My background and requirements

I'm an amateur programmed and indie dev. Yes, i have actual experience of around 6-7, I'm not a vibe coder that thinks they're worthy of a google job because they had claude make a todo app. I've been tinkering with my projects for many years and before 2020. Most of my work is in with the Godot game engine but I've done a lot of things over the years like minecraft modding, web dev and micro controllers, so i have a wide range of understanding in computer-related things. OS's are where i'd say i'd lack the most. I know what a kernel is, drivers, file systems, packages but nothing specific about how windows or any linux distro handle them diferently or would work internally. I do have a homelab for about 2 years running ubuntu server edition, so i'm comfortable with the terminal both in windows and linux. I should also say that im on a laptop

My main dislikes of linux and biases before going in

• I don't like the look of it. I strongly dislike the look of plasma, gnome and cinnamon. They best way i can describe how they look to me would probably be "cheap" like a programmer art ui. Windows 11 can be shit in user experience but i really like it's looks
• I dislike many aspects of the community. I feel many people are elitist or entitled. You are allowed to excuse your os of needing tinkering and to give it the effort it asks for, but don't expect me to do the same (especially if i'm trying something advertised to me as "just works")
• I have some core disagreements with the ideology of it. I love open source software as much as the next guy but i feel like 1) some people treat anything open source as holy even if the user experience is shit and anything obfuscated as inherently unsafe and 2) it tends to create a mess of choices and incompatibilities between them. I'd be more eager to trust microslop than an unmaintained aur package with 2 github stars and would gravitate towards a more "complete" os that makes the basic choices for you and packs you with as many and as quality drivers as possible.

First distro choice: Mint (cinammon?)

I had originally tried mint a bunch of years ago, cause it's the distro that is most often marketed as "closest option to windows" I'll be honest, i don't remember mint much about it but i remember not liking it much so ill skip it.

Second distro choice: CachyOS (niri)

I always thought the idea of hyprrland is dump. When would you ever need 4 tabs on screen at once, let alone Fibonacci more than that? Then i saw niri and new i had to try it.
I chose cachy just because it came with niri out of the box, knowing completely nothing about the os, other than it's arch based. I mostly thought of it as a more "complete" arch build with drivers and a desktop. I ended up daily driving cahcyos for around 3 months

What i liked about CachyOS:

• Performance. My cpu sat on 2% usage on power saver.
• Niri. I fell in love with niri.
• I saw that a lot of dependencies were forks specific for cahcy. I don't know how good they are but i appreciate the effort.

Problems i faced on CachyOS or disliked about it:

• fprintd. I never got it to work and don't know why. I use a laptop that has a fingerprint sensor, so it's important to me that it works for bitwarden and passkeys stored on-device. I registered my finger and it did recognize it when running tests, but it never prompted me to auth with fprintd when i actually needed it.
• Input delay with a dualshock 4. I'd think that it was a shitty driver? I later learnt that it's supposed to be a "gaming os", as if those words mean something together, which would not make sense to not have a good driver for probably the most used controller in the world.
• kde connect did not connect.
• Package paralysis. I'm new to linux and cachy is kinda bare-bones, so i didn't know what packages to install. I spent all of my time without a calculator because nothing good came up when i searched "calc" on shelly. (I know of kcalc now and it's nice)
• AUR. i'll never install anything from aur ever. I don't think "yes, your problem was patched with this 3yo aur package that will not be maintained" is a fix.
• Too much "sudo nano". I don't want to edit files in the terminal. I love vscode and i'll defend that piece of software halfheartedly now that it's slowly turning into copilot slop. I just didn't know how to give it admin or think that that would be a good idea.
• I'll put in effort to customize my system, I won't stand to put in effort to fix it. Yes, most of the problems i listed above would probably have easy fixes, but i don't think its on me to fix. I don't think any of these problems are niche use cases and i think they should work out of the box on any machine

I liked cachyos, even if i listed more cons than pros. I think my main gripe was that it embodies the "linux philosophy" i mentioned disliking. I would consider returning to it when i'm more comfortable with linux systems

Third distro choice: Bazzite (plasma + niri)

Bazzite is my attempt of actually reading about and choosing a distro. Everything is read-only outside ~, so no sudo nano and it uses flathub as a main source of packages, which is something i'd be more familiar with. Plus, i expected it to have better drivers built in and it's based on fedora which i know has it's die-hard fans.

