Weird, am I blind or is there no SteamOS?
I know it’s based on Arch, but it is NOT Arch.

I used Awesome about 5 years ago, and was extremely happy with it, unfortunately an upgrade of Awesome broke my scripts so nothing worked, and I didn’t have the time to be distracted and fix it. So I switched to XFCE.
Pretty annoying to have many hours of work destroyed like that. If they have a promise now to not break compatibility with upgrades, I might consider trying it again. But I don’t care for a user environment that breaks completely because of changes in an upgrade.

Ah yes of course, I just haven’t used manual mount for almost a decade. So I completely forgot we used to do that. I have to unmount it first though, because USB sticks are automatically mounted.

Yes that’s annoying too, I have no clue why it does that, but when the sync says “clear”, I always wait a couple seconds, and run sync again a couple of times, to see if it’s actually finished. And only THEN unmount the stick.
Copy to USB does not seem very solid on Linux IMO. So I also ALWAYS buy sticks with activity LED.
But even that can fool you, sometimes when I think a smaller copy is finished, because the LED stops blinking, it suddenly starts up again, after having paused for about 1½ second?!?!

noatime

Oh boy, yes I remember I used to disable that shit ages ago in fstab, that’s quite annoying that’s still necessary!!!
How do you do that for USB sticks?

except linux waits on updating the UI until all write buffers are flushed, whereas Windows does not.

I wish that were true here. But when I copy to USB the file manager ( XFCE/Thunar ) shows the copy is finished and closes the copy notifications way way before it’s even half done, when I copy movies to a stick.
I use fast USB 3 stick on USB 3 port, and I don’t get anywhere near the write speed the stick manufacturer claims. So I always open a terminal and run sync, to see when it’s actually finished.

I hate to the extreme when systems don’t account for write cache before claiming a copy is finished, it’s such an ancient problem we’ve had since the 90’s, and I find it embarrassing that such problems still exist on modern systems.

A standard boot system for Arm would have been awesome 10-20 years ago! I dreamed about that already back in 2005 when the OLPC idea was new, but when the netbooks finally came out, based on somewhat similar ideas, they were exclusively Intel!!!

I must admit that after having waited in vain for 20 years now, I no longer give a shit. I cannot fathom how Arm didn’t create such a standard at least a decade ago?
Initial Netbooks with Linux were very popular, but when vendors switched to a deprecated version of Windows, that ran way worse in every way, popularity of Netbooks actually dropped for a while, and the entire concept was basically declared dead. Because they were next to unusable compared to the early Linux Netbooks.

Netbooks with Arm/Linux could have been HUGE!! But now the time has passed, because many use IOS or Android instead.

None of that ever happened

It was so fucking obvious, how he was paid by companies to do some arbitrary shit, and later there would be a stellar review of their products.
You had to be blind to not see it. It was hidden advertising, and it’s even illegal! But I think he changed his approach to make it BARELY legal now.

He has since apologized, made the victim whole (or as whole as can be)

Yeah after it became a scandal that hurt his business and reputation.

Oh, does he still exist? I’ve blocked his channels, because he is simply not trustworthy. Everything he makes is at best infomercials. He’s a sellout.

Edit:
To those who downvote, really?
It’s been so obvious already years ago, that his reviews depend heavily on who advertises with him. He was also called out on it, and even ADMITTED it! (Apologized) Then said he would be more open in the future. Note he didn’t say he would change, only that he would hide it less! Fool me once…
Also the incident where he was a total asshole to a small cooler developer, and used the prototype wrongly, then wouldn’t deliver it back, despite that was the agreement, and it was a pretty expensive prototype to make for a small company, and then he auctioned it away!
He was revealed to have behaved like an asshole all the way. But go ahead and support him if you want.

That’s a pretty decent amount of time ago. I switched a bit earlier, when XP was still going strong. In 2005 when Ubuntu Breezy Badger came out. Goddam it was a good distro for the time, and it became my main OS. For years it was like free gifts when a new Ubuntu came out. In the early Ubuntu days, Ubuntu was way ahead of all the rest, and the forum was amazing.

Yeah well, you can say anything and I wouldn’t know. I haven’t used Windows for 15 years, and Linux became my main OS in 2015.
I just ordered a new CPU and SSD, and I’m quite looking forward to making a new install, because my current system is running on a 6 year old installation. Although it’s a rolling release distro, I can see there are desktop improvements I haven’t got. Also I’ll be going back to KDE, since they’ve fixed the hotkeys on numeric keypad issue. I’m almost giddy about it. 😀 😜

IDK, Steam Deck is kind of a game changer, with SteamOS also getting a lot better. Kinda easy to say it is what it is in hind sight IMO.

There was clearly an increased popularity of Linux when Windows Vista and Windows 8 came out.
IDK if Windows 11 is bad enough to make much difference. People were really pissed about Vista and 8 which helped Linux some.

It’s nice to see that Linux is doing well on Steam.
But with Steam deck being pretty successful, and showing that gaming on Linux is viable now, I kind of hoped for more.
But as the AMD numbers showed for years after Ryzen came out, the inertia in the market is huge. And change takes time.

As a former Windows SUPERUSER, I always change the desktop wallpaper, just to show off. 😋

But jokes aside and apart from things already mentioned, I always install the Speedcrunch calculator, and xbindkeys so I can copy all my keyboard shortcuts.

That’s true, and it’s amazing we can get it legally for free.

They’re not selling it

Yes they are selling it with help desk subscriptions. But mostly to professionals.
https://ubuntu.com/desktop/contact-us

Corporate ownership, but you can have that and still be generally accepted in the community. Like both Fedora when controlled by Red Hat and Suse when controlled by Novell.
One of the real problem is their dual license policy for their open source projects, that grant Ubuntu full license and the power to close in an Open source Project if they want. This is decidedly against the GPL spirit, but can be done with dual licensing.
Another problem is the “not made here” mentality, which undermined Wayland for instance.
Ultimately the problem is I guess, that Ubuntu is (was?) trying to make Ubuntu exclusive to Linux, with Canonical controlling key technologies. Seemingly an effort to reduce other Linux distros to second rate players.
Another example of that (apart from dual license and Mir) is their new package system Snap, which is open source on the client side, but proprietary on the server side.
Obviously it’s not a good idea for Linux to use proprietary package systems.

These are of course ideological issues, if you don’t give a shit about those, I suppose Ubuntu is mostly OK. Except minor annoyances like media not working out of the box. And that the PPA system sucks.

Thanks, you just made my day. 😀

I switched in 2005, I miss being in my 40’s. 😋