Lineage gives you a decent app ecosystem (F-droid) with the option to set up Play Store for full Android compatibility

Ubuntu Touch has a very limited ecosystem compared to F-droid, but might be enough for someone willing to do most tasks in a browser.

Stuff like phone calls, pictures, sms, podcasts, music, and other simple tasks will work equally well on either OS assuming your device is supported

My bad it’s a 3a

I wonder why test this on an 11 year old phone?

I have it running on a Pixel 3a and it’s definitely smooth, but it still stutters once in a while. It feels slower than Android to me, but not much.

Battery life is indeed excellent, though mine doesnt seem to fast charge.

The camera app was the standout feature to me. The pictures i take look every bit as good as those from Android. I expected the app to be clunky or to have bad colors, but that is not the case at all.

Edit: Pixel 3a not 3

Good counterpoint

I just don’t see the draw of immutable distros for non power users.

With traditional ubuntu/mint/fedora you have 15+ years of forum posts, tutorials, and community wisdom to help you out if you get stuck. You probably wont need to, but it’s nice to be able to just google something and get a dozen good answers. If you want to use containerized apps you also have that option.

Also depending on your taste in gaming, you might need access to stuff outside of steam/lutris/heroic/flathub. In those cases getting your game working could be a bit of a hassle compared to a traditional distro.

I totally see how immutability can be a draw for tinkerers and developers, but for regular users it’s solving a problem that doesn’t really exist, or is pretty rare if it does.

I also think there is something to say for picking a distro that’s been around a long while. Hopefully Bazzite is still around in 10 years. I feel very confident Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora/Pop! still will be.

That said, I’m glad to hear you and your friend are happy with Bazzite. It seems like a really good option if you only play games from steam/heroic/lutris/flathub. A best of both worlds between a PC and a gaming console.

make the most use of the hardware

All distros should do this equally well, and better than Windows

let me play the most games

All distros will be more or less the same. Games generally work or they dont. Check ProtonDB to see which games work and how well.

easiest to use

lowest maintenance possible

This is how distros actually differ.

Some common suggestions:

Ubuntu LTS:

• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• GNOME shell environment is very beautiful and fast, but very different from Windows

Kubuntu LTS:

• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• KDE Plasma Desktop is like all the best parts of windows 95/xp/7/10/11 + os9/OSX/macOS combined, improved, and made super customizeable

Ubuntu/Kubuntu current:

• Upgrade your OS every 6 months
• Newer software than LTS
• Otherwise same as LTS

Linux Mint:

• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• Cinnamon Desktop is a better looking and faster implementation of a Windows 7 style desktop

Fedora

• Upgrade your OS every 9 months (or else)
• Proprietary codecs need to be added after install to play some video and music streams in your browser. It’s like 3 commands copy/pasted into the terminal
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• Choice of several desktop environments (Fedora spins)

Pop!_OS

• Fun to spell
• Upgrade your OS every 2 years
• Proprietary drivers are there if you need them (Nvidia is the only GPU that needs them)
• Pop_shell makes you feel like a hacker from the future, but is very unlike Windows

I do not reccomend Bazzite, Kali, Arch, Manjaro, Garuda, Debian, or Slackware. They are all great distros for specific use-cases, but they are all significantly more work to configure and/or maintain than the suggestions i’ve outlined.

I haven’t tried Nobara so i cant recommend it, but from the outside it looks fine for a gaming desktop.

Edit: I have mixed feelings on Bazzite, but it might also be a good option for someone feeling adventurous

Sorry to be off-topic but I’m curious:

How/why do people use proton-ge?

Are you using it standalone? Through Lutris or Steam? Something else?

What are the situations you’d need it over vanilla proton? Do you keep both vanilla and ge installed?

Also, do improvements generally get added to vanilla, or is ge an increasingly-divergent fork?

I’ve been gaming primarily on Linux for over a decade and since it’s been an option I’ve used proton on steam extensively, but I’ve never tried ge

I built a backup server out of my old desktop, running Ubuntu and ZFS

I have a dataset for each of my computers and i back them up to the corresponding datasets in the zfs pool on the server semi-regularly. The zfs pool has enough disks for some redundancy, so i can handle occasional drive failures. My other computers run arbitrary filesystems (ext4, btrfs, rarely ntfs)

the only problem with my current setup is that if there is file degradation on my workstation that i dont notice, it might get backed up to the server by mistake. then a degraded file might overwrite a non-degraded backup. to avoid this, i generally dont overwrite files when i backup. since 90% of my data is pictures, it’s not a big deal since they dont change

Someday i’d like to set up proxmox and virtualize everything, and i’d also like to set up something offsite i could zfs-send to as a second backup

I had no issues with compatibility, just made sure to save documents to older microsoft office formats in the hopes of avoiding issues.

I never had to use an exam browser or anything like that, I’d imagine you’d want to have a polite conversation with the instructor if that were to occur, perhaps they can make an exception or allow you to do it on a library computer

Collaboration was always over google docs, so there were never any problems working with others. My CS classes were all expected to be done in Linux VMs so that was sort of ideal. Other science/humanities classes were totally software-agnostic.

RAID 5/6 aren’t yet recommended for general use on BTRFS by the developers.

Other than that I agree it should be suitable for anything, and an improvement over ext4 in some situations.

If you don’t know what RAID 5/6 is you are good.

I guess I’m smart enough to install opensuse, but dumb enough that I somehow got slow pacman.

I kid you not, on my hardware zypper is the fastest between ubuntu apt, fedora dnf, and arch pacman. dnf was the second-fastest on my hardware, with apt and pacman being pretty sluggish

I’ve also used portage which was even slower, but probably not a fair comparison considering how much more complex it is.

One of the best apps on any platform

Wow I must be doing something wrong, zypper has always been faster for me than pacman, both on my newer desktop and my older laptop

Somebody has never used opensuse. Zypper is an amazing package manager, one of the best on any distro.

It can handle flatpacks, native packages, and packages from the opensuse build system, keeping everything updated and organized.

Pacman is very basic by comparison, and a lot slower too in my experience.

I remember a showstopper a while back being that you can’t resize the title bar while shaded. That’s already the current behavior on x11, so I would be fine with that caveat continuing if it meant wayland support.

On KDE Plasma, my only outstanding bug is that the “window shade” button on my window controls is broken. Too bad since I use that feature a lot.

On GNOME everything seems to work as far as I can tell. It’s pretty smooth!

Nice job! If you can get the nvidia driver installed properly, any distro should work in theory.

On Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation

On Fedora: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht511074-enabling-nvidia-proprietary-drivers-on-fedora-linux

On Pop!_OS it should be already installed by default

I’ve been hearing good things about Nobara, Ill have to try it out!

LTS kernels aren’t more or less stable. Rather, they have been selected by the kernel maintainers to get security fixes backported to them for a certain time.

Ubuntu does the same thing for the kernels on their LTS versions (technically they usually are not LTS kernels since canonical supports them instead of kernel team)

Overall I’d suggest going with what the distro provides unless you have very new hardware, in which case a newer kernel may be required

Haven’t done this myself, but supposedly you can do it with xboxdrv using the “–mimic-xpad” flag

I don’t hate systemd. However:

Units and service files are confusing, and the documentation could be a lot better.

That said, when systemd came out the traditional init stack was largely abandoned. Thanks to systemd (and the hatred of it) there are now a couple of traditional-style init systems in active development.