+1 for uBlue. I did the same for my mother on her laptop and desktop PC for office work. Chose Aurora in this case. Setting system and flatpak updates to automatic means I hopefully never have to look after these systems again as the distro maintainers basically do the maintenance. Setting up Secure Boot with the shim/MOK method and TPM auto-unlocking for full disk encryption using the ujust
scripts is a breeze as well.
sunred
What actually exists but what I have yet to see implemented in any game I play are those server-side "AI anti-cheat" solutions like from anybrain that basically just analyse the players behavior to fit certain criteria. According to areweanticheatyet.com though there are four games using it already (the most well-known one probably being Lost Ark). In theory ai models can be very efficient and accurate at this (we are not talking about transformer models here like with the current llm craze) but that all depends on how they train a model and what the training data looks like.
What surprised me the most, also in part due to me not really being knowledgeable about software solutions in their respective industries, was the Unreal Engine (the editor that is) and Houdini being available on Linux. Tbf, at least in the vfx department it is apparently more common as most of the high profile software in that industry does have a native Linux version available.
What I appreciated the most though was software like Reaper and Renoise providing a (very good even) Linux-native version when I looked for a new DAW to learn, seeing most software in the audio industry not being very Linux-friendly.
Rock and stone!
Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying they 'had to completely reinstall the os' and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn't rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don't count). This is due in part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn't hurt to apply new package configs by going through pacdiff
once in a while though.
Edit: Typo
I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its 'obscurity' though. It's definitely a standout among distros.
KDE for its Wayland performance and features and occasionally I switch to hyprland if I need a more focused work environment.
In the past I used Cinnamon but it became ever more buggier on Arch and due to lack of Wayland support still it was a dead end anyway.
Well, Minetest also can hardly be compared to Minecraft as Minetest is only an engine or platform for voxel based games like Minecraft. What you rather have to critique is something like Mineclonia that is apparently a more active fork of the MineClone2/VoxeLibre project that try to perfectly replicate Minecraft (without using Minecraft assets that is) on Minetest. Allegedly it's pretty good now but I haven't tried so myself. As already mentioned, the community for Minetest as a whole is pretty small and that additionally split among so many different games building on that. But it's good that viable alternatives exist in case Microsoft ever considers shutting down the Java edition.
Edit: Typo
I use Secure Boot on all my machines but I just use my own keys with Foxboron's wonderful
sbctl
utility instead of the hacky shim/MOK method most distributions use.