Its main purpose is to prevent malware from booting. In my experience its main purpose seems to be preventing me from booting things I want like ventoy flash drives, nvidia drivers, and Linux distros that don’t support it. Same goes for tpm module. Its main purpose seemed to be the switch keeping win 10 from upgrading. I turned them both off and haven’t felt the strong need to turn them back on yet.

That said, and my bad computing habits aside, you probably should turn them ON. I’m not sure they will do all that much realistically speaking, but if it isn’t getting in your way (and it shouldn’t), then ON isn’t a bad default state to be in.

It used to be a pain. Multiple versions that didn’t all work. Today it’s pretty painless. A lot of installers will actually do it for you now.

In arch (at least the last time I did it), it was just a matter of picking the right package and installing it with pacman

EndeavorOS’s installer will do it for you

I use Fedora these days. It didn’t do it automatically the last time I loaded from scratch (not an upgrade), but the rpm fusion team/repository made it simple. I just followed the crystal clear instructions on their website.

I think mint does it automatically with the installer…

Honestly I really don’t even think about nvidia drivers anymore.

Hard

94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.

But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.

Another vote for fedora here.

I use regular workstation. I like gnome so that fits. And I found when I set up arch exactly the way I liked, I was just recreating the fedora experience ;)

It’s not bleeding edge but I don’t think anyone really needs that unless you just bought a brand new vid card or mobo etc. If your components are common and 6mo+ old fedora is new enough.

I really don’t have issues with it. It seems to have become the new Ubuntu (install it and it just works).

Openrgb is what you want. It’s tricky to figure out though. It’s not just going to recognize the device and poof magic. You’ll have to fiddle with HOW it’s connected - through your rgb header, bios settings, separate controller etc. Once it’s recognized, you may have to play with the settings for how many lights it has etc.

When I first used it, it thought it didn’t do anything. Then I learned and got it to do everything.

I enjoyed the difficulty of hollow knight. It was tough as nails in spots but I felt fair. I also dug the art/music/atmosphere. It was just unique enough yet familiar.

Yes I’m a big fan obviously.

Kobo for sure. Great devices.

You bought the kindle books, Amazon took away what you bought. Anna’s archive without any guilt - boom, your kindle books are now yours to read on any device of your choosing again.

You don’t need to fiddle with calibre or managing files. This website works great for transferring books to the kobo. https://send.djazz.se/

You’re welcome :)

I will try it! Never heard of it. I also hate the markdown nonsense.

When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)

Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.

It’s so stupid, there’s more great things to read than you can ever possibly finish.

But yes, I do the same thing.

Their insistence on sueing the world of emulation ensures I’ll never buy another Nintendo console ever again. (And I’ve bought all of them so far). Their actions cause the opposite effect of what they want - they are creating pirates.

It’s much better these days - at least it works fine on arch and fedora. I wouldn’t worry about nvidia on Linux. That said, I’d go AMD for another reason - $. There’s just no reason to spend the kind of money nvidia wants when you can get something just a tad slower for 1/4 the price. AMD makes cards that can drive a huge monitor at high fps.

Bottom line: whatever is fine.

Love mine and daily drive it. Not janky, zero issues. Everything works on Linux. Not sure what you’re referring to.

Can you get more bang for your buck? Yes, to start. But let’s compare after a couple of upgrades on mine vs whole laptop replacements with other brands.

And the sunk costs aren’t even a thing tbh. You can just go pirate your books with zero moral dilemmas since you actually paid for it and they took it away.

No, but it’s a set it and forget it thing. I pay zero attention to it and it just runs. Easy means it runs more if I had to check what to mine and switch and blah blah, well I’m lazy…. So for me - ya it’s better. ;)

I went to 11 and have gone back to 10. The only thing it does is mine crypto coins (I need a heater in that room anyway - whatever). Everything else works better in Linux.

11 was fine until they repeatedly kept breaking their updates. Next time I have to reload that os on that drive it’ll be hiveos. It won’t be as convenient as the auto switchers like nicehash and their alternatives. But ya, windows sux these days.

I really like the gnome workflow plus a couple of extensions. Notably I ran across a tiling extension called “grid” that scratched my tiling window needs on my desktop, and gnome is amazing on my laptop trackpad. I zing through desktops quick! Anything it can’t do out of the box, you can find an extension for.

I like the feel of something different than windows.

I’ll wait until it’s heavily on sale and that it’s proven itself to actually play on Linux. Just like I did for Elden ring. Otherwise I’d pay them full price on day one.

This WAS a day one buy for me. Now I’ll pass thanks.

This is good advice imo. Some further comments:

• Its easier to make a vm out of a bare metal or “real” install. It’s much harder to go the other way.
• you seem to have some fear about installing or reinstalling OSs. It’s much easier than redeploying vms. I’d banish those thoughts and jump in. Again the above advice is solid because you can mess up or change your mind, and you can always revert. Cloning a drive and redeploying that image to the original drive is simple.
• dual booting gets a lot of flak. Most of that comes from windows not playing nice with boot partitions when windows is installed on the same drive. Another source of issues is secure boot. If you have two internal drives, installing an os on each one works great. I like turning secure boot off and simply pressing F8 upon boot up if I want to switch. (But you totally can get it working with secure boot and adding other OSs to grub.