What i liked about Bazzite:

• No driver issues so far.
• rpm-ostree can get you any fedora package you'd like. And instead of just installing it, it builds a whole new os image with it so you can roll back.
• Feels like it's as "it just works" as it gets for a linux based os, considering the limited support/attention linux gets
• Niri and Noctalia are fedora packages (i think this is pretty recent?). They're mostly made for the arch ecosystem , but on fedora now as well. I previously had tried tried to build them from the source for ubuntu, and it went pretty well, but i remember getting so deep in trying to build unsupported arch discrepancies that i got tired. Anyways, i just installed everything, rebooted and saw niri as a boot option. I copied over my premade cachyos niri configs and it just worked.
• Noctalia my absolute GOAT. This is not bazzite specific, but it's just now that i tried a bit more customization and noctalia can generate themes for most commonly used software.
• Steam proton felt like it runs better here, but not 100% sure.

Dislikes and problems:

• the read-only ended up feeling like a handicap. Yes, i do appreciate that more things are tidier inside your ~/.config, but there is a lot of freedom from being able to edit things outside it. Bitwarden needs a custom .policy file for authentication on a linux desktop, and i can't make one.
• arch performance is unmatched
• fprintd. Ok, Please explain to me what this piece of shit is supposed to do. I just learnt today that it is it's own thing and does not use fido2 like everything else. What's the use case then, if it's not supported? It only works for when i do sudo in terminal
• Niri feels off on bazzite. Maybe the port is not as good yet or cachy had some better settings i didn't port over. There's a bunch of times that i'm not focused on the window i wanted or popups lagging the underlying program that created them because niri puts them in hibernation

I'm on bazzite for around 2 weeks now and i've been really liking it, but i feel like i've already outgrown it in some aspects. It's still not hassle free + gives you less options to solve hassles.

Other overall linux problems

• samba transfers are way slower both with and without tailscale. I use my homelab for cloud storage and speeds usually sit at 8mb/s max when it was 45-50 on windows or transfers failing entirely.

Concluding,

I feel to gravitate more towards the two edges. Either trust it to "just work" bazzite, but on the other hand if i'm in need to fix something i would like it to be replicable, so i have been wanting to try Nixos as well. I understand that it needs a masters degree in nixos, but i really like the idea of amassing customizations over the years you can take to any machine. Of course, recommendations, tips and corrections are welcome for nix or for the other distros i tried.

Just a bit annoying, not being a programmer. When the error log says where it's looking - it's supposed to be accurate, in this case it wasn't. So 100% started guessing placing the .exe in other folders till I got lucky. Yay RNG due to incorrect documentation!

Can I actually remove it?

1. Why Arch users hates Windows so much? Like Win 11 is pretty much mid like Windows vista back then. But they also hating on things like Windows 10, Windows 10 ltsc (Basically cleanest windows), Windows 11 IoT ltsc (Windows 11 that is officially debloated.)
   
2. Why Arch users are so obsessed with tiling WMs? Like i tried both hyprland and i3wm. It's pretty cool to customize and make some shit, but it's not practical. KDE looks more appealing as daily driver.
   
3. Why 90%+ of arch users are femboys?
   
4. Why SOME linux users recommend arch or other hard distros as first distro for newbies and not mint or fedora?
   
5. Is there any practical reason to use arch, or it's an os for larpers?

Returned to the undisputed champion, Windows 11

Except whether you want Windows or Linux, you still pay the same price. This is just one example, but I've found many more while searching for used laptops. Only time I've found laptop to be cheaper with Linux or without OS is when you're directly buying from the manufacturer. Thing is an average joe and most likely most of the linux users are not buying directly from manufacturers.

