Try endeavoros and use flatpaks. That’s basically manjaro with the following differences:

• current with the aur
• doesn’t have a built in gui software installer
• no modifications-it’s basically just arch with the things you would have probably installed

I don’t know. There’s a surprising amount of stupid people here. They live in near poverty and are easily manipulated into hating others as the reason for their miserable lives. It’s really that simple in my opinion. Yes there are lots of people who don’t vote, but I’m not sure that it would change the current split if they all did vote. We need more and better education.

Anyone still defending Microsoft at this point has cognitive dissonance and deserves what they get. Seriously people - just use Linux. And for the 1% of you that can’t get that 1% of your programs working in Linux - just dual boot.

It’s like people forgot how to use computers.

Such a great game. If you’ve never played - now’s a great time to start. They changed it just enough where all your old tricks either don’t work or are obsolete. Back to spaghetti factories and making blueprints!

Although I was SHOCKED last night to realize cliff explosives are all the way down the tech tree now. I need to redo my entire base now.

I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.

Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.

My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.

Synology NAS. I really love that thing. I use their synology drive software to backup the Linux home folder, as well as windows PCs, iPads, iPhones etc. I use their photos mobile software to automatically backup phone photos and videos. I also synchronize a few select folders between PCs so certain in-use files are always up to date. I set the NAS to keep 30 old versions of every file. This works great for my college kids - dad has a copy of everything in case they nuke a paper or something (which has happened).

I stopped cloning drives long ago. Now I just reinstall the os and packages. With Linux, this is honestly faster than deploying a backup - a single pacman command installs everything I want. Then I just log into things as I open them. Ya I might have to futz around with some settings or redownload some big games on steam - but the eye candy and games can wait - I can be productive pretty quickly after an install.

I DO use btrfs with automatic snapshots (snapper and btrfs assistant). This saves me from myself when I bork an update (which I’ve done more than once). If I make a mistake, I just rollback a snapshot, and try again without my stupid mistakes. This has saved my install 3 or 4 times now.

Lastly, I sneaker net an external hard drive to my office. On it is a manual backup of the NAS. I do this once per month. This protects from catastrophic failures like my house burning down. I might lose a month or so of pictures in the worst case scenario, but I still have my 25+ years of pictures of my kids, wedding videos, etc.

In the end, the only thing that really matters is not losing my lifetime of family pictures and the good memories they provoke.

Oh right! Forgot about that one! FOUR major screw ups.

This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.

They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.

100% agree. Buy a brother laser printer and be happy. I would NEVER buy anything else.

I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.

I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.

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That’s how I use it as well. Plain old brave browser gets the job done on iOS.

It’s expensive but I recently bought a flydigi apex 4 controller and I absolutely love it. Seems to work with everything, is solidly built, and has precise controls.

I’m sure there are other options too, but this is one of the good ones!

Edit: apparently it does not work natively on PS5. My apologies - I thought it did, but was mistaken. I believe it can be done with special cables/adapters but that’s more hassle than it’s worth imo. For a PC controller though (how I use mine) - it’s absolutely my most favorite controller of all time (and I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600). ;)

Honestly-I always wondered how in the hell women with nails even just a little bit long typed comfortably on a keyboard. I figured it was either a) not a big deal or b) a super pain in the arse and another example of the world (for whatever reason) not making a simple product to solve a simple issue (like bandaids that match people’s skin color for example).

Now I know! :)

Phones must be a bitch as well…. The solution to that might be a bit harder to pull off…

Little bit of a thread hijack. But maaaaaybe a recommendation for OP as well.

I’ve never tried a tiling wm before. What does it do that’s so much better than say, a gnome extension? For example, I’m running a gnome extension called grid and I LOVE it. I can tell it to break my screen up into rows and columns with a simple 5X8 or 4X4 command. Then set as many hot keys as I want to move things around and scale the size. It auto tiles and does intelligent window things. Basically I spend all my time with my entire screen tiled with random stuff, but I can move it around easily, not have to write scripts, and still have all the gnome interface stuff as well. What am I missing? If not much, maybe OP, you’re just looking for something like the extension I’m using?

For me I find endeavoros to be the goat. I realized that when I install arch and then the “essentials” for me - I basically recreated what endeavor does. Except endeavor does it with like three clicks on the installer. So now I just install endeavor. Gnome, nvidia drivers, pacdiff and meld, text editor, yay, you get the idea…. No bloat, no bs, quick install with exactly what I would do manually with arch.

I also know this take is controversial-but I like flatpaks as well. Sometimes you gotta mess with flatseal, and sometimes the AUR package is clearly superior. But they usually get the job done well.

It’s nearly impossible to break arch if you use the AUR as little as possible AND read the arch homepage for manual steps BEFORE doing an upgrade.

The anger over this always amuses me (I put my cart back in the corral btw). But there was a time in the very recent past, where there was no such thing as a cart corral. You simply left your cart in the lot and an employee was paid to fetch them (I also used to do this job as a kid - it was a great job).

Until it shows up for everyone. That’s not paranoia, Microsoft has a bit of a trend in this department.

• I walked around with a ruptured appendix for weeks without knowing it. In my case, the pain was very minimal (not normal)
• there was so much raw sewage in my abdomen, they decided to gut me from my pelvis to my sternum, take everything out, and powerwash me
• there was a problem with the hospital pharmacy. I woke up in the ICU with zero pain meds and my nurse screaming murder at the pharmacy tech over the phone. “For the love of god he’s up, I need that morphine RIGHT FUCKING NOW”
• don’t know how long it took, but that was pure hell.
• then I got full bowel blockage, multiple times, throwing up and all, with my stomach cut in two trying to heal. Surprisingly the blockage was almost as painful as the unmedicated seppoku I experienced.

Take my upvote for bowel pain being horrific.

Another data point. I also literally broke my back from a fall on the ice. If bowel pain was a 10, I’d put breaking my back at about a 6.

I’m old

I remember dlp tvs and 40 inch tubes that weighed 200lbs.

I bought one of the first 1080p large screen LCDs that wasn’t $10k. A Sony XBR 46” for like $3000. At one point, I thought “man I should replace that TV, I can get a bigger screen, a thinner bezel, and better blacks”

And then I remember that this 20 year old TV has no internet connection, no ads, no bs, a million connections of any type (want to hook up that retro console - boom this tv can do it) AND it still looks good after all these years. It’s arguably a great tv, better than a lot of the crap being sold today. Funny and unexpected.

I think I’ll keep that TV forever.