I do think those featues have become pretty common in PC gaming nowadays, which is why I’m more in favor of openSUSE as the beginner distro if I had to pick just one, but sure, let’s put that aside.

When it comes to Linux though I just don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all distro yet that I can safely recommend to everyone. And getting beginners onto a distro that fits them can greatly benefit their initial experience, so I think it’s worth it to give them a few simple choices. That said, you’re completely right that the way OP tries to explain the differences isn’t how you should do it. Ever. Less choices, less jargon, less mentions of fringe distros. It also doesn’t help that a lot of it seems to be based on hearsay rather than actual first-hand experience.

Do you really want to recommend btrfs to beginners?

I mean, it’s the default on Fedora with all its spins, openSUSE, CachyOS and even SteamOS for its root partition.

So lots of people use it nowadays without even knowing.

Chiming in, I’ll say that I mostly agree with your points, except for one:

Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.

They won’t care about X11 vs Wayland, sure. A non-ignorable number of them will care about stuff like HDR or multi-monitor setups where different refresh rates don’t stutter and VRR works, and that’s where proper Wayland support becomes a must.

If you recommend someone a distro that can’t do those things and later have to tell them that they have to switch distros for that chances are high they’ll just go back to Windows.

Mint is a fine distro, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that wants to do gaming right now either. None of the first class DEs are running on Wayland yet, which means that most monitor features of the last decade are not at all or badly supported.

There are some caveats, but you could always extend your storage capabilities with a USB-DAS. I currently have two with 4 slots each extending a small NUC-style server.

PS: I don’t see a mention of at least one SSD. If not already planned, you should at the very least use one for the OS.

I’m almost certain it’a troll, maybe even a previously banned one. Given their username it would be very ironic otherwise, considering that so far, in the week since they’ve created the account, they’ve only commented in order to rail against things that respect user freedom.

Less packages really doesn’t mean much in terms of how easy the system will be to manage. If anything, I’d say a distro with more, but pre installed packages is easier to manage because the maintainers will make sure that those packages will be as easy to work with and upgrade as possible.

That said, I’m definitely not going to stop you from trying Arch though. You can even get similar (or better) optimizations by using the ALHP repos and a kernel like linux-tkg or linux-cachyos for example, although the difference really is negligible in most cases.

Eh, while I agree that some recommendations are dodgy at best, I’ll argue that Wireguard is not only adding to security, it also makes Fail2Ban obsolete. Due to the way it works, you’ll completely hide the fact that you’re even running a SSH server at all, and this includes even Wireguard itself. More importantly though, it’s pretty much impossible to set up Wireguard in an insecure way, whereas SSH provides you with plenty of footguns. You’re not risking locking yourself out either.

Also, security comes in layers.

Exactly. No root login and no password login will do just fine as basic measures, but after that Wireguard is perfect tool for this, no weird rituals required and also quite useful for any other services you don’t want and/or need to expose to the internet as well.

I’d be wary of that fork. It’s run by a former Thunderbird dev that got banned for his toxic attitude and hasn’t really improved since. Just take a look at the projects website. Being so unrespectful towards your upstream project should have no place in open-source.

Can recommend as well. I recently checked what’s out when it comes to anything terminal-related and for the multiplexer I landed on zellij. Works well, looks neat, is easy to learn and well configured out of the box.

My current stack looks like this:

• Terminal emulator: kitty
• Terminal multiplexer: zellij
• Shell: fish
• Prompt: tide

Year-based version numbers are pretty neat IMO, particularly for applications. Not only can you quickly estimate how up-to-date any particular application is, it also avoids the version number racing problem between competing applications, because some people equate lower version numbers with a less developed application.

For programming libraries though semantic versioning is still the good ol’ reliable.

I see. So it’s less about editing the pictures themself, and more about what they’ll be used for.

And yeah, Krita is main image editing and drawing tool as well, helped out by Inkscape for vector graphics and Aseprite for pixel art.

Instead, I think Krita has a good chance of moving into photo editing with enough funding.

As someone who doesn’t really do photo editing, one thing I never quite understood is what’s missing for that to be viable right now.

For reference, the one time I had to edit a photo a few years ago, I just used Krita to move/remove a few objects and do some basic color grading. It didn’t feel like there was anything missing.

Granted, I never used software like Photoshop either.

You can enable it, but it just won’t work when more than a single monitor is connected to an Nvidia GPU.

Right now the only workaround other than turning off secondary monitors while gaming is connecting all but one monitor to an iGPU, assuming you have one.

As far as I know Nvidia has recently confirmed that they can reproduce the issue, so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.

Surely they didn’t mention multi-monitor VRR support because the work for that is already done and just about to arrive in the next beta driver any day now, right?

I’ve worked around the issue with an AMD iGPU, but still.