Yeah, I’ve considered VR for a long while, but between the already existing headaches, and the Linux related headaches I’ve heard of, I’ll just wait until I’m retired for VR space games, VR racing, and VR porn. Hopefully it’ll get better before I’m dead.

Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.

This is entirely plausible, but I don’t know if it’s there yet. I’ve long since moved to AMD GPUs so I can’t really fiddle and find out. Give the open source drivers some time to mature.

Until then, you are reasonably safe running Linux with secure boot turned off. I’m no expert on the matter, but I’m not familiar with any ongoing threats to boot loader in Linux distributions. Stick to your official repos to be safest, unverified user maintained sources like AUR and COPR are possibly more likely to harbor security threats, don’t use them if you don’t need to or don’t know what you’re doing. Password your bios and require a password to log in to your operating system. Common sense is a better defense than secure boot.

I’m well aware of the risks inherent to not running calyx or graphene, but my threat model doesn’t justify sacrificing a lot of the functionality that I enjoy on an iPhone. If my threat model required it, I’d have an unactivated burner and a pixel device running calyx in addition to my iPhone. I’m happy settling for “better than google” based on my needs. I also have a couple PCs running Linux, with steps I can take to ensure some level of privacy if needed.

Thanks for posting some good reading though, it’s all shit I’m generally aware of.

Okay

Same. I have come to trust Apple’s commitment and attitude towards user privacy substantially more than Google. I actually know a person that works in a fairly high middle management position in a technical department at the fruit company, and he told me that even their internal handling of user data is incredibly restrictive, even when it makes their jobs harder. I don’t think Apple is perfect, but better than the alternative.

There’s a ton of them on Etsy

Love it when people speak with authority and are confidently incorrect. Eugenia is right.

You could potentially use flatseal to grant the flatpak the necessary permissions, and you might find out what those permissions are by looking for other users experiences with the flatpak version.

Or, you find the .deb file and it installs natively without being sandboxed. OR, you can find a PPA repository for it, load said repository and install your software.

But those things require learning a little. Linux rewards self starters who can use a search engine and forums. Hope this maybe points you in the right direction.

I would recommend Linux Mint. Yes it’s faster to update than Debian, but it doesn’t push the envelope nearly as fast as Fedora or Arch based distros.

Linux mint is just super easy, user friendly, you could use Mint without ever touching a terminal if you wanted. BSD would be a great pet project to fiddle with, but if you’re looking for a rock solid backup machine with zero fuss, Mint is perfect for that.

I spent my first year of Linux installing a new distro, or same distro with a different DE probably every other week, sometimes more than once in a week. The Linux ecosystem rewards self starters with curiosity and the ability to search for answers.

LearnLinuxTV is an amazing YouTube channel, high quality distro tours and reviews, as well as tutorials at various levels of mastery. ItsFOSS and Phoronix are great sources for Linux news that help you build some awareness and vocabulary. The official forums of almost every distro are extremely helpful places to find solutions to problems. You just kinda have to be motivated to seek out the answers you need as they arise.

That’s one thing I find particularly neat about Fedora, it has all of these software package groups that can be either added on at install, or installed at any time, including:

   3D Printing
   Administration Tools
   Audio Production
   Authoring and Publishing
   Books and Guides
   C Development Tools and Libraries
   Cloud Infrastructure
   Cloud Management Tools
   Container Management
   D Development Tools and Libraries
   Design Suite
   Development Tools
   Domain Membership
   Fedora Eclipse
   Editors
   Educational Software
   Electronic Lab
   Engineering and Scientific
   FreeIPA Server
   Games and Entertainment
   Headless Management
   LibreOffice
   MATE Applications
   MATE Compiz
   Medical Applications
   Milkymist
   Network Servers
   Office/Productivity
   Robotics
   RPM Development Tools
   Security Lab
   Sound and Video
   System Tools
   Text-based Internet
   Window Managers

I got a laptop with a touch screen for a young kid in my family, installed Fedora Workstation with its native Gnome desktop, and touch worked great without any tinkering.

