My notes said I tried nobara but they werent very detailed, I assume it wasnt great? Manjaro is one of the ones I didnt test, along with Garuda. I tried Fedora base and Arch base and they didnt work out of the box with most games.

GUI absolutely does matter for helping adoption of linux, I’m not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary either. Everything should be as GUI’d as possible if we want linux to grow

Does it have a driver gui?

Yeah, thats useful for laymen / people that dont want to tinker a whole lot

Nah, I’m on latest hardware (4080) and did a bunch of tests recently. Mint was the best along with PopOS. A lot of distros like CachyOs or Bazzite have a lot of great enhancements but they break so often without easy rollbacks that a layman shouldnt use them. Mint has a driver manager and can install KDE if you want with no breakage. Bazzite and CachyOS couldnt even run many major titles due to driver breakage and not having an easy way for a layman to rollback. (I could do it, though a layman would hate it). Whereas PopOS and Mint both ran major titles without any configuration.

I don’t know of any ‘bleeding edge’ distros with driver managers, I might ask about that though.

I personally found it kinda jank. Mint feels best for a laymans gaming distro ime

i use it as an editor even though thats not really its use case. i just feel like gimp is far too clunky, it just feels “off” to me in comparison to photoshop

In general I feel like its probably KDE’s best software package outside of its DE. Know of any other super good KDE apps?

My biggest complaints with krita are around it not being easy to align objects and the text tool could use some love. Other than that, it feels like a great photoshop replacement

Krita, I use it for everything, I hate gimp, it feels so bad

itd be bad as a daily driver imo

I use a Windows VM (Tiny10 works ok here) in whatever lightweight linux OS I’m fucking with at the time. All my files and stuff are on a local server so I can swap distros easily if I want.

Usually it runs ok, can game, and I dont have to deal with restarting a bunch of stuff. I’ve been using CachyOS, not sure if I like it yet

yeah ive been considering it

i do have integrated graphics and a gpu, though i dont know if the bios has one set to run independently or something

happen to know of any distros that dont have this limitation and operate similarly to qubes? i havent heard of anything i know its a longshot 🙃

but maybe i could work on programming and making this a bit smoother if i like the rest of what qubes offers

for me i will likely play some games or use proprietary apps in windows or something and swap back to linux. i also develop for linux sometimes so being able to swap distros quickly and with good efficiency while being able to share files easily would be nice.

i dont know how viable qubes is for this use case. i like the concept of privacy but i dont need 100% lockdown for each app.

i hate dual booting with a passion, and i also hate how much my base OS interferes with the operation of a virtualized os.

yeah i was just wondering if there was a quick chart somewhere so i could be lazy

i have a ibm laptop with a really old ssd running and the health of everything looks very good. i never wrote a whole lot to the ssd, i feel like this computer could last 30 years or more without going fully obsolete. its just a basic laptop with not very good hardware that i use for looking up information during a tabletop game, read a pdf, or to browse the internet. sometimes i message people on it. perfect for my use case, and probably will never need anything more than this. it always has to be plugged in because the battery sucks now, but its lightweight and portable so its not a big deal.

Is there any info about how much the base system uses?

you should try damnsmalllinux, it had a revival recently. though the absolute smallest modern one is probably Slitaz? or alpine linux

though you can definitely set up debian to use less than 500 ram today, kde/gnome are kinda hogs