Oh lord

EndeavourOS is pretty good at making using Arch a bit easier in an opinionated way.

Fedora's usually do a good job making the keyboard thing consistent. If you're gaming and want something that you don't need to adjust all the time check out Bazzite.

In any case give KDE Plasma desktop a shot especially if you're used to how Windows works. I mean a more vanilla version that what Garuda probably came with.

The people saying tiling managers are the shit are the ones who have been Linuxing for quite some time. I think newcomers should just always go for a major, mature, opinionated desktop first. KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. Mate or Xfce if you really like some old school aesthetic or have no RAM to speak of (<4GB). Distro choice comes after, I don't recommend base Ubuntu for most people because of the risk of enshittification from Canonical that I see on the horizon.

It's been great overall, after about one full year now. The only major complaints are keyboard-related. Between my work-supplied macbook that runs macOS, my old macbook that runs GNOME, and my desktop that runs KDE, keeping my muscle memory in tune with keybinds and shortcuts and window management is a headache. Maybe sometimes I'm thrown off by some command line tool not being available on Mac or Linux or it's named differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_from_the_Ministry

Yeah, I'm planning to spin them down so infrequently that it shouldn't matter in the long run.

I'll gladly take the advice on the NAS VM, I see so many tutorials virtualising TrueNAS and not a lot of the opposite viewpoint. If it's not a good practice I'd indeed rather recycle that setup while I'm at it.

I don't need to keep using Proxmox, or TrueNAS for that matter. If I need to DIY this with bare metal Debian, I will. My constraint is to have both always-on services and on-demand HDD backed services on the same machine. Sky is the limit after that..

Scheduling doesn't sound the best indeed, which is why I'd ideally want a simple button that I can click from a GUI.

So he's hinting that he has now discovered where autism comes from, conveniently passed from the mother's side? Checks out..

I'm on eOS, so this specific thing will be a non-issue.

I already have an old dumbphone as backup. It might actually get some use going forward. Installing Linux on my current main phone may be in order.

Another thing I'm thinking of is potentially combining the dumbphone with a tiny laptop, say 10-12 inch. We used to have this category of device in the early 2010s. With today's manufacturing it could be made to fit into a large coat pocket or purse. Need to look up if anyone is making these at this time.

If you have an nvidia card, which is very common and can't always be avoided, there is significant benefit in newer drivers, for one

F-droid

Fair about the SSD life. How would you go about achieving the frequent backups without zfs? I wouldn't want to implement it separately for every app I use, though I'm open to it if this doesn't work out.

I'll easily buy more memory if needed, the box now has 8GB and isn't struggling in any way.

What makes it tricky is, I think, that there are both kinds of voters so both viewpoints are kind of correct but piss the other side off with the implications. E: typo