Which distro(s) did you try?

I’ve been a linux user for 20-25 years (exclusively for 10), and I find that Linux Mint works pretty well out of the box. I’ve heard others recommend other distros for the same reason, but I’ll let someone with first hand experience recommend them, as Mint is my go-to distro for desktops and laptops.

And just a tip: Take people who go “Don’t use X distro because of Y” with a grain of salt. All distros have their own quirks (Mint’s being relatively old packages), but whatever works for you is the best distro for you, and that’s the most important part.

I recently got myself a brand spanking new and relatively high end laptop, and everything worked out of the box. The only “problem” was that I wasn’t satisfied with the wifi performance (it worked, just not as fast as it should), so I installed a different kernel module. ome to think of it, I had to select NVIDIA proprietary driver as well, due to it defaulting to an open source driver. But it’s just a few mouseclicks (yes, all GUI) to get that sorted.

Allegedly AMD has better support for linux than NVIDIA does, so I guess that’s a good omen for you.

The rest worked flawlessly, including the proprietary lenovo hotkeys that requires it’s own Lenovo program on windows - I was prepared to live without those, but I’m glad I don’t have to. Fn+Q to change power/performance/cooling balance on the fly is pretty neat.

I have no idea how to edit videos, and I’ve never touched any software for doing so, so I can’t help you there. Same goes for CAD stuff. I think it’s safe to assume that doing arduino stuff on linux is well supported, though.

I remember back in the day, running Quake3 on linux provided better FPS than on windows. I haven’t compared the two since then on any game.

Is it still the case? And is this difference (mostly) there in other games too?

You have one per installed kernel. Not sure what (if any) automagic is common for removing old kernels, I guess this varies between distros, but at least on my computers, old kernel remain. At least the previous one, maybe more. It comes in handy in case a kernel upgrade breaks something, which it actually did recently on one of my laptops - makes it easier to boot from old kernel and revert.

EDIT: I just checked. I have just one on my daily driver. It’s quite new, and I don’t think I’ve had a kernel upgrade on that one, so it makes sense.

On my work laptop (the one with borked kernel upgrade) I have two.

So what you most likely have is one or more vmlinuz-version-numbers, and then simply a symlink named just vmlinuz to the version you boot from.

Short answer to your last paragraph:
vmlinuz is the kernel. It ends with z instead of x, because it’s z-compressed to save space. (I’ve heard that it’s possible to use an uncompressed kernel for that 1ms faster boot time)
Initramfs (not intramuscular, which my autocorrect thinks is appropriate) is a small filesystem blob, “initial ram filesystem”, meant to be loaded directly into ram to allow the kernel to talk to your hardware via drivers. It also has a lot of binaries needed to perform other tasks that need to run before the root filesystem is mounted.

Plural.

Can’t be arsed fixing that for you.

“It just works”

…because that is the state of a mainstream modern distro, and it’s not true of Windows anymore.

Alternatively “No nagging, no forced online account.”

cd /usr/ports/hammertothehead && make && make install

…for FreeBSD users

yum install melatonin

I would’ve liked to see him try mint instead. Less fluff, and hopefully that would’ve gone better for him.

I don’t see a problem here.

PS: My opinion on PC innards was formed during the reign of IDE cables.

My thoughts as well. Plus LLMs are trained on a lot of outdated data, so often it would recommend a walk through that does not apply.

I don’t think anyone knows how to actually use ctrl+r, though. When I try I usually give up and resort running egrep on bash_history instead.

They ruined each other. I preferred both when they didn’t affect each other - Your neighbor didn’t get her news and science lessons from a crackpot blog, and your favorite online community wasn’t based on identity politics. The only identity that mattered was your username.

Nej

Yup. I think the engine improvements that allowed for the gravity gun to be a m7ch more prominent HL2 thing.

I love how features like these are quickly adopted by some dev in some basement, resulting in support built in the OS and automatically supported.

For example, I recently got myself a brand new Lenovo Legion 7, and the intention was always to nuke the windows install and get Linux up and running. I was curious about the hotkey too adjust the fan/cooling schema, as it seemed to rely on some proprietary Lenovo windows program.

Less than an hour after picking it up at the post office I had a basic Linux Mint ip and running with the GPU drivers working well, and the hotkeys worked out of the box.

Confirming mind lost

The main reason why I wanted KSP2 was because of the colony-system. I would love to have a more vanilla experience of building colonies which can build rockets - too many times have I tried it with modded KSP only to see my colony spontaneously disassemble after crashing into terrain upon being within physics range.

Yes-ish. Updated graphics/reskin was the original idea, but this changed to add some long-wanted features. This is where the problem began: The reskin was built on the old KSP source base, which the original developers have admitted was very difficult to work with.

When the development changed focus, the feature scope was simply not realistic with so much legacy code getting in the way.

Worst of all, the devs working on KSP2 were barred from talking to Squad (the original developers) about ANYTHING. No communication about specific parts of the code. No communication about why various approaches to different problems were chosen. Basically due to corporate stupidity that focused on a quick buck through a resin, the developers had to pretty much reinvent the wheel a bunch of times.

I think the initial corporate plan was a reskin-scam. The development plan involved a lot more than that. These goals were simply incompatible, which is why everything was so delayed and buggy.

There were some really passionate and talented devs on the team, but they didn’t get what was needed to build what KSP2 could’ve (and should’ve) been.

ShadowZone made a couple of really good in-depth videos on what went wrong, and this sums it up well: https://youtu.be/NtMA594am4M

Care to share a discord link?