Keep in mind that sometimes a Battle.net update will be released that will essentially break playing WoW and other games via the launcher on Linux. usually it’s resolved within a couple days. your best bet is to install it via a Lutris script and if something goes wrong DO post about it either on the Lutris Forums and/or Discord because one of the main Lutris devs is a WoW player so if there are issues with installing WoW on your system he will be right on top of it. It’s your best bet in resolving an issue, he knows all the work arounds and fixes to get battle.net and WoW running on any distro.

the only issues I had with KDE when I was recently using it all revolved around the panel. Random crashes with “too much” interaction. Adding widgets for the panel or desktop is still to this day hit or miss. clicking the “get new widget” option is a roll of the dice if it will actually work or not or even find the thing you want. It’s still horrible at loading stuff in there. and installing whatever, again, is a roll of the dice if it will actually do it or not.

I like KDE, it’s a good and solid DE but man do they really need to focus on fixing the panels and the installation/discovery of widgets. The alternative is using the pling store and that’s just a headache on it’s own.

it’s funny because once you start using other distros you quickly realize how easy Arch actually is. I find Arch more straight forward and easier to use that Ubuntu. Ubuntu makes me want to rip what remaining hair I have out.

on my CachyOS/Arch and NixOS machines I just use borg to backup to my dedicated server. Very easy to do. I have a couple alias’ set up so I can view my backups easily through my file manager on whatever local machine. Essentially all you have to do is make a script to tell it what files/folders to backup, what to potentially ignore, how often you want to backup, the time of day you want it to happen, can also tell it to delete old backups. In NixOS it’s painfully easy to set up and can be done within the configuration.nix. On other distros the only difference is you have to set up a service and timer for it.

but I like it, it’s straight forward, never had issues with it.

I mean if you’re going to go the multiple user accounts route for different things wouldn’t it just be easier to just use QubesOS? No account switching and granted it will be a bit slower but saves you the headaches.

have you looked at asusctl? you can set fan curves/speed and performance profiles via that in the terminal

I have an Asus Rog Strix and use asusctl with rog-control-center.

the tags are really decent, like the previous poster said it’s pretty much all audiophiles so everything is tagged, a lot of FLAC stuff but you can sort by MP3 (Nicotine+ makes it really easy in that regard)

The great thing about it and because the user base is mostly audiojunkies is that you can find some REALLY obscure stuff. Like things you’d never find on spotify or youtube music or any of that. I once found a set from a band I love from a show I was actually at.

this was the script I used to download my youtube playlist, you can modify it to do spotify also:

#!/bin/bash  

PLAYLIST_URL="$1"  

if [ -z "$PLAYLIST_URL" ]; then  
    echo "Usage: $0 <youtube_playlist_url>"  
    exit 1  
fi  

# Log file with timestamp  
LOG_FILE="$HOME/music-downloads/download_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).log"  

echo "Starting download at $(date)" | tee "$LOG_FILE"  
echo "Playlist: $PLAYLIST_URL" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE"  
echo "----------------------------------------" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE"  

# Run sldl with YouTube playlist  
sldl "$PLAYLIST_URL" --yt-dlp 2>&1 | tee -a "$LOG_FILE"  

echo "----------------------------------------" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE"  
echo "Download completed at $(date)" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE"  

I just ran this in a screen session. You don’t have to log everything but I did it so I could check to see what songs weren’t on soulseek from my playlist.

I used screen. Just start a screen session for it like “music-downloads” and then you can quit the session and exit out OR install a DE like XFCE on your server and then use something like xfreerdp to remote desktop in, run the script in a terminal on the server, then just close your xfreerdp.

I first used screen to download everything but then decided to install XFCE and Nicotine+ and just leave it up so people can download from my library also.

because they’re built by individuals who are those things. that’s the controversy. that’s it.

the whole thing is people are upset that Framework sponsored those things because they don’t like paying Framework for their machines who in turn then give money to people they feel are facists.

right that’s why I said worse comes to worse and to take it with a grain of salt. For very simple issues it’s fine, beyond that it’s a coin toss. It’s a fine rubber duck. Like if I missed something obvious but I’m just not seeing it then it might point that out for me. Like for example I recently reinstalled my OS and I couldn’t get wireguad to work so as a last ditch effort I plugged it into Claude and it told me that I had forgotten to replace a privatekey on one of the peers. I had just completely missed it.

yup! I used that to pull my playlists from spotify and youtube to download my songs on soulseek. very powerful tool that worked great. just let it run on my server overnight and had all my songs by the morning.

