I'm somewhere between Kitty and Ptyxis.

Might as well go for Win11, you're going to have to deal with it next year anyways.

Windows doesn't do minimal, it does whatever the hell it wants. There are some OOBE tricks to get a local account working.

I have used the privacy.sexy app to strip down some of the most obnoxious Win11 bits - be warned that you have to disable defender to have it work. Is it doing bad things? Is MS doing incredibly shady shit with their detections? Who's to say? When I turn on Defender afterwards, everything seems "fine".

There's no need to get rid of grub, or play games with different boot drives. Get to know how EFI works. Look at efibootmgr's output - that's pretty much all that the firmware knows. The firmware has multiple entries consisting of a drive (magic device number), a program path (EFI\grub\grub_x64.efi), and maybe a string to pass along. There is a priority list (0003,0001,0002) which MS occasionally likes to re-arrange.

"Except when something breaks after an odd update once or twice per year"

You don't need snapshots, except for the moments when you do. The point of snapshots is that they're so cheap that you can let them roll on their own and only care about them the day your system breaks.

Do you have pci-e slots? An nvme to pcie card is cheap - it's pretty much just passing from one connector shape to another.

I made a systemd script that fires when going to / waking up from sleep - it checks how long the sleep was and if it was just a few seconds, it puts the computer back to sleep.

In hindsight, I think the thing that made it work was bluetooth was somehow responsible for the initial failed suspend. The second shot at sleep happened before bluetooth came back up, so it succeeded.

The Steam Deck only does VRR over Displayport. Valve has their own engineers working on every part of the software stack. It's their own hardware and their dock. With all that, Valve still can't get VRR over HDMI to work.

Fuck the HDMI forum.

I think the screws are supposed to be “captive”, they unscrew from the bosses but still stay with the lid so you don’t lose em.

Likewise. I also have a glut of really cool new indie games from the last couple of months to catch up on.

Oof, that is a low blow

ExFAT is the LCD filesystem for flash sticks. FAT32 is the filesystem that you have to use for devices designed back when Microsoft was awful about Exfat licensing.

Everywhere else, Btrfs. If Oracle didn't poison-pill ZFS licensing and it was common on Linux, I would be using that instead. Basically, taking it on faith that a drive didn't fuck up your data is crazy. The most basic responsibility for a filesystem should be ensuring that "the files come out exactly the same as when they went in".

Oof, that sounds like an appimage alright.

If you haven't seen the first one, I can't imagine what sidereochronological phenomenon you've been lost in for the last decade and a half. It's a bridge-building game, but the bridge is made out of nodes of goo. The goo is both cute and not an ideal construction material.

If the distro just boots into a live session, you can get a pretty good idea there. They're all working off of roughly the same kernel and driver and firmware sets, give or take some distros being a year out of date. The slower distros have something like "backports" or "enablement kernels" to still give you the option of pulling in newer stuff.

The graphics situation (compositor and mesa and kernel drivers and userland driver libraries) is more complicated. Especially with Nvidia. Your distro choice makes a much bigger impact there.

When you change your nvidia driver version, you also need to do a "flatpak update" so that you have the matching nvidia library version.

This. A fresher Proton-GE is also going to come with a newer DXVK, the DirectX to Vulkan translator.

The other part of your equation is "what is the Nvidia driver version?". Dunno if Fedora has the E-sync capable version 555 yet.

The latest yt-dlp is in bookworm-backports.

https://wiki.debian.org/Backports

Btw, here's my config file.

-o "%(title)s (%(uploader_id)s).%(ext)s"
 
-P ~/Videos

-P "temp:/tmp/yt-dlp/"

-f 271+ba[language=en][ext=m4a]/308+ba[language=en][ext=m4a]/137+ba[language=en][ext=m4a]/299+ba[language=en][ext=m4a]/231+ba[language=en][ext=m4a]/http_mp3_128/271+140/308+140/137+140/299+140/231+140
--download-archive ~/.config/yt-dlp/dl-archive
--no-playlist
--write-sub
--no-mtime
--compat-options no-live-chat

You can have most of the settings pre-loaded in its config file. I mostly let it do my preset -f, or when that fails do a -F to see what encodings are available.

systemctl

Try rEFInd. It's pretty good about detecting OSes and auto-populating its menu, and it has a pretty easy conf file format otherwise. Installing the refind debian package mayybe will also register it with the system firmware, I don't recall. If not, it can be set up with efibootmgr (which is not the most pleasant program, sadly).