WFH

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: it starts with hardware.

It’s sad to say but a flawless Linux experience out of the box often comes from picking the right hardware first. Chose vendors who actively support Linux. AMD/Intel CPUs, APUs and/or GPUs. Intel WiFi card. Everything else should work ootb except most fingerprint sensors. Avoid laptops with dGPUs. Avoid nVidia. Hardware support comes from hardware vendors, the days of janky community drivers have been over for almost 2 decades. When it’s time for you to replace your hardware, do your homework first and/or buy from companies who sell Linux machines (Framework, Tuxedo, Slimbook, Starlabs, System76, some Dells, some Lenovos, etc). You can still buy from random companies but there won’t be any guarantees.

Then, the choice of distro in kinda important but not that much. In my 20+ years of actively using and working with Linux, both in the desktop and server space, I’ve always found Ubuntu and its derivatives kind of janky. I’m a lifelong Debian user, but my best experience on modern hardware have been Fedora on my main laptop and its atomic derivative Bazzite on my gaming rig. Bazzite also comes with a nVidia-specific image for those who can’t/wont replace their GPU.

Nowadays to limit interactions between system and user-facing applications, I tend to install most things from Flathub. It might not help with hardware issues, but it helps with stability.

There are a lot of QoL improvements on uBlue projects that make them much more usable as daily drivers, like hardware accelerated codecs from rpmfusion, nvidia drivers for those who need them or actually useful preinstalled software. Plus some minor improvements on defaults.

You’ve never heard of atomic/immutable distros? You’re part of the lucky 10,000 ;)

Bluefin, Aurora and their much more popular sister Bazzite are part of the universalBlue project: a delivery pipeline that lets anyone build their own, maintenance free atomic distro.

All uBlue projects are 100% based on Fedora Silverblue, itself an atomic distro based on Fedora. Which means that uBlue projects get automatic weekly upgrades just like Silverblue.

For people not familiar with Linux, and people who don’t want to spend any time maintaining their OS (HTPC, gaming rig etc), it’s amazing.

uBlue Bluefin or Aurora. Tested and approved. I moved my dad on Bluefin one year ago, no issues, it just works for his use case (90% of the time in a browser, light photo editing in Krita, some text editing). No maintenance, no updates, no actual knowledge needed as a daily user, just a single reboot once a week to boot the freshest system image.

And more importantly, it keeps on working despite his talent for fucking up every single piece of software he lays his hands on.

https://projectbluefin.io/

https://getaurora.dev/en

Maybe it’s popular with German monolinguals and it’s cheaper than Swiss or Austrian ski resorts? I dunno, I’m pulling that out of my ass.

Because most of the time, the complicated stuff is just a few simple commands chained together.

99.9% of the time, git is easy. You don’t need to do everything on the command line, especially when dealing with diffs and merge conflicts. But in my experience most devs who flat out refuse to use it don’t understand most of the basic concepts because it’s all hidden behind a layer of abstraction. That’s why when I teach the basic concepts, it’s command line only. At least you know what that big Squash&Merge button does and why you should never click on the big Rebase button on main/master.

A multi-billion dollars marketing budget, anti-competitive practices and confidential agreements, blacklisting hardware vendors if they dare proposing an alternative, and of course a legal department the size of a small city to sue all competition out of existence.

Oh wait that’s Microsoft/Google/Apple/Meta/Amazon.

Fucking backend developers who can’t even git commit without their fucking IDE handling it for them.

I miss Craig Ferguson so much!

Funnily enough, I feel the opposite. Manjaro never worked reliably for me, but Fedora works great for my use case. Is it perfect? Fuck if I know. But it’s a good, no-nonsense, extremely low maintenance, super reliable distro that I use daily with zero issues.

Also, they pioneered the atomic distro concept that has amazing use cases, and some fantastic projects are based on this technology. My gaming PC runs Bazzite for a zero-maintenance, immediate gaming experience. My dads laptop runs Bluefin and he hasn’t broken it yet, and he’s capable of breaking every single OS.

So true. I bought an e-bike last autumn and have been using it for pretty much everything since then, but haven’t considered myself fully car-clean until a few weeks ago when I consciously experienced car brain for the first time. My bike was at the repair shop and I had to drive my daughter to daycare instead of biking there. A 5min ride became a 15min nightmare with traffic, anger and frustration, mixed with anxiety of being late. I don’t think driving does that but traffic messes with our brains and our mental health so much. It’s crazy that we consider this mental state “normal” while going somewhere.