Over the last year or so NVIDIA massively improved their Wayland support. May not be perfect, may not be as good as AMD, but it usually cones with lass drawbacks than the X11 experience.

It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.

For me, that’s indeed the main reason. I actually prefer their look and feel of Gnome, but absolutely loathe quite a few of their stubborn decisions, so I currently stick with KDE (which is also great). From what I’ve seen and tried, Cosmic seems to try and become a mix between those two.

That, and it’s neat having a DE that offers both tiling and floating and treats them as equally important.

Agree. It’s neat for file transfers and simple one-shot backups, but if you’re looking for a proper backup solution then other tools/services have advanced virtually every aspect of backups so much it pretty much always makes sense to use one of those instead.

I’ve also done the math a few times and every time the cost of GamePass was higher than the amount of money I would’ve saved in that same timeframe.

The only way I could’ve saved money would’ve been to not purchase any games not on GamePass and limit myself to (worse) games included in the subscription.

So if I, someone who purchases and subsequently abandons a lot of game, so basically the target audience, can’t make GamePass work, I wonder how many people just run on copium when they mention how much money they save. Either that, or they treat gaming like junk food and don’t care about quality.

Then you deserve them even more. Fuck privacy and freedom I guess?

I know I will get downvoted for this opinion

Well yes. That’s what happens when your only argument boils down to “It could be worse”.

Oh please, stop the act, we can see your shitty referral link.

Yup, that’s how it works.

If you the flea caravan has already moved you’ll be out of luck for now. You’ll be able to fight it later on though in a slightly different spot.

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.

Yeah, that’s why I’m currently only recommending Mint to people who don’t do any gaming. It’s kind of a shame that Mint doesn’t have a KDE spin. It would be my unconditional beginner distro otherwise.

Personally I run CachyOS + KDE with native Wayland and HDR enabled system-wide. It’s kind of amazing how I don’t even need to clog the launch parameters of every game with a bunch of variables and tools like gamescope anymore. I just have to hit launch and all the fancy features just work.

I see.

HDR depends a lot on the monitor I guess. Mine isn’t really brighter in HDR mode than normal because it’s an OLED, so the big difference is that the darks can get darker and more detailed as opposed to the brighter brights on HDR LCD/LED panels.

As for VRR, I’m a huge fan of it and I can’t recommend it enough. Particularly on high refresh rate monitors and demanding game it’s a big win not having to tweak your settings so that the framerate always stays above the monitors specified refresh rate. No tearing. No penalty from not reaching the required framerate. Just a smooth presentation.

You can actually use VRR on X11, but only on for single monitor and it will introduce tearing on the others.

Neat theme.

everything has been running flawlessly.

I have to ask though: Do these monitors not have HDR or VRR and run at the same refresh rate?

Those are the things why I usually wouldn’t recommend Mint for high-end gaming rig like yours right now: None of the supported DEs are really ready for Wayland and therefore stuck with those problems (for now).

At the very least you can still pay a small one-time fee for the DWD WarnWetter app (or enter a code for firefighters).

Best 3€ I’ve ever spent purely out of spite, even if the reason behind it is complete BS.

Exactly. Locking basic services behind apps should be illegal. Services must be accessible to everyone.

What’s extra funny is that I already did all of this, and yet, I’ve been informed that my developer account is subject to deletion because I’m not active enough. Since my game does not get regular updates I said F this, let them delete my account. It’s still available for sideload on itch.io anyway. Jokes on me for believing that.

So yeah, it seems like Google is actively hostile towards building a library of software/games that just work and intentionally only wants live service garbage apps on their platform because those make more revenue.

I feel like a big problem is that a lot of people never learned how to learn.

Adding onto your examples, I’ve also heard about a study once where they were given similar basic Excel tasks. However, you didn’t even have to solve the tasks. Instead, just trying to get help from the help function or searching online got you into the highest skill bracket. That bracket ended up being the smallest group.

Because it wasn’t mentioned, I’ll just note that Joplin has also has the option to sync with a dedicated server component.

While it doesn’t work in a P2P configuration like a Syncthing setup allows, I’d recommend it for anyone with access to a server.