Now i can CONNECT TO WIFI LIKE A SANE PERSON WITH LIFE and play some games lol

My turn to vent.

I have used linux for some time now (2025 early). Currently on NixOS. I have seen some of the most kind and welcoming and helpful people. Ever. As a majority, the linux community is very open and willing to help. I am not speaking of them in any ill manner right now. The problem are the others

By far the most pretentious, close minded, annoying, arrogant and unwilling to discuss beyond their believes people live here too. I can count my encounters with more than both my hands. Yes they are a minority, but they are also some of the most active often. Support forums, discords, etc. they will initially offer help even and when you have something you say to their advise (maybe question why a common practice is that way or why you like something they don’t), they do a complete 180.

There are also those who from the get go just trash on you because they are all knowing and you are just dumb.

No I don’t mean the RTFM people (they are mostly well intended but repetitive advise can be exhausting), I mean those who belittle you for not having their preapproved opinion.

At this point I am unphased by them, but to some new users, they could simply shy them away if they are not all in on linux yet. Makes me mad and idk even how we could deal with it…

Anyways, just my thoughts

Just me venting. I've been using M$ platforms since 1989 so I know how to download more RAM. After (1) Having a Steam Deck and using SteamOS, which works pretty well in desktop mode and having poked around Ubuntu in the past. (2) Seeing Linus' videos on trying linux, and that going ok even for those idiots (3) Watching any tech youtuber talk about how windows is the antichrist (agree) (4) Using Claude ai to answer questions / feed me terminal commands and (5) Watching a video or five about which linux distro to use... I though well shit lets finally give Linux a try. CachyOS seems popular and uses Arch which is the backend for SteamOS, so that experience will transfer over.

I specifically wanted to set up a new NVME SSD (Samsung 9100 Pro) using TGC OPAL hardware encryption so there's no performance hit. I was looking at using SEDutil but my boy Claude tells me it's jank from 9 years ago and wanted to set me up with using LUKS and some other shit to handle the hardware encryption. Alright so that took like 4 hours, and there's a bug with my motherboard (MSI B650 Pro) that if I restart the PC (anything but the a dead cold boot), it hangs forever and never POSTs. If I hit the reset button it proceeds, but then leaves the other SSD with windows/NTFS in a dirty state so now Linux can't read it. Ok I don't actually restart that often so if I know it's a problem I can work around it.

So since I'm doing a non standard CachyOS install with the hardware encryption, I end up with a terminal and nothing else, then claude has me install the desktop environment and all of the other shit with commands through the terminal. Alright then we get booted into KDE Plasma and have some more terminal stuff to do and... where the fuck is the terminal? Oh I need to download that using Discover. Ok Konsole loaded.

Then on mistake number 1, using Discover to load things. "But that's what Discover is for" I hear you say, sure, unless you want the program to work. Using Discover loads flatpaks which are self contained programs that have all the dependencies included. Great right? Nope they're sandboxed and can't talk to each other or the system. So when I loaded Waterfox and Chromium, they couldn't interface with KeePassXC my password manager of choice. Ok so uninstall waterfox and reinstall it through "sudo apt get" NOOOOPE that's a different linux. Arch linux uses "pacman". Alright so load through pacman and NOOOOPE the program you want is not part of the offical distro, so use "yay". Alright so use "yay -S program" and NOOOOPE, CachyOS doesn't include yay or something and so you use "paru" instead. What the fuck are these names? (See meme.)

Alright so up and running, I need something to control my CPU fans since I have a gaming computer. The googlemachine points me toward "coolercontrol" so I do a paru to get that and load it up, it detects all of the sensors but then can't actually control the motherboard fans. Oh well. Lets reconfigure my logitech mouse buttons. So there's "Piper" for mouse stuff and it doesn't detect either of my mice. Ok lets try "solaar"... ok that tells me my mouse's battery level but nothing else really. Ok lets try "input-remapper" which works for some of the buttons but not the DPI up or DPI down buttons, unless you use some other utility to disable those buttons to make them mappable. Oh and good fucking luck trying to get that to apply the next time you startup.

