So on arch can you choose to run the deb anyway and get updates through the package manager, or is it that only AUR applications are the main application type? Or can you use both?

I have a number of apps that are super small teams/individual made that I can’t expect them to care about the AUR. What do you do in the case that an app developer doesn’t use the AUR?

What are some of your customizations?

you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly

Can you think of a quick example, out of curiosity?

First thing I wanna implore you do is create a separate partition on your boot drive for your /home folder. Distro hopping is super normal when you’re starting out, and by separating your home folder makes distro hopping very easy.

Bazzite, like others suggested, is your best bet at a first attempt because it’s much harder to cause irreparable damage with a stray terminal command.

All of the apps you listed should work just fine under Linux. Bazzite ships with Steam and Lutris (it’s a game store aggregator) to get you started with gaming. Use Microsoft 365 online or one of the open sourced alternatives like libreoffice for office apps. The rest of the programs should either be able to be run with wine/bottles/WinApps.

A 1050 is kinda paltry by today’s standards, so just don’t expect a big bump in gaming performance or super snappy emulation.

Option 2, with more emphasis on the login component. My files are safe, but I don’t wanna bother my buddy to 2FA me every time I need to reinstall Linux for whatever reason.

Omg thank you. I’m gonna try this out tomorrow

New problem: they have 2FA as well

Yes, lol. Long story short,I don’t have the password because it’s a shared account

It is; I want to reinstall my OS without losing my Dropbox install

I’m not, I’m on xubuntu at the moment

I was under the impression that one could force these to be themed, is that inaccurate? KDE Fedora btw.

Something immutable with VNC for tech support

I think the biggest draw to Synology now is the ultra low power consumption. Yeah, you could totally repurpose an old PC, but it’s crazy to run 500W perpetually. The reason they use old Celeron processors is the low power draw. In time, hopefully, RISC V can produce some low cost systems that would slot in well for this use case.

Was literally about to post about that. Going into this I was hoping the new trade war shit would’ve reignited the desire to switch, but alas: disappointment 🙃

What is it that rust is less preferable to?

It’s for the best. X11 is 40 something years old now and lacks any future proofing and security.

The multitouch trackpad for me is a great way to get the eye candy of having linear animations tied to your finger movement. In a practical sense, I use linear animations in MacOS to “peek” between desktops and pages in Safari all the time. The fact of the matter is that linear animations are just far smoother, and useful than ones that snap into place from a single input trigger. I even have a trackpad for my home desktop setup and literally don’t use my traditional mouse unless I’m playing a game that doesn’t support controllers.

A good example of this is to compare Windows’s app exposé with the MacOS one. In Windows when you swipe up (or down? I forget which one) with 4 (3?) fingers, once you hit a certain point the app exposé just appears no matter how slow or fast you’re doing the gesture. On MacOS, you can do the app expose gesture on the trackpad as slow or as fast as you want and it’ll animate in time with the speed of your fingers doing the gesture.

in my searching I found XClipper, but unfortunately it’s windows only on the PC side

sounds like a permanent clipboard history that you can search

that’s exactly what PastePal is, and what I’m looking for

someone needs to figure out a root method for Samsung phones that doesn’t trip Knox… I wish they weren’t the only OEM that had a complete ecosystem…