Gnomes workflow is a big departure from windows, but with its gesture navigation on a trackpad, I think it’s a highly superior way to use a laptop. My desktop gets KDE Plasma, but if I had a laptop it would use gnome

Why bother with Pop!_OS when you’re comfortable with Arch? Arch is, in my opinion, better for gaming just due to its newer packages, and certainly its newer Kernel. I’ve been running EndeavourOS which is basically just pre packaged Arch, and it handles all of my gaming and productivity tasks more to my liking than any Ubuntu based distro, certainly better than Pop! did.

Also, I see no reason why you shouldn’t delete all of your old partitions and start fresh, but when you do, give EndeavourOS a whirl and see if it handles all of your dev tasks and gaming. I think you’re over complicating your system and not getting any tangible return from dual booting Pop!

Yeah, let’s be real, if you like manjaro, okay whatever, but no one should be using manjaro when EndeavourOS exists.

Which makes me wonder, if manjaro tanked, what other twists on an Arch based distro aimed at gaming and content creators could spring up in its place? Something with the level of execution of EndeavourOS but with its own comprehensive GUI tools?

I would say that EndeavourOS, while being more fleshed out than vanilla Arch, has a lot fewer GUI tools for system configuration than say, Linux Mint. Mint has GUI tools for managing PPAs and extra repositories, managing graphics drivers, updating packages and much much more. This has become pretty common in distros aimed toward ease of use for newcomers. EndeavourOS has none of that, with the stated goal of seeing users dive into the command line a little more.

As a result I’ve learned a lot in the CLI. Setting up BTRFS with timeshift auto snaps taught me a little about configuring grub and systemd, so now I’m learning how to set my fan curves and AIO pump to presets I’ve built into shell scripts to interact with liquidctl, and systemd config files to make them persistent after sleep and reboot. You could totally do all of that in the terminal in any distro, but EndeavorOS not having any GUI handholding made me leave my comfort zone and start learning more.

The votes for EndeavourOS keep rolling in. I like to distro hop just to experience what’s new, but I can’t help coming back to EndeavourOS every single time.

My suggestion to you, is please oh please replace Manjaro with EndeavourOS. It does everything Manjaro does but better. The learning curve will still be the same.

pacman: EndeavourOS has yay installed by default, which is an AUR helper. It interacts with pacman and builds your packages for you. yay -S steam for instance calls up pacman and builds the steam package from the repo and takes some of the head scratching out of it. Very easy to use. A simple “yay” to update, no sudo needed, yay will ask for a sudo password when it needs it.

Shell selection: bash is fine, and bash is enabled by default in EndeavourOS.

But the real reason to use EndeavourOS, aside from having an arch based rolling release distro, is its community and support. An amazing forum, tons of documentation between EOS and arch itself, and fantastic wiki that guides you through various tools and utilities you may want to use.

It is a terminal centric distro, but you can easily install GUI tools for things you don’t want to do in the CLI.

I would even be down to correspond and help you out if need be. Manjaro looks cool when you’re in those early stages of outgrowing Ubuntu, but it’s not the distro you’re looking for, I promise.

I think it’s also worth noting that windows bloat and Linux bloat are not even in the same category. Even the heavier Linux distros are so light on system resources that installing a plethora of tools, games and assorted software isn’t going to effect your machine as negatively as it would in windows.

Recycling has always been a lie to make you feel good about consumption. If it’s not a valuable commodity, it just goes to the dump anyways.

Yeah, you make valid points. Maybe Linux isn’t for people who need windows capabilities for work. I enjoy the tinkering, but I don’t make my money on my Linux machine. I work in construction, I’m only a nerd at home.

So, my machine does everything I need it to in Linux. Some things require me to memorize fairly lengthy commands and perform more complicated functions than I’d ever have to in windows. Sometimes I learn things the hard way, sometimes my shit breaks. I try to learn something while fixing it, and if it doesn’t work I nuke and pave and keep good backups.

The satisfaction I get from becoming competent must give me some serious dopamine because I’ve stuck with it, and I’ve come to perform most day to day actions in the CLI.

I certainly don’t think OP has a lack of ability to learn, but, I also don’t think Linux is a good fit for his use case. Yet.