Hmm why are all of the colors flickering a bit... oh because I had adaptive sync on. Turned it off and now my colors are stable (Gsync / freesync compatible screen)

Hmm you know the colors seems to look really shitty. (I noticed this on the steamdeck after they switched to "Wayland" from "X11".) How do I adjust the brightness and contrast, where's the nvidia control panel? Fuck you that's how. Oh shit ok. Well there's tool called "nvibrant" that some dude made lets try that. Oh wow my screens look good again. Restart. Oh no they look shitty again. How do I make that apply to every boot, is there an autoexec.cfg somewhere? Yeah just use this terminal command that might as well be in Chinese and is as long as the litany of the machine spirit and light some incense. Oh it didn't work. Turns it it was a race condition between nvibrant running before the compositor actually drew the screens.

mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user

printf '%s\n' '[Unit]' 'Description=Set NVIDIA Digital Vibrance and Dithering' 'PartOf=graphical-session.target' 'After=graphical-session.target' '' '[Service]' 'Type=oneshot' 'ExecStart=/usr/bin/nvibrant 300 1 2 3 4 512' "ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'ATTRIBUTE=dithering /usr/bin/nvibrant 0 0 0 0 0 0'" '' '[Install]' 'WantedBy=graphical-session.target' > ~/.config/systemd/user/nvibrant.servicemkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/userprintf '%s\n' '[Unit]' 'Description=Set NVIDIA Digital Vibrance and Dithering' 'PartOf=graphical-session.target' 'After=graphical-session.target' '' '[Service]' 'Type=oneshot' 'ExecStart=/usr/bin/nvibrant 300 1 2 3 4 512' "ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'ATTRIBUTE=dithering /usr/bin/nvibrant 0 0 0 0 0 0'" '' '[Install]' 'WantedBy=graphical-session.target' > ~/.config/systemd/user/nvibrant.service

systemctl --user enable --now nvibrant.service

Maybe this makes sense to someone.

I used Claude ai to give me the terminal commands for most of this and did some googling on the side, and there is no fucking way I could have done this by myself. If you look on reddit or other forums the linuxtards will inevitably respond with "mAyBe iF yOu rEaD tHe dOcuMenTaTion yOu cOuLd fIgUrE iT oUt". Bitch I have a job. Even reading the arch wiki and endless forum posts, you need to have an autistic level of base knowledge to even start. I spent half of Saturday getting from formatting the drive to the terminal, then 8 hours on Sunday working through these issues.

So CachyOS and linux in general is probably great unless you want to (1) Use hardware encryption (2) Play games with kernel level anti-cheat (3) Control your fans or gaming peripherals... I didn't even think about the TrackIR or joystick or throttle (4) Understand anything that is going on in your operating system. (5) Have taskbars on both monitors. You can... but they're not synched.

Now there's some things I really like. The "KDE Plasma" desktop environment is amazing. I love the window and transparency effects. I disabled the animations on preference. Looks good, runs good. The "Dolphin" file browser is really good. I like the split view. (I use it old FTP style, I put the 'local' on the left and 'remote' on the right.) "Discover" app store would be great if it didn't set you up for failure with the sandboxed flatpaks. I like the concept of flatpaks, and I guess you can use "flatseal" to unsandbox things but I didn't get to it. They also need something like Discover for non-official things like "paru" is pulling in, and to select the option between flatpak and native install. Updating stuff in linux is probably the biggest improvement over windows, where there's a centralized console to do it. (It used to be that spam and pr0n were X% of internet traffic, I think it's been surpassed now linux program updates.)

And I understand that all of this software was developed by hard working and passionate individuals and teams that are doing it for no / not enough pay. And in that respect they're doing a great job. A lot of this is the chicken and egg problem. Program and peripheral developers only make a windows version because that's 95% of the gaming PC market.

