methodicalaspect

HeliumOS, Kubuntu, Linux Mint (standard and Debian Edition), Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, VanillaOS, and Zorin OS here. Helium and Vanilla are not necessarily beginner-friendly but I use them in specific places.

May you run into a nerd with a Ventoy USB full of beginner-friendly distros in their back pocket to help you along your journey.

There are at least two of us out there, I’m sure of it.

Proxmox 9 dropped too, their major releases coincide with Debian’s. Upgrade process on a single standalone box was completely uneventful; I’ll be trying a 9-node cluster on Monday.

Exactly the correct approach. Similar thing happened to one of my friends a couple years back with Nord. This sort of “leak” could happen with any other VPN provider; not binding the interface is just rolling the dice.

My son, 14, is on Bazzite now after using Pop!_OS for 5 years. He specifically requested it after using it at my office and seeing how well the Logitech steering wheel he uses works in Forza Horizon 5. He’s decent with tech, to the point that his teachers called on him to help with their problems during middle school, so maybe not the best example.

My daughter, 11, is on Pop!_OS. She’s currently at the tech level you describe, though sometimes she forgets to turn the power strip on, making me think she may be slightly below that. Her PC has been on that distro for a good 2 years, though she really only plays Minecraft, watches YouTube videos, and does her homework with OnlyOffice. Zero tech-related complaints from her, once she’s logged in she’s able to do what she needs with little to no assistance.

After stints in EndeavourOS and AlmaLinux I’ve settled on Kubuntu 24.04 LTS. I needed something stable with zfs in its official repo, so I don’t risk losing access to the big volume that contains all my raw video footage after a kernel update. The experience has been about as unremarkable as possible, which is exactly what I was looking for.

All three of us are using nvidia GPUs, and have had no trouble with drivers in the slightest. I use mine for gaming and video editing using DaVinci Resolve Studio, and while I was looking for as unremarkable an experience as possible, I’ve been using Linux since around 1996, so my tech experience doesn’t align with what you’re looking for; however, if this means anything, I’d switch my 85-year-old father with dementia to Linux Mint without worrying that he wouldn’t know his way around.

Yes, that’s the only reason. You can mix drive sizes and still have a dedicated parity drive to rebuild from in case things go poorly. I am aware that it’s basically LVM with extra steps, but for a NAS I just want it to be as appliance-like as possible.

Still using Scale at work, though - that use case is different.

Just got unraid up and running for the first time today. There’s a bit of a learning curve coming from TrueNAS Scale but it supports my use case: throwing whatever spinning rust I have into one big array. Seems to work alright, hardware could use additional cooling so I’ve shut it off until a new heatsink arrives.

I’m self hosting a lot of things, but those services are mostly on Debian. I’m daily driving AlmaLinux on my main desktop. I do a decent amount of video editing using DaVinci Resolve Studio, and while I’ve consistently gotten it working on Pop!_OS and EndeavourOS, I couldn’t get the Micro Color Panel working on anything other than the CentOS successors. I tried manipulating udev rules, sniffing USB traffic, etc but it just wouldn’t go on anything else. The product was fairly new to market when I bought it so the body of knowledge may have changed since then.

Blackmagic Design officially supports Resolve and Reaolve Studio on Linux, but only on their lightly preconfigured version of Rocky 8. Everything else is best-effort, so I started with the Blackmagic ISO, converted it to AlmaLinux 8.6, and then upgraded to 9, and the Micro Color Panel still works.

I also love that my external disk array works with every kernel update because the kernel’s so old. I keep all my originals on an 8-disk ZFS array connected to a cross-flashed Dell PERC H810. Endeavour and Pop sometimes go beyond the kernel versions supported by zfsonlinux, and editing the source code of a file system is not something I’m particularly comfortable with.

Also, every game I’ve played on it works, though I mainly play single-player titles.

As for parity: I’ve got several hundred VMs at the office on Rocky, and maybe a dozen on Alma, and both are running flawlessly. They’ve been as solid as the RHEL physical machines. Quite happy with all of them, to be honest.

If you use a distro with the nvidia drivers preinstalled, or you get the drivers set up with dkms, you don’t need to reinstall the driver with every kernel update.

Pop!_OS has the drivers in their repo and they get applied during system updates like any other package; I’m sure this is the case with Bazzite as well.

I use AlmaLinux at home with the driver from nvidia’s site (yes, I’m aware that rpmfusion exists), and have never had to reinstall the drivers as the installer configures dkms to do it every time the kernel is updated. Same with my Plex server (Debian, Quadro P2200) and my office workstation (Arch, Quadro P600).

Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.

If you’re using Debian as a daily driver you can always use a Flatpak if you need a newer version than what’s available in the repos. The foundation is solid, though, and that’s what matters - it’s one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Debian for office workstation use.

Indeed - but it runs really well through Proton, as does BL2, so no big deal.

Horizon Zero Dawn runs perfectly through Proton as well. Currently playing Forbidden West, about 24 hours in, and have encountered some minor issues (occasional momentary graphical glitches, rare instances of dialog drops requiring exit to title screen), but I’m not complaining.

There was a native release from the jump, it was always kind of jarring being able to install it without selecting a Proton version first.

Borderlands 2. Give me a mindless Diablo With Guns experience any day.

After seeing some of Craft Computing’s videos on YT I’m considering getting my hands on one of those cheap Erying mainboards off Aliexpress with a laptop CPU on it. Seen those as low as 140 bucks with a 13th-gen i5, just add a cooler and desktop DDR4.

Absolutely, and it’s usually up to the organization disposing of the drives to set and document the standard by which they abide.

Somewhere, an ISO27001 auditor’s jimmies started rustling.

Pi-Hole’s great. Got my primary instance on a Pi 4 and three secondaries (one per vlan) on LXCs. Works so well it feels weird seeing ads when I’m not at home, I’m actually considering using Tailscale to route all my queries through my home connection.

I’ll second the Pop!_OS recommendation that others have been posting. Don’t get me wrong, Linux Mint is great, though I personally prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition over the Ubuntu-based one, but I think Pop!_OS is just as easy to use while presenting a different look & feel. Pop tends to support newer hardware as well: despite being stuck on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base until Cosmic is finished, System76 releases new kernels to support the hardware they sell. They’re currently running kernel version 6.6.6, as opposed to Ubuntu’s 6.2.0 (I think – that’s what server’s on, at least).

I gave my wife, who “hates computers,” a laptop running Pop!_OS when her Windows 10 one failed and, apart from the standard new PC complaints, I haven’t heard anything Linux-specific. She runs two businesses on the thing; the only changes I made to the standard Pop!_OS software were to replace LibreOffice with OnlyOffice, and to replace Geary with Thunderbird.