Its a lost cause, I’ve wasted several weeks in August and September trying to make Nvidia and Wayland and hardware video decoding work on every distro imaginable, GNOME or KDE. I would have bought a card from Team Red outright if I knew how deep the rabbit hole went.

I’m a simple man. I do simple things. I replace df, ls and top with more modern alternatives. Courtesy of this list.

alias df="duf"
alias ls="eza --group-directories-first --long --group --sort=ext --icons --all"
alias top="btm"

One more tip, if you already have a Windows environment, spin up VMs with Hyper-V and start from there. Anytime you mess up, just nuke the VM and spin up another one. I must have burnt through hundreds of VMs (hyperbole) while testing out distros that I like.

Another vote for LFS. I like that it is really at the right level of depth (assuming that you already have a basic grasp of computing in general). Even if you end up going with a distro, reading through LFS gave me insights as to why certain things were done in certain ways. Alot of “quick-start” style guides tell you what command to type in, but for brevity reasons, they don’t explain what the command does. For example, you may come across many guides tell you to type sudo or sed or echo or | or >>. It may seem daunting at first, but gradually as you become more at ease with the CLI, all these will start to make sense.

At my previous job in a Fortune 500, circumventing the IT security policy is ground for instant dismissal. Like literally marched right out of the office kind of dismissal. We had an IT breach before and it cost the company US$300m to fix, and IT security was locked down HARD after. At best, OP is not wise.

Seconded, this looks like it was written by a high school edgelord that just got into linux, and has zero understanding of how corporate systems are actually built, and how diverse the IT landscape is.

Yeah! Thanks for the input too, the 3080Ti I’ve been struggling with getting Arch or Tumbleweed to work without compromise but it’s always little gotchas like Wayland visual-glitching or VAAPI not working in browsers or graphical.target refusing to start if i915 is not blacklisted. The overall experience is just slightly more pleasant than gouging my eyes out with a rusty spoon.

Excellent, much thanks!

You sir are a scholar and a gentleman. Thank you for the inputs! Just to confirm if you don’t mind a stupid question, I understand VAAPI works for you, does it also work for browsers with YouTube? I’m asking this specifically because I could get hwdec working with MPV with Nvidia but YouTube refuses to use hwdec regardless of browser for me. How about yours in Firefox at least with YouTube specifically?

Devs: “it works fine on my machine”. At this point games should just come with their own OSes. Or hardware. Hell, ship 'em like arcade boxes.