CrabAndBroom

I had a go on a VR helmet and thought it was kind of fun, but at the moment the options seem to be an affordable one that's infested with Facebook nonsense, or the Valve/Apple ones which are presumably less intrusive but cost a fortune. So I'm fine to just do without until someone figures out how to do it in a cheap, open-source kind of way, like the raspberry pi of VR helmets.

That might not even be possible, but in that case I'm also fine to just do without TBH.

You can use sponsorblock with yt-dlp, if that helps at all.

Yeah same here. Don't have TPM, not buying a new CPU just to enable Microsoft's bullshit, so we are at an empasse.

I admittedly don't have many conversation about Linux with people, but yeah the ones I do have are usually me trying to convince people that it's less techy and scary than they think it is. One person asked me how I do everything if it's only text. They thought Linux was literally just the terminal with no UI at all. I had to be like "no dude, it's like everything else. You can just install Firefox or Chrome or whatever you want."

I never thought I'd see the day

Single-click and the little plus icons on everything in Dolphin are the first things I switch off after install for sure.

Yeah Lenovo have always been really good for me with Linux. I think if I had the money I'd still go either Framework or System76, but my current laptop is just a mid-range Lenovo Ideapad and it seems to run any Linux thing I chuck at it quite happily.

I've read so many things that try to explain what flakes are, and for the life of me I still don't understand what they are or what they're for lol.

What I tend to do that scratches the distro-hopping itch is I keep an external drive with a bunch of virtual machines on it that I can spin up and tinker around with as needed, like little specimen jars lol. I think I have about 5-6 on the go at the moment. So like my actual computer runs Arch (btw), but I have VMs for NixOS, OpenSUSE, Mint and so on, as well as another one that's as close to my main system as possible so if I want to try a weird experiment I can try it on there first to see what breaks. Just today I tried upgrading it to Plasma 6 to see what broke and the answer was everything lol.

I used to keep ones for Mac and Windows on the go too, but they tend to eat up a lot of drive space.

It can sort of depend on the distro, there are a lot of Debian-based ones such as Debian (obviously), Kali, Ubuntu, and then ones based on Ubuntu like Mint and Pop!OS, those all largely work the same under the hood, ie you'd use .deb files and something like sudo apt-get install to install something.

Then there are Arch-based ones like Arch and Manjaro, which are a bit more different, you'd use pacman or yay or paru to install things instead, and they have things like the AUR, which is a big user-maintained repository or software that has just about everything on it.

Then you have the Fedora based ones and SUSE based ones, which are different again in other ways. And some more unique and weirder ones like NixOS which is having a bit of a moment, whereby you sort of configure the entire system in one single config file and rebuild it each time (as I understand it, that might be a bit off 'cause I'm still learning.)

So yeah it sort of depends. And then you have desktop environments like GNOME and KDE which aren't distros, but do affect how the whole system looks (and functions, to an extent.) And these are largely agnostic of the underlying distro, so you could have say a machine running Debian with GNOME next to a machine running NixOS with GNOME which would look very similar from the desktop but would be hugely different under the hood, and two machines running Arch, one with GNOME and one with KDE which would look totally different but be functionally the same.

I won't even start on Display Managers lol.

Someone already said Manjaro, so my second pick would be ElementaryOS. In the past they've had this weird attitude about open source things being free (I get supporting devs for projects you like of course, but I don't agree that it's "cheating" to not pay for every single piece of open source software you use), and they seem to get a lot of hype and praise for what's essentially just Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS IMO.

Yeah I was gonna say Manjaro too. I used it for a while while I was heading towards Arch but wasn't feeling fully confident to go full Arch as a daily driver yet, and it was nothing but trouble for me. I found that it tried to prevent me from breaking things, which is not necessarily bad, but it would also break things by itself and then this feature would prevent me from going in and fixing them.

I much prefer it when the OS just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want, even if it's dumb lol