A Sharky Anthro

Yeah there is also the social aspect to consider. Which can provide a tech support system aside from Valve’s, and in general connection with others that happen to have a Steam Machine or other Valve branded device!

Personally, I understand the appeal of the Steam Machine, it’s also cheaper than a standard prebuilt which helps. The fact it can basically be a nice, cute form factor machine is great! There is room for optimization in the future to make it run games and shit better too.

Personally, I would rather buy a prebuilt over putting a computer together myself because…While I can get a distro installed and use the package manager and command line to set stuff up. I am ever afraid of actually plugging and screwing things in. As my goose on the loose energy is LEGENDARY for causing random fuck-ups. Random sneezes, itches, all manner of odd occurrences will distract me to the point of not being able to reasonably complete the build correctly. I can change thermal paste, and do little things. Nothing as big as making my own computer from a bunch of parts boxes.

Edit: I still might try and fix my busted BIOS PC anyway, but, first I will get a mini-PC that will be a guarantee that I can play some games that I have been missing out on.

Arch is good, but I use Garuda Linux (Arch-based) because it’s dangerous to go alone and without batteries.

I prefer Fedora over Ubuntu because Canonical’s direction has been worrying, not that Fedora’s leads have been doing any better in certain areas. Depends on how old the Thinkpad is, a lot of the rolling release distros tend to support a certain range of devices out of the box (not super old, but not also super new hardware). If the Thinkpad is from 2021 or later, you’ll probably be okay! There are distros that you can research for better compatibility with older hardware.

Yeah, going down the rabbit hole of Arch isn’t for everyone, learn, and explore, decide your comfort levels before deciding on that (in the further future). I personally use Garuda Linux (which is based on Arch, not as difficult).

Ah, a blast from the past that which gets a modern touch! I remember Hannah Montana Linux and it looks as girly pop as ever.

Yeah, but ultimately, it was even easier with Garuda Linux which was built to be used. As my drivers were correctly selected when the installation began. It was a good surprise.

There is a command line workflow for installing NVIDIA drivers, but, the provided drivers (which Trixie was built against) were pretty moldy at that point. For just a simple productivity machine, Debian would’ve been my go to.

For one that is a gaming/entertainment/productivity machine…It wasn’t for me, personally. As Debian is pretty stable and mostly easy to use.

Glad you’ve had a good time post install, I’ve experienced a similar thing on Garuda Linux…It’s pretty smooth with the latest graphics drivers!

Man, you had it harder than me with the realtek drivers. PikaOS is pretty cool overall, as it does streamline some things that Debian makes annoying (graphics drivers, for example). I do hope you enjoy PikaOS, after troubleshooting that annoying issue! The good thing about anything Debian based is that .debs are probably the most prevalent installer out there (cries in Arch).

If you do have some experience with Linux, I think perhaps Garuda Linux might be worth a shot. It’s based on Arch and makes it pretty easy to install Arch and configure it. I find their ChaoticAUR is probably one of the best repos. The Garuda team polices it and keeps bad malicious builds from being born on that repo. I’ve gotten a lot of great software from that place and never touched the actual AUR. In my experience of running Garuda Dr460nized KDE on my gaming PC, it’s been one of the best that I’ve ever had. Surprisingly, I haven’t jumped to another distro (notorious distrohopper here). My system is pretty stable and I’ve not had any problems with my installation of 2 months so far…

I chose Dr460nized because it is colorful and bold, but also customizable, it gives you a strong base to build off of. I also like Garuda Mokka, which has a chill, smoky, gray vibe to it!

Also, Mullvad VPN is in the Arch Extra Repo, you would just have to set it up by installing the application and the daemon which would run in the background. It’s not particularly difficult, and only takes barely 2 minutes.

Yeah, that is why I read everything before deciding on installing anything. As a user, if you trust a distro enough to install it directly, you have to be aware of all it’s features first. Yeah, personally I wouldn’t keep an unsupported feature enabled for any length of time, that is just asking for a preventable breakage (though easier to rollback with Bazzite or any distro with Snapshots).

If it does bother you enough, it might warrant a distro change…I still say it’s not a huge deal. The atomic nature of Bazzite is one of its greatest strengths as there are inherent security advantages. Nothing is absolutely immune to cyberattacks or malware (as there are numerous paths to exploit) but immutable distros are a good and solid thing!

It’s unlikely that anyone could really leverage a vulnerability within the Bazzite OS Build updates and sneak something malicious in there…That is the reason why nobody is really talking about it. Some of the measures used are discussed at the link that I put here.

There is always a slim chance of it happening though; I am sure that people understand the reality of supply chain attacks and know when a malicious actor is determined enough, they’d find a way. If this concerns you so much, wouldn’t it be wiser to use a distro that doesn’t automatically update? One that simply checks for them and allows you to decide if or when you’d like to?

A healthy amount of caution is just right for anything OS related, but, you seem a bit too worried about it.

Nah, nobody is recommending that you just rawdog this freaking script in a terminal, as it is only useful if you make use of the AUR! The golden rule is to evaluate every script that you see, decide if it is a good or bad, personally having read it there aren’t any malicious instructions present in it. ML tools aren’t particularly reliable, can be tricked, deliver false negative or false positive results, and will just dull your mind.

If one cannot read, evaluate, and come to a decision based on the information available…Arch simply isn’t a good fit for the person in question. That is okay, and there are plenty of options.

Granted the AUR shouldn’t be as easy to exploit as it was in this instance, it’s a bit too wild west for my liking. There needs to be better protections that prevent such exploitation in the future, as there are clear exploitable weaknesses present with the AUR which need to be closed to prevent something low effort from happening again. The axiomatic truth of the AUR remains true: Do not trust, verify any PKGbuilds before installing software and before every single update.

