OP has good advice here. I agree with most of it.

1. Especially making sure hardware works BEFORE buying it, instead of fighting it get it to work after. If it does not work out of the box, don't use it.

2. I have not themed for years, and now days I always keep things vanilla - so that things are easy to recreate, and work the same from machine to machine.

3. I have always dual booted, but like I mentioned, I really never go to Windows. You could always run windows in a VM too and do hardware pass-though, but I just dual boot.

4. I agree about staying away from weird distros (for beginners at least). I always suggest Ubuntu as a first distro, as that has tons of docs and is probably the most user friendly - between its out of the box install, its online docs, the wealth of online questions, and how it is always supported (if the app supports linux in the first place). Later you can dive into the dark world of distros.

5. I personally stay away from Wayland. It has been "odd" and "finicky" for me, consistantly. Most things work, and some things are just a disaster. I know everyone will freak out about this comment, but in my experience things just work way better in X. Like for instance when I use Wayland with different DEs, they all have some sort of braking issues - which is probably why OP suggested staying away from them with Wayland. I prefer options.

6. Ubuntu uses these things called Snaps, which are kind of annoying, but work fine (not really that slow) if you are using a beefy machine, so I don't bother trying to change anything.

Advice to someone JUST getting into Linux, do all the crazy things. Install everything until the machine does not work anymore. Rebuild. Rice. Distro hop, etc - if you are techy and LIKE that stuff. If you just want a stable OS and don't care much about Linux, Ubuntu works just fine.

Advice from someone that has used Linux since 1995, as I got older, I learned not to bend a distro to myself, but rather to bend to what the distro wants. Do it the way IT wants, and don't fight it. This is really with all IT stuff. The more vanilla you stay in a distro (or any software), the more stable and the easier it will be to upgrade later. This was learned from years of rebuilding and re-configuring over and over again. Eventually I realized that if I had just gotten used to the "way it was", then next install would be exactly the same as last.

I have this hardware setup with 64gb ram. I installed ubuntu 24.x and it all worked out of the box. i use X11 (not wayland) and xfce window manager. Almost all games i play work in steam. i can dual boot to win 11, but have notin months.

I have no idea how you are having trouble with this. Are you using some weird disto or something bleeding edge? Like with Ubuntu, select "use proprietary drivers" and it always works. NixOS works fine too without hassle.

I agree. User is probably doing unsupported options. If they want to live on the bleeding edge, that is fine, but dont blame the hardware if something does not work.

Literally just follow the distro instructions. Even NixOS works fine.

Nvidia works just fine on Linux despite what anyone says. People are just upset because it's a closed source driver. I have used Nvidia exclusively for like decades without issue. Just purchased an RTX3090ti (upgrade from a 2060) for Ollama, InvokeAI, and ComfyUi. Plus I do a lot of gaming. All of it works right out of the box with no tweaking.

for those confused: "yes" in french is "oui". Oui is pronounced "Wheeeee!"

chromeos is the correct answer. It maintains itself. Also, using gdocs, gaheets, etc., you dont have to deal with backups, "lost files", etc.

you are a fucking imbecile.

Nova Launcher got bought by a data mining company a couple years ago. I left and went to Total Launcher. It is a little weird at first the way it works, but it is now my full time launcher.

I like it for the over lapping widgets that can be sized down to the pixel. It also has a bunch of built in widgets like icon widgets and allowing widgets to stick in place across home pages.

fixed. thanks bff for the heads up!

how am i marked as a bot??? thanks. trying to fix now!

self hosted. postfix + dovecot. android email app, thunderbird, or alpine from the cli.

Buy the "Fiske Guide to Colleges". It lists hundreds of colleges in the US. You can look up by major, location, price, etc.

It also discusses things like social life, acceptance rate, and amenities.

I have 3 kids that are in or went to college. This was indispensable.

if you did lspci >/dev/sdc1, you would write the output of the command to the beginning of the filesystem on that partition, thus corrupting it.

make the drive unmountable if it had a filesystem on it.

yeah, chicks hate that.

a commode toad!

dont start with nixos. it is not friendly. Ubuntu is probably the best/easiest starter distro. that or fedora. go with the most mainstream so you have the least friction. Later you will be trying all the distros for fun.

you meet in 3 days.