You haven’t provided a lot of detail on what your current setup looks like. If you use a gaming-focused distro like Cachy or Bazzite they should essentially work “out of the box.” Bazzite is also very difficult to break since the immutability makes for very effective guard rails for new users.

If you went with Arch right off the bat, you did take on quite a lot for a new user, but - and I do genuinely mean this - there is no better way to learn the ins and outs of Linux than jumping into the Arch deep end. Even if you choose to switch to a lower-maintenance distro, your effort with Arch is never wasted.

Want a very low maintenance gaming distro with almost no setup? Bazzite.
Want a more hands-on gaming centric distro like SteamOS? CachyOS.
Want a more stable all-around distro that also works great for gaming? Fedora.

Avoid Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu. You will see Mint recommended often, but I personally only recommend it for older hardware that you are trying to revitalize. There are better options.

A new version of Debian just released, and there is no more rock solid distro than Debian. Add KDE Plasma and you will have a very low maintenance, pleasantly familiar, extremely reliable system.

And deadites.

It’s not just you. Cursor is horrible.

So far, the only time AI seems to works well - and only sometimes - is as autocomplete for a single line. It does such a terrible job at generating larger chunks of code that you will spend more time correcting the problems than if you had written it yourself or used the template-based features of a half-decent IDE. It doesn’t matter which LLM you use, they are all bad. Everything an AI outputs is a hallucination, even when it’s correct. The system is not capable of reasoning or thinking, it can’t apply logic to problems. As a result, you can’t trust any code it gives you in the least.

I know that saying this here is preaching to the choir, but don’t use Microsoft or Google products. None of them. They can and will take things from you. They cannot be trusted.

Also it’s not like a landlord hard zero risks

Then they should sell instead of renting.

It sounds like it uses similar ideas to Amazon Kiro. Many of the advancements in “vibe coding” tools are focused on ways to put consistent, coherent bumpers on AI output.

Please see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominatrix

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is excellent and no less beginner friendly than any other major distro, so I wouldn’t worry. It really is one of the most underrated distros out there.

Kubuntu could be a good option for you, but I recommend doing the “Minimal” install to avoid Snaps and bloat.

If you are mostly about gaming and flatpak, then consider Bazzite. You can’t just install packages on Bazzite, so if you need to do things that aren’t already built in then you need to use containers or, as a last resort, create a new layers with rpm-ostree.

For the record, Arch and it’s offshoots don’t especially resonate with me, either. I want my OS to “just work”, but at the same time I want to have the ability to go wild whenever and however I feel like it.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Bazzite lately and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it to most Linux newbies, especially gamers who want their system to “just work.” It’s also a very interesting system for jaded old Linux users because it works so differently than we’re used to. The “everything needs to be a container” paradigm is very interesting and has a lot of security and stability benefits.

If you want more control and freedom, then OpenSUSE is definitely the best option here. I’d only fallback to Kubuntu if there was some software you need that only ships in .deb and you have no other options. I’m not a fan of Canonical or what they’ve done to the Ubuntu ecosystem.

I’ve lived through that entire journey. I still don’t trust the printer, though.

I don’t like Beyond and have only met one or two people who do, but aside from the taste problem they are expensive. Meat alternatives need to be a fraction of the price of meat, but instead they are treated as luxury bourgeois foodstuff. We need to do better.

In PHPs defense, it keeps evolving in positive, meaningful ways. If you are up to date with it, it’s quite sophisticated and enjoyable. Doubly so if you use a framework like Laravel.

There should be some powerful antitrust action against payment processors over this. There is a very small oligopoly and trust that gets to dictate their own arbitrary morality to the entire planet. That must not be tolerated.

How does one join this “pleb with hundreds of millions of dollars” club?

where everything you install comes from the first-party distro repo, you’ll likely be fine.

Canonical’s Snapcraft has a bad reputation for a reason. Many reasons. But compromised apps is a major one.

Linux is gaining market share quickly as the Windows 10 EOL rapidly approaches. There is still a massive amount of perfectly great hardware out there that isn’t officially supported by Windows 11, and only 3 months until Windows 10 reaches EOL.

From an electrical engineer, here’s what this means as an ELI10.

The “Thomson effect” is a phenomenon where running electrical current through a material changes how heat moves through that material. For example, if you have a wire and heat the middle of it over a flame, when you apply an electric current you notice the wires temperature change in different places. Different materials/metals behave differently. Some (like Iron) will appear to “push heat toward the cooler parts” when a current is run through them while others (like copper) will appear to “pull heat toward the hotter parts” when a current is run through them. It’s an interesting interaction between heat, electricity, and certain materials.

The “Transverse” Thomson Effect is a theoretical (until now) phenomenon where a magnetic field is added to the equation. The theory was that the addition of a magnetic field could move the temperature changes to the sides of the electrical current, instead of simply forward/backward along the current. So if you heat a plate instead of a wire, you would see temperatures change on the left/right instead forward/backward. This has been very difficult to test accurately because of the complexity in how all these things (heat, material, electrical current, and magnetic field) can interact.

The only thing this does is punish everyone and implement more surveillance.

Tories: Precisely.

Self-hosting a search engine is unfortunately not feasible given the amount of data and power required for it. Not to mention access to the data (crawling yourself or using another index).

For privacy and customization there is Kagi, which is amazing and very customizable, but requires a paid subscription. You are a customer rather than the product, though.

I read it and regret the time I wasted doing so. It’s the same tiresome “enlightened centrism” propaganda we’ve been bombarded with for decades.

“If you oppose anti-intellectualism then you are the one being anti-intellectual.” It’s classic newspeak rubbish.

Al-Shamahi, 41, who describes her politics as “wokey-progressive — definitely left-wing”, said scientists who do not fit the political mould increasingly keep their heads down for fear of the response. “A lot of them feel that they have to hide their thoughts and their opinions.”

“Where are the deeply, deeply devout religious scientists? Where are the right-wing scientists? If all our biases are not in the room it leads to worse science outcomes.”

The definition of rightism is appeal to authority - but only the chosen in-group authority - above all else and at all costs. It is utterly and fundamentally incompatible with the search for knowledge and truth.

Where are the religious and right-wing scientists? They either deconstructed because they realized fairy tales aren’t real or they are twisting themselves in knots to convince others of their bizarre (and often hateful) foregone conclusions, which is anti-science.

The article goes on to mention the mask debate during COVID while completely missing the fact that the topic itself was literally science (masking to protect yourself and others) versus a murder-suicide cult (rightists).

Leftism is not a monolith the way rightism is. There are many different leftist ideals and theories, but rightism is exclusively about the consolidation of power.

A rightist scientist would be a comic book villain, believing in science and using it to harness power for themselves. The book The Authoritarians by Dr. Bob Altemeyer would call this type of person a “Social Dominator”, and they aren’t scientists because science is not a useful tool for controlling others and amassing power for yourself.