure I would want something like that.

antiX is my go-to distro for antique stuff. I even managed to run it on an old laptop from 2005, IDE HDD and all. Surprisingly it was opening fast too. Old wi-fi drivers suck though.

Try lowering some VRAM-heavy graphics settings. This was happening with Elite Dangerous to me with Proton 6. It was fixed with later Proton releases but until then I played with lowered VRAM-heavy settings.

Sounds like a memory leak. Have you checked your RAM and GPU memory when this happens? You can use btop and nvtop. If it’s a memory leak, it shouldn’t happen with every game though.

Of course, it does not have the same goal. But it uses the same system.

You might find this interesting, because Erdogan is also a Kemalist (at least some variation of it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamokemalism

You can check here >> https://programming.dev/post/28713862

He should go to Bluesky and get blocked there as well.