It depends on the way you like to learn.

If you like to play around with things and look things up as you need, go with a beginner-friendly distro (Mint, ElementaryOS, and Pop!OS are all good options). This gives a more immediate payoff (in that there are lots of fun things to experiment with right away), but you’ll learn things kinda piecemeal.

If you like to learn by reading first, then starting with the absolute minimum and gradually working your way up, something like Arch might be great for you. It’s a much slower process and has a much steeper learning curve, but if you have the discipline for it, you’ll come out with a really solid understanding of how things work.

Most people start with something simple, and venture into the more intimidating waters when they feel comfortable. If you’re not sure, try Mint and go from there. You can always wipe it and install Arch later (if you don’t have anything important on this laptop, you can try lots of different ones without worrying about migrating or losing anything).

Brilliant, no notes.

It’s okay, I’ll still take it.

C H A R L E S I S W A T C H I N G

Plain curtain. Cut a hole about 3 inches in diameter, about 30 inches from the ground. Line the inside of the hole with duct tape.

Developers are resentful toward AI for the same reason they resented blockchain–it becomes a buzz word that every middle manager is convinced will improve productivity, and it’s forced whether it’s actually helpful or not.

I work on safety-critical code. AI is useless here, but we have to “use” it to appease clueless shareholders.

Truly autonomous driving (on general purpose roads) is a lot further off than the hordes of venture capitalists want you to believe. Not sure which state is letting them loose, but I can’t imagine it’ll end well.

C’mon, don’t server shame. Some of us want to leave the basement once in a while.

Weird looks: +200%

Strangers attempting to lick ears: +3000%

Stream that shit from a Debian server running Jellyfin!

If you don’t care how it looks, and you’re specifically blowing air in with the box fan, you can just use a large garbage bag to direct the air in. Mount the fan vertically facing the opening, cut open a trash bag, and attach it to the remaining three edges of the opening and your fan.

If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.

As far as I know, the only thing Waterfox does (differently from Firefox) is not collecting telemetry and having uBlock Origin installed by default. I haven’t noticed sites breaking either (at least, any more than they did on FF).

I’m using Waterfox. Been great so far.

Disconnect it from the network, and maybe do a factory reset. Set up some sort of set-top box (a raspberry pi or similar works great, or any old PC).

The brain does what it must to survive. We normalize things that are insane to keep us from going insane. It’s… weird.

Yeah, the defacto Arch packages are only compiled for v1, but CachyOS has compiled a lot of the core libraries for v3/v4 (including Wine), which is where I think I’m seeing some improvements. I’m sure the performance would be more optimized by compiling myself, but I don’t have the time or patience for it right now.

No worries, I’m here for it!

It’s a noticeable improvement to me, but probably only marginal to the layperson. I haven’t gotten around to more thorough profiling yet (the included btop++ profiler actually caused my games to crash), but I get the impression my PC is utilizing a lot more of its capabilities (based on performance, fan noise, etc), though maybe I’m just confirming my own biases.

I’m guessing you might get similar gains by compiling manually, but the nice thing with CachyOS is that it’s already compiled (likely with other optimizations as well, I haven’t looked too far into it). I have the technical skills to compile manually, but not the time or energy, so it’s a great solution for me.

Yeah, they were common to Arch. Specifically, Steam would cause the entire system to stutter for a good 30 seconds when starting it up. Found a tip online about it doing something with some extra config files, followed the tip and now it’s working fine.

Even using the CachyOS versions of Proton and Wine libraries (which have the same kind of optimizations applied as the rest of the OS) has worked flawlessly, and my games are smoother than they’ve ever been. Pretty impressed with it overall.

Don’t get me wrong, Mint is great for everyone. I was using it primarily for ages, and I’ve been using Linux for decades as well.

It’s been great so far. Minimalistic in its philosophy (even with a choice of DE, it doesn’t install the typical slew of utility applications and such), and it’s easily the fastest distro I’ve ever used. I’ve had almost zero problems with Steam and Heroic. Overall I think I’m gonna stick with it for the foreseeable future.