Affinity isn’t Linux compatible yet, and Gimp has a steep learning curve (the photoshop-ification plugin for new Gimp users isn’t well advertised)

My 7800XT can’t play Hogwarts Legacy without stuttering (on Linux). I’m really regretting not getting a 5080 at this point.

That’s such a bad way to look at it. I would’ve bought a 5090 if I could afford it because I want to hold onto the 5090 for almost a decade like I did with my 1080. Depending on prices, it doesn’t make sense to upgrade twice in 10 years because you bought a budget option, and then be stuck trying to sell a budget card. 5090s will hold their value for years to come. Good luck playing AAA titles maxed out in 5 years on a 7800XT.

AMD is plug and play on Linux. With my 7800XT there isn’t a driver to install. Only issue is that AMD doesn’t make anything that competes with the 5080/5090.

I’d use Gnome if it had tray application icon support. I just cannot do without my tray icons for Dropbox.

Bazzite for a first try. If you never hit a wall needing to make system tweaks, stick to it in the long term. Otherwise, I’m really liking Fedora. KDE/Gnome is personal choice.

You most likely will never earn more than 2 mil in your lifetime. With 2 orders of magnitude and a doubling factor, that’s still not 500M lmao. And just like a car purchase, that’s only for the purchase price, not the upkeep.

So on arch can you choose to run the deb anyway and get updates through the package manager, or is it that only AUR applications are the main application type? Or can you use both?

I have a number of apps that are super small teams/individual made that I can’t expect them to care about the AUR. What do you do in the case that an app developer doesn’t use the AUR?

What are some of your customizations?

you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly

Can you think of a quick example, out of curiosity?

First thing I wanna implore you do is create a separate partition on your boot drive for your /home folder. Distro hopping is super normal when you’re starting out, and by separating your home folder makes distro hopping very easy.

Bazzite, like others suggested, is your best bet at a first attempt because it’s much harder to cause irreparable damage with a stray terminal command.

All of the apps you listed should work just fine under Linux. Bazzite ships with Steam and Lutris (it’s a game store aggregator) to get you started with gaming. Use Microsoft 365 online or one of the open sourced alternatives like libreoffice for office apps. The rest of the programs should either be able to be run with wine/bottles/WinApps.

A 1050 is kinda paltry by today’s standards, so just don’t expect a big bump in gaming performance or super snappy emulation.

Option 2, with more emphasis on the login component. My files are safe, but I don’t wanna bother my buddy to 2FA me every time I need to reinstall Linux for whatever reason.

Omg thank you. I’m gonna try this out tomorrow

New problem: they have 2FA as well

Yes, lol. Long story short,I don’t have the password because it’s a shared account

It is; I want to reinstall my OS without losing my Dropbox install

I’m not, I’m on xubuntu at the moment

Over a decade in and I haven’t internalized the text selection and cursor movement differences TBH. You can rebind the system key combos though if it really bothers you that much. I’m just not really using the keyboard as much anymore now that I use a trackpad for everything.

The very first thing I did was swap around ctrl and cmd on my mechanical keyboard.

It’s really sad that macOS is the only major operating system that functions on API calls for UI elements and system calls. Part of what makes windows awful is the terrible UI inconsistencies between apps. 3rd party app can’t hook into the system or each other easily because there are so few shared APIs. It’s crazy that macOS has the best utility apps all because of the shared API library and that the other operating systems don’t want to copy or unify with them.