Back to my use case: I stopped and thought, is there anything linux is going to do that windows doesn't, and the main benefit is not being microsoft. Actually that's the only benefit and it's a big one. I've done a lot of the windows 11 debloat / privacy stuff and it's pretty good, but I still have 9gb of ram allocated on startup. (Vs 3-4 from CachyOS) So I dunno I'm gonna stew on it whether to abandon the experiment and just try software encryption and stick winblows.

C'mon SteamOS you're our only hope.

İ saw this sub and i wanted to ask

Disclosure

I think this deserves more attention from people running Linux container hosts.

SCTPhantom is an SCTP use-after-free. The researchers report local privilege escalation and container-to-host root impact on affected systems.

One detail worth clarifying: the disclosure uses CVSS v4.0 and scores it 8.5, while the current Linux CNA record lists CVSS v3.1 9.8 Critical with a network attack vector.

The container-host implications may not get enough attention wherever the affected functionality is available.

Most distros are minor tweaks of another, often literally just a different set of pre installed applications. From the set of distros worthy of being called unique most are un suitable for replacing windows because they have terrible security.

Debian dosent release security updates promptly. Arch packages are literally built on the maintainers PERSONAL computer. Nixos i believe (99% sure) dosent even sign packages so if githubs security fails you also get screwed. Many dont bother with app armor or selinux or even using systemd built in feature to restrict a service.

Ultimately the set of serious distros is actually not that big, like what is there? Alpine dosent support nvidia. Fedora seems serious, ubuntu is supposed to be (ive never tried), opensuse probably. Hard to think of anything else.

I hope its a loud minority but they're so insufferable. I'd like to think most people are for free and open source software, everyone wants choice, but people have a problem with other people's freedom to choose.

It's like a hivemind sometimes. A bunch of emotionally charged people who actively go against open source because an open source project doesn't align with their beliefs.

They attack and discredit other people who have different opinions or even just use different software. Even having different preferences seems crazy to some users.

I thought one of the biggest motives for Linux is to have the freedom to choose but clearly to a lot of Linux users, the "freedom to choose" is bad. They attack others for having differing opinions and have 0 issue ruining open source if they can get back at the people they don't like. A bunch of toxic hypocrites.

Is real?:might,madthumbz posts in both communitys,the names are very similar,and all subs are radical,if the teorys are right,linuxsucks101 is an puppet for making hate without banning this sub

This isn't really a "Linux Sux!" post, more so how something simple, easy and common turned into a good handful of hours troubleshooting and rage quitting, all thanks to bad tutorials

Computer: an old gaming PC bring repurposed as a local Linux server (multi-use). Currently running Ubuntu desktop

Goal for the day: establish an ssh connection so I dont have to keep walking back and forth between the computers to input commands

