jjlinux

Welcome to the club. Just now I'm setting up Endeavour to give it another (14th) shot.

I'm genuinely curious, what was their reaction to the OS change?

Frustrating, that's the word I was looking for when I was looking for about using Windows. My kids started using computers with Linux (Zorin first, then PopOS and now Fedora Gnome) and they won't touch their mom's computer because she uses Windows. They both say that's a hideous and unnecessarily complicated OS 🤣. If I may say so myself, I've done great as a dad, lol.

I would argue that, even if you're not into tinkering, you're still better off running a solidly proven Linux distro that requires minimal to no maintenance other than software updates (Debian stable, PopOS, Linux Mint, etc.). Just "flatpak" your way into having what you want, and leave the system itself alone, just like you do with Windows, but with less chance of something breaking and driving you mad when you suddenly land a BSOD. In any case, it's highly likely that you'll end up beginning to tinker after somentime feeling comfortable with Linux, happens to everyone I know has come to this side of happiness. Be aware that, once you are used to ANY Linux use, you'll be wondering why you put up with all the Microsoft or Apple crap for so long. I can't imagine ever going back to that.

And out of thousands of good reasons to choose Linux over everything else out there, this has to be in the top 3 list.

Getting ready to make this happen. I know, I said "during the weekend" but I just could not help myself. I may need therapy for my ECDHM (Extreme Case of "DistroHopping" Madness) 🤣

Awesome. Then that's the word. I'm going to go with Endeavour again, this time I'll do it over the weekend and stick to it for a few weeks even if it breaks. I have to confess that, in both cases, I jumped ship afyer just 3 or 4 attempts to fix broken stuff and those turning into a slight headache, and that's no way to learn. And, you are falling short by saying that Garuda "breaks hard", for me it was just frustrating. On Endeavour I recall being able to roll back some of the damage I made by just removing some software I should have read more about before installing, but Garuda is unforgiving 🤣🤣

I'm glad I have everything backed up regularly to my NAS, and then my NAS is mirrored weekly at another exact copy I set up at my brother's house in another country altogether. I never had an issue with ext4, but chose to try BTRFS about 2 years ago, mainly because of it's compression capabilities, and I've never looked back since then. My UnRaid servers run on XFS, so no issues there either. Also, I'm no "File System wizard" or anything, but I've been reading pretty regularly about BTRFS getting increasingly easier to use and much more solid. Don't know what they look at to say that, but in my experience, it seems to be true enough. What O have read constantly, and never been able to find anything to counter that, is that BTRFS is a nightmare when it comes to any type of RAID. I've been wanting to get my feet wet on ZFS (mostly because I want to built a TrueNAS server to play with), but I need to have some money burning a hole in my pocket before my wife approves of such an expense just for fun, he he.

We're lucky that there are so many nice developers out there just providing these tools for the community to break the ropes that tie us to big tech. Those devs are the real heroes in my book.

This is why I've been spending Kore time in Lemmy than Mastodon. Anyone can provide good help, as long as it needs to be, without worrying about having to split the whole thing.

You two just gave me the courage I needed to try some Arch based distros again. My experiences with Garuda and Endeavour were hideous, so I never looked back.

I have an Intel + Nvidia laptop (S76 Gazelle 16), so I'll do it on that one. My work PC is AMD with integrated graphics, and Fedora 40 KDE has been flawless so far.

Thank you, for real.

Maybe I've been extremely lucky, but I've had nothing but good experience with BTRFS. However I do see a lot of comments where something broke catastrophically. Is this one of those things where I can't feel the pain because it hasn't happened to me?

You'll have the die-hard "XX is the best distros" and the "distros are irrelevant, choose a DE" answers here. The reality is that it will all boil down to your hardware, use case and willingness to tinker, in that same order.

For example, I love PopOS for laptops with Nvidia cards, only because I am used to the Cosmic version of Gnome PopOS has used all these years (looking forward to the proper Cosmic DE once its out), but for PC (regardless of GPU) I'd rather use Fedora KDE (customized to a Gnome feel) because I find it easy to customize to a very granular degree, and I feel Fedora has the best mix of cutting edge + stability.

As you can see, there's a whole lot of "I" in my comment. That's the beauty of Linux, whatever you end up sticking with, you get to make it as YOURS as you want it to be.

Arch derived distros require more carefully maintenance than most other base distros (RHEL and Debian), but are also great to actually learn Linux more deeply. RHEL derived distros, IMO, are a better balance between "it just works" and "I can make this happen", and Debian based are the easiest to maintain, mainly because it tends to be what the most popular distros out there are based on, which makes for a much larger community for when we hit a brick wall (when, not if).

Bottom line is that I believe you would be better off going the route you mentioned, and going through the pitfalls of each until you find that sweet spot.

And of course, once you're on that road, come and ask anything you want, most of us are always happy to help if we can.