I have soulseek/nicotine+ on my private server and I just use that. It’s really easy. If you ever used Napster or limewire or Kazaa or whatever it’s exactly like that.

journalctl and log files are very valuable. If it’s specific to an application running said application in a terminal with verbose also gives can potentially provide you with a clear indication of what’s going wrong.

I’m dyslexic so I get syntax errors all the damn time and thankfully using NixOS it likes to remind me on rebuild how much of an idiot I am.

Worse comes to worse you can always plug the error into an LLM like Claude or Chatgpt. But take that with a grain of salt. It’ll give you a good base to start from for debugging but never trust something like Claude that will constantly tell you “it’s a known issue” when it isn’t.

All this being said I’ve had the best experience for help via whatever application/distro/whatever IRC channels on Libera chat.

they sponsored Omarchy and Hyprland. one a glorified dotfiles arch “distro” built by DHH who is pretty much a fascist and Hyprland a buggy neon mess of a WM built by a transphobic fascist.

So yeah, they’re not having a good time right now.

I don’t get it either. I mean the distro at the end of the day really doesn’t matter. like ok, which way do you want to type a line in a terminal to download something. you want Debian, Arch, Fedora, Nix or Gentoo.

People always suggest Mint and I don’t get why. I mean I could have Cagebreak or Herbstluftwm on Mint…is it still new user friendly? no? then it’s not the Distro it’s the DE.

Throw Cinnamon or KDE Plasma on Arch with a Distro Manager GUI, boom now that’s new user friendly.

It’s the DE that’s important, the Distro is whatever.

As someone that recently got back into digital art may I suggest switching inkscape for Krita? I prefer Krita as I found it easier to use, has better brushes, and great settings options for my tablet (if you eventually get around to using tablets)

Other than that I’d also suggest Libresprite for creating pixel art/animations. Godot for creating games (the tutorials online are fantastic and they even have focused tutorials for kids making games)

I’d also suggest an IDE like Neovim with Lazyvim or DOOM Emacs. either/or are invaluable learning tools for kids to get into development. PLUS the added bonus of teaching them VIM style navigation which many tools use and it’ll make them feel like “uber haxors” cause it’s really fun once you learn to navigate your machine purely with your keyboard.

Also if they want to get into web development I’d consider installing Astro as well. It’s a fantastic and easy to understand framework for building sites that will allow them to build in a dev environment and then push their projects to “production” combine that with tailwind CSS and it’s a solid base to get them going.

Also maybe even consider using a terminal emulator like Kitty or Wezterm. both are great and they can customize their terminals easily with like kitten-themes to make them unique to their machines. It’s just something that’s fun to play around with.

if you’re looking for something with the most security, then Qubes. It’s heavy, it’s slow, but good luck to anyone looking to break into that system.

Bit of a learning curve and a bit to wrap your head around it but I would tell him to think of it like you have access to a bunch of individual computers that don’t talk to each other but you control all of them. So he could have a Qube for casual web browsing, could have a Qube for work, and another Qube for financial stuff. all independent of each other. IF something were to happen (malware, trojan, whatever) just simply close that qube window and spin up another.

that’s easy. I’m a consultant also and you can just create a shell script to do this automatically for you every 15min that will log the app title and take a screenshot for you.

Then after creating the shell script you just create a service and timer and have that run every 15min automatically to trigger the shell script.

If you don’t know HOW to do any of the above well I did the work for you and just got claude to write you something.

here ya go: https://claude.ai/share/ef030e63-0814-4e0a-b7d1-662bdf4435ed

the ONLY issues I’ve ever had with my Nvidia GPU were with A. Sway and B. Mint.

and when I say “issues” with Sway it was simply not being able to use a DM to login to it and having to login via TTY with “sway --unsupported-gpu” since the Sway devs aren’t fans of proprietary stuff at all.

for Mint…just didn’t work well for gaming. Crashing, slow downs, etc. That could either be a Distro issue or a Me issue as Mint was my first linux distro and I only stuck with it for a couple weeks before moving on to CachyOS.

On every distro since then? zero issues. it just works. Best experience with it was probably via CachyOS or NixOS. Runs smooth as silk on NixOS.