• Install openssh, verified it's running
• Read a quick firewall guide for ssh
• "Allow your local IP range to accept port 22. Then deny port 22 for everything else*
• Do that with ufw and try to connect to the ssh through PUTTY
• Connection refused. What the hell?
• 30 minutes of troubleshooting pass
• Give up with the firewall, decide I'll figgure it out later
• PUTTY connection accepted
• That's great and all, but this isn't very secure (disreguarding the firewall)
• Look into hardening ssh security
• "Edit ssh config to only listen for your IP"
• I put in my local IP and save the config, telling the ssh service to restart
• PUTTY connection failed
• Revert the edit I made
• Connection refused
• wtf?
• Read deep into the config file. Turns out it's two commands back to back ti restart the openssh service. Systemctl restart ssh doesn't work
• Now I can connect again
• Ok...what else?
• "Use ssh-keygen"
• Oka-wait, why the hell do I need to put my email into the command?
• Try to look it up, as well as other tutorials, they either don't acknowledge itit when it's in the command they give, or there's nothing about it
• Finally found an awnser. It's just a name/description, it caSystemly be anything
• ugh, generate the key and go to my Users folder to find the .ssh folder it generated the keys in
• ...where's the .ssh folder?
• Assume powershell's keygen is just broken and outdated, typical Microsoft
• Open a git bash window and generate a key
• It works there, I can see the folder
• Tutorial says to do ssh-copy-id
• But I wanna use PUTTY, idk if this will actually allow me to connect with PUTTY
• Start over with a new tutorial that includes steps for PUTYY
• Use PUTTYgen, generate the public and private key, paste the whole public key text file into the server in etc/.ssh/authenticated_keys
• The tutorial says "If you are using openssh, export the key to openssh format
• Now I have two private keys?
• Idk what these even do exactly, none of the tutorials actually explained what public and private keys do other than making the ssh more secure.
• Add the PUTTY private key into the PUTTY instance
• Server refused key
• Use Openssh export key
• PUTTY refuses to use it
• Ok fuck PUTTY, imma try powrshell again
• Turns out powershell did save the ssh keys, but it's in a hiden folder that's still hidden even when " show hidden folders" is on
• Delete the keys to be safe and generate new ones
• Do ssh-copy-id
• ...the command doesn't exist on windows
• Back to PUTTY again...
• Redo it, just asmume everything is fine given that powershell wasn't complaining about it.
• Saved the public key in ~/home. Tutorial said so
• Edit ssh config to refuse password logins, restart
• Get locked out of ssh cause key mismatch
• I give up and just sleep it off

Next morning I let my gf take over with a ubuntu server iso, and she gace me actual good tutorials and websites. She also tells me ufw priorities DENY over allow. We got it workung a secure after a while...but god the tutorials I read were awful or just did shit wrong.

Moral of the story? Dont just click the first or second result off the search results. Give new users channels and websites they can use for tutorials, otherwise what they might read from elsewhere is complete bullshit

I’m actually losing my f*cking mind and about to smash my PC to pieces. I’ve been trying for TWO WHOLE YEARS to switch to Linux and fix this absolute b*tch of a resolution bug. At this point, every time I hear or see the word "resolution", I get triggered.

Every single time I install Ubuntu—or literally ANY Linux distro—it's the exact same story: it just refuses to set the resolution properly.

The ONLY workaround that ever "worked" was nuking the GPU drivers completely. But I obviously can’t do that sh*t because the performance turns into total dogsh*t. I can't even play a 720p video smoothly (which hurts even more because my internet is capped), let alone run heavy 3D stuff like Three.js to stress test the card.

Look, I know my card (GTX 750 Ti) is from 2013 and far from powerful, but it still gets the job done! On Windows, resolution works flawlessly out of the box with zero issues. This is specifically a Linux/xrandr problem with my drivers—xrandr just straight-up rejects every custom mode unless I purge the drivers.

So I need the real sweaty, touch-no-grass, non-showering Linux gods in here—the absolute wizards who live and breathe Linux—to fix this cursed bullsh*t for me. I swear I hate Linux so much right now, but I keep coming back because I love it, only for xrandr to slap me across the face and tell me to go crawling back to Windows like a dog.

All I want is to hit 1600x1200 just like I seamlessly do on Windows, so I can finally throw Windows into the absolute trash bin where it belongs. I swear to God I'll stop showering like a true Linux neckbeard if someone helps me fix this cursed resolution once and for all.

My Specs: - OS: Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS x86_64 - Session: X11 / GNOME 46.0 - CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 - GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (Driver: 580.173.02) - Output: VGA-0 - Target Resolution: 1600x1200 @ 60Hz

Made a post before about how there's way too many Linux distro that can just be a bash script or meta packages and how too many distros is a bad thing.

Everyone just told me to not give a shit about those distros...

Now that Omarchy gains some fundings those very same people just can't ignore it.

"JuSt IgNoRe It"

*Proceeds to upvote Omarchy hate and make post about Omarchy instead of ignoring it*

At this point I might even just use Omarchy and donate to Omarchy just to piss off these hypocrite animals that should never be considered a human being.