Übercomplicated

I unfortunately had disabling experiences with the System76 Pangolin (12). Since then I would absolutely not recommend System76.

You don’t need the laptop to run it, and I have unfortunately only had negative experiences with System76 laptops. I’d stick to the classic ThinkPads or maybe something like Tuxedo; the latter if you’re based in Europe.

Yeah, I second this. You may want to look in to DEs/WMs like DWM ©, Xmonad (Haskell), and AwesomeWM (lua) that let you customize them through programming.

Huh, this may vary game to game or WM to WM. I lose like 40% performance (mostly in 1% lows), get insane stuttering, shaders start glitching, and some games won’t even start. I’ve tried this on KDE Wayland and SwayWM, mostly with the games Counter Strike 2, Vampire Survivors, the DOOM games, and a few others. The only game that’s worked for me in Wayland was Transport Fever 2 ¯\(ツ)/¯

Okay, people have said many good things so far, so I won’t add much. Simply one thing: take one problem at a time.

By this I rather mean, make your life easier, and only progressively deal with more complicated things. When it comes to distro choice, this would mean picking something with plenty of default installed packages (since you won’t necessarily know what to install yourself) — this rules out my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed as well as the popular Fedora and Debian — something that will play nice with NVidia (Desktop Environments use display managers/servers, the two most common being Wayland and X11; Wayland is better, but unfortunately will really mess up NVidia gaming, so try to stick to X11 for now — you can always switch later!), and, lastly, something with a large community (and by extension a large help forum and wiki).

I never thought I’d hear myself (see myself?) saying this (typing this!?), but Mint checks all those boxes.

I wouldn’t recommend staying with Mint for long (though some people claim to enjoy it…), but as a first distro to introduce you to Linux, it really may be the easiest. Using a different DE is already difficult, don’t overwhelm yourself from the get-go!

Alright, that ended up being longer than expected. I wish you the best of luck, and a lot of fun on your approaching Journey!

A stripped down version of pretty much any distro is gonna do the trick here. Minimal install Fedora (or the lxde version), openSUSE tumbleweed, Debian (lxde flavour), arch, or Void Linux (will give you very, very good start-up time, as it uses runit instead of SystemD. It also has a great installer, imo, and is pretty easy to get the hang of—more so than arch). These should all be fine. Depending on how much work you want to put in, my top recommendations are Void and openSUSE tumbleweed. You could also try a tiling WM like Sway if you want to make the whole experience even more lite weight. Good luck!

Also shout-out to airwindows. Absolutely fantastic plugin collection, and entirely free!!!

Edit: also, while I’m at it, Orca is a great, though very weird, sequencer.

I almost disagree with this.

IMO Reaper is fantastic and simply a better drop-in replacement for audacity. Audacity—despite the wonderful name, second only to Alacritty (maybe the greatest program name ever)—is wildly difficult to use, buggy as all hell, and insanely inefficient. Reaper, on the other hand, works for simple things and for complex synthesizer and wacky editing stuff perfectly. I still remember how surprised and bemused I was that the Electro-Akustik department in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin uses basically-free Reaper for their recording needs.

The only argument for audacity is the slightly faster start-up time, and the absence of a “buy-me” pop-up (if you haven’t purchased one of the very affordable licenses). Seriously though, since I discovered Reaper I’ve basically used it for everything not related to work et al. Fantastic software.

Audacity is decent, but Reaper is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much better. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo much. And it’s basically free (presuming you’re not a business).

It’s, as of recently, a nonprofit.

I had literally the same Linux distro-hopping track as you. I hated fedora though, and after one year installed openSUSE and Void Linux on my 2 of 3 systems respectively (3rd system ran Arch the whole way through). Now I’m happy, openSUSE is a great daily driver work laptop (I have it running on ancient shit, but it legit feels super smooth with swayWM), Void is my tinkering and personal programming laptop (broken right now, but I’ll fix it soon), and arch is for heavy loads (cough, gaming, cough). Everything works and is efficient (Void has given me ACPI issues, but usually works). I think I’ll probably stay like this for a while longer.

You could at least try to be civil. I am still curious as to what your original reply meant though. Are you calling me centrist? I am communist, how in the world could I simultaneously be centrist? Furthermore, I wasn’t — as far as I’m aware — stating any kind of political opinion with my original reply.

Please, I beg you, elaborate. I would appreciate that a lot more than jumping to conclusions.

Would you care to elaborate?

Edit: Well, to be fair, I could have paragraphed a little more effectively.

How might one/I find an instance with very few de-federations? What are examples of such instances. Thanks, and, just as you say, peace.

