Not to interject, but when people talk about using “Linux” they’re generally referring to desktop Linux (usually GNU/Linux). ChromeOS and SteamOS are Linux distros of a sort under the hood, but they’re also highly curated experiences. Android technically uses the Linux kernel but architecturally it’s so drastically different from basically any other system using it that it’s quite misleading to call it “Linux” in the colloquial sense.

Thanks ChatGPT.

The article you linked is describing how to set a static internal IP address (i.e. the address your computer uses within your local network) whereas YouTube would be seeing your external IP address (which is typically assigned automatically by your ISP). I’m not sure what the parent comment is referring to with “changing” their address, but I would assume they’re probably using a VPN or something similar so that YouTube sees the address of the current VPN server instead.

Pixel 8.

It’s overall a pretty good experience, but there’s occasional weirdness you may run into. For instance, up until a month or two ago I was encountering a bug that caused my phone to basically slow to a crawl after running Android Auto for 20 minutes or so, with a reboot being the only solution. This happened once while I was driving somewhere unfamiliar and it took about 5 minutes to start back up due to app optimization (which, incidentally, I don’t remember being a thing on other Android flavors after 2018 or so) so it turned into a whole adventure.

There’s also a fairly persistent issue I’ve run into where GrapheneOS starts very aggressively killing background apps, like as soon as another app gains focus. Not sure what that’s about but I haven’t really encountered it on other Android versions to the same extent, so I’m inclined to think it’s GOS-specific.

Ah, I assumed you were just talking about the upcoming release. AFAIK trixie-backports doesn’t exist yet though.

Debian stable only uses LTS kernel releases, so unfortunately you’ll need to wait for it to appear in trixie-backports.

Fedora Workstation has been really good in my experience. The available software is shockingly up to date and I haven’t run into much breakage of any kind in the year or so I’ve been using it across 2 systems (despite my best efforts every few months when the urge to tinker hits me). I do occasionally run into issues caused by the default SELinux policies, but they’re not especially difficult to work around if you’re comfortable using the terminal.

I do share your sentiment about the AUR - I definitely miss it at times. That said, Flatpaks and the fact that pre-built RPMs are so commonplace have both softened the blow a lot.

Odds are, it’s usually the opposite because they’re insecure and can’t handle when people do things differently from them.

If this isn’t projection then I don’t know what is.

Unless I’m mistaken, X has never had proper color management support in the first place.

When is the last time you tried a Wayland DE? I can’t speak to them all, but Plasma for one has been in really good shape for basically everything a typical user might want to do with it for around a year now.

X11 versus Wayland isn’t some kind of holy war; Wayland was specifically designed as a successor protocol to the largely cobbled-together X and is objectively superior to it in most ways outside of accessibility.

“systemd bad”

Not sure what the situation is on the NVIDIA side, but Mesa’s raytracing performance is… lacking. Don’t get me wrong; it’s amazing that it works as well as it does, but even with a high-end card it’s not the best experience. I don’t personally care much about RT, but if I were more into it I would probably consider setting up a Windows dual-boot.

The way I look at it is that most of my time spent fighting with the compiler is usually made up for in time saved debugging. I’m in the process of RIIRing a hobby project and so far most of the ported code just works, and I only end up needing to fix a few dumb logic mistakes before it’s fully up and running.

I’m not familiar with the specific install/upgrade process on Gentoo so maybe I’m missing something, but what’s wrong with forcing new installations to use time64 and then forcing existing installs to do some kind of offline migration from a live disk a decade or so down the line? I feel like it’s probably somewhat uncommon for an installation of any distro to be used continuously for that amount of time (at least in a desktop context), and if anyone could be expected to be able to handle a manual intervention like this, it’s long-time Gentoo users.

The bonus of this would be that it wouldn’t be necessary to introduce a new lib* folder - the entire system either uses time64 or it doesn’t. Maybe this still wouldn’t be possible though depending on how source packages are distributed; like I said I dont really know Gentoo.

The fact remains that Arch generally requires more work to maintain an installation than a typical point-release distro. I’m speaking from experience - I had two systems running Arch for over 2 years. I switched away when each system separately had a pacman update somehow get interrupted resulting in a borked install. I was using Mint before and Fedora now, and both are a lot more hands-off at the cost of some flexibility.

Also, just to be clear, I’m not trying to disparage Arch at all. I think it’s a really cool distro that’s perfect for a certain type of user; I just don’t think it’s great to lead people to believe it’s more reliable than it is in the way that I’ve been seeing online for a while now.

I hate when people insist that Arch isn’t easier to break. There was an incident a couple of years ago where a Grub update was rolled out that required that grub-mkconfig be re-run manually, and if you failed to do this the system would brick and you’d need to fix it in a recovery environment. This happened to my laptop while I was on vacation, and while I had luckily had the foresight to bring a flash drive full of ISOs, it was a real pain to fix.

Yes, Arch offers a lot more stability than people give it credit for, but it’s still less reliable than the popular point-release distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, and there’s not really any way around that with a rolling-release model. As someone who is at a point in life where I don’t always have the time nor energy to deal with random breakage (however infrequently), having the extra peace of mind is nice.