Oofta, like this is so vexing…Shows that Linux is getting a bit too much attention these days. I don’t use the AUR specifically, just Chaotic-AUR and Extra, still ran that Fish script on Garuda Linux in case something snuck into my PC. The PC is clean as a whistle, thankfully. Malicious actors can get fucked for all the grief they cause and ruining of the good times of Linux enjoyers!

It’s clear that this is his own project, that he is doing this for himself…It’s just sad this is what Felix is choosing to share with the community of people that follow him on YouTube. It’s bad enough that corporate idiots are peddling slop tools, but having a content creator with history and sway in the YouTube scene do it. Also, it’s an LLM not an “AI”, as AI is actually out of human reach unless humans actually do some real multidisciplinary work to make it happen. Techbros being able to conflate LLMs with AI was the worst thing to happen to the world. If only they were forced to advertise their slop tools correctly, we’d be in a different situation. 😮‍💨

I was finally becoming interested in Felix when he started dabbling in Linux and made some serious cool shit…Now that he’s made his own slop tool, I am losing interest in him again. It’s so fucking cursed, this slop nonsense needs to stop. I wish he would’ve stuck with ricing, making fun projects instead of open source washing corporate garbage.

Thank you, I guess because I stare at what I write all the time…It’s become boring and substandard in my opinion. It’s like looking at your own face for years, looks ordinary or bland because familiarity creates a lack of novelty! If you provide too much sensitive information it does raise the risk of someone being able to connect the dots and finding you. It does create an attack surface, but…They need to have all the parts in order to be able to act upon it. If the device is a local network thing that doesn’t connect to the internet…Small bits of info might not be so bad, but too much is not good.

I think hustle culture has destroyed a lot of the blogging scene with pushing products, services, etc. I really hate how authentic blogs have gone to the wayside and the hustle blogs have kinda taken over. Or worse the influencer blogs designed to sell you low quality tat are growing in scale and influence.

Yeah, deciding what a blog should be, its purpose, or how it should be implemented is very person. I would think on it, personally I am choosing a general purpose style. That focuses on variety stuff written from my perspective (occasionally flawed because yah know, people aren’t perfect). My Blog.

I think you can talk about all manner of subjects, whether they be controversial or otherwise provided you do it with care. Really think about the political posts carefully before you make them, as it is important to talk about politics, but doing it in a humane way matters. I think we’ve lost the art of the indie web since the commercialized, centralized website has become popular. I am even trying to rediscovering it by just trying shit and seeing it if works in practice. There is nothing wrong with a bit of live practice!

It depends on the subject, often times I tend to learn better by simply doing or thinking through the process before actively attempting what I thought about. I am a weird mix of practical and book learner, I often just blog about daily life stuff or whatever has my immediate attention. A blog for me is like my current hyperfixation identifier. ROFL

For internal stuff, I tend to keep system documentation of all the changes that I made (directories, etc), the reason why I did it, how I did it, what steps did I have alter in order to complete the change. That also really helps because years down the line, this helps build my understanding of my personal system.

Oof, clutch win against the US Company, as a US Citizen…You don’t want our irresponsible and stupid corporations buying your stuff and running it. It would be a privacy nightmare! It would be expected that The Netherlands would protect their citizens from the forces of nasty US companies.

Uh, I don’t blog regularly…Might do someday. Personally, the quality of my writing isn’t that great. I occasionally think before I type (got that goose on the loose energy). LMAO If I do end up writing more, I will put the blog link in my profile.

Solus is something that I chose because the sane defaults are good at install. You can use Secure Boot if you want with the Linux Distro and you only need to enroll in MOK once at install, never worry about it again. It is a rolling release with weekly sync updates that are often fairly fast, depending on your internet speeds. The most I ever had to wait is 4 minutes for eopkg to download and install the updates, a simple reboot and I am into the latest Solus Linux version. Talking about eopkg, I like their custom package manager, it’s fast tells you everything you need to know, and doesn’t waste my time. Solus repos have quite a bit of software in them, you can also use Distrobox/Shelf, AppImage, Flatpak to shore up any deficiencies. It’s a general purpose distro that is a perfect daily driver. That will make it very difficult for me to test Gentoo on bare metal because I love Solus. Still, there is a lot of time for me to read and learn beforehand.

It seems like you have everything just about figured out for your plans, so that is good. I knew about Asahi Linux project…I have an aversion to Apple hardware because of my personal bias. I’d honestly want a Thinkpad or another kind of Windows Laptop to wipe clean of Windows. As while you like sleek and light laptops, I don’t mind a laptop with a bit of heft (love a good 17 inch screen laptop) I like having roomy keyboards and screens. Mostly to account for my shitty eyes being borked from birth LMAO, and my big hands. I find anything less than a 15 inch screen device to be cramped and it hurts my hands over time.

As for Gentoo compiling on another device, yep you can indeed do that. You just have to be sure to compile with the correct hardware in mind! It will be hard given your core desktop is running Arch and you don’t want to disturb the force at the moment by installing a distro you haven’t any practical experience with on it. That would be a trial by fire way of learning (I often do because as apparently my brain loves the adversity and frustration a lot).

Given that you’ve used Arch for years and have entire workflows attached to Arch, I would just get something relatively powerful and cheap to test Gentoo on, so you don’t have to compile the distro on another device. If you are testing, there is nothing wrong with keeping the compiling contained to the device in question. You’ll get the full experience and not sacrifice anything (since it would be easy to install another distro you’d like on the thing).

That way if anything goes wrong, you can do some reading on how to fix it on the other device, to troubleshoot. Whatever you decide, you naturally have all the time in the world to decide! Good luck on that.