Yes! It’s a sad, sad world. It mostly has to do with people’s political opinions on moderators, i.e. “.ml are tankies” and “.world are right-wing normie fascists” or something like that. I have never — literally never — witnessed a .ml mod doing something I thought was bad. I have also seen only one tankie since I joined .ml. I have witnessed some kind of conflict between .world and .ml everytime single time I open Lemmy though. Kind of depressing. I wish we could make less of a deal of an issue that, all things considered, seems pretty small. Ah well, that aside, Lemmy is still great, it will just take time to mature — like all social platforms in their beginnings!

My office forces everyone to use Microsoft (there’s a lot of Mac and Windows users), and whenever I complain, people get pissed at me. God knows why.

As for SystemD, I think a lot of people think it’s fine and people like me are exaggerating. I guess that’s fine, but non-systemD systems (Void Linux being my favorite) are so much faster, it’s unbelievable.

And then there’s a lot of generic language programmers and business owners, who are very willing to defend their income source. Like everyone I know. (I’m really dying here; I gotta find a cool Rust or LISP company)

As for uBO, it’s a “progress” thing. If using masses of third parties and trackers makes stuff more innovative (not to mention laggy), then it’s good, they claim.

I’m happy to hear that Lemmy shares my opinion though, that’s a little comforting :)

The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious — both from a Software Dev and ordinary user perspective. Literally any alternative is better, Libre Office, Google Office, etc.

Word is bloated, slow, impractical, bad for collaboration, and politically dubious. Teams is buggy, impractical, also politically dubious, and lacks many basic features. At this point, I literally despise Microsoft. Also Windows really seems to be unusable, from the enlightened perspective of a Mac or Linux user (in my case the latter).

SystemD is bloated and stopping Linux from getting faster.

Most mainstream programming languages suck, Rust being the exception.

Alright, I’m done ;)

Edit: any website that breaks because of uBlock Origin medium mode is poorly made and not trustworthy. /endrant

This literally got posted on “linuxmemes” — people will have the tendency to disagree with you…

Fair enough. FYI I have played Apex and Rainbow on Linux before, without issue. As for Riot games: LOL → Dota, Valorant (shows up twice in your list) → CS2. It’s true that a tun of big-budget software is purposely made unavailable to the Linux community, and I’ll always forgive someone who can’t switch because of these wretched companies, but do note that I was a Valorant player before I 100% gave up Windows. I sucked it up and stopped playing. Worth it.

Sorry it took me so long to respond; I had to find my copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Here is a relevant quote from that excellent style guide:

If two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.

Mary Shelley’s works are entertaining; they are full of engaging ideas.

[…vs.]

Mary Shelley’s works are entertaining. They are full of engaging ideas.

[…vs.]

Mary Shelley’s works are entertaining, for they are full of engaging ideas.

[…] A comparison of the three forms given above will show clearly the advantage of the first. It is, at least in the examples given, better than the second form because it suggests the close relationship between the two statements in a way that the second does not attempt, and better than the third because it is briefer and therefore more forcible. […]

Note that if the second clause is preceded by an adverb, such as accordingly, besides, then, therefore, or thus, and not by a conjunction, the semicolon is still required.

I had never been in the place before; besides, it was dark as a tomb.

Alright, back to me. A good example of what I’m referring to with “weight” is revealed when discussing how to properly use a semicolon with an ordinary colon. A semicolon is “heavier” than a colon; let me give you an example to illustrate this.

The answer: humanity is doomed; the people are angry.

This is stylisticly bad, because the semicolon separates the clause “the people are angry” from the context (the scope, if you’re a programmer) of the colon: now the clause is equal to the rest of the sentence, “The answer: humanity is doomed,” instead of serving as part of the clause “The answer:” is describing. The correct—that is, the intended—sentence would simply be this:

The answer: humanity is doomed, the people are angry.

One might think that this is illegal, as there is no conjunction, but, indeed, that presumption would be incorrect: “[…] humanity is doomed, the people are angry” is actually a list and the author of the sentence (me, muahahahaha) is using a literary device called asyndeton.

Here’s an example of asyndeton:

The ingredients of despair: hope, yearning, jealousy, conjecture.

The incorrect version would be with a semicolon introducing the last element of the list.

The ingredients of despair: hope, yearning, jealousy; conjecture.

Because the first example has only two elements, it can seem like one has to use a semicolon, but I think that the example given above shows how that is, in reality, quite absurd.

Alright, rant over, I hope this has sufficiently answered your question! Have a good day :)