Pretty sure something like 10 years ago crashplan deleted a bunch of customer data in a deduplication job gone wrong.

Google best gaming Linux distros. DraugerOS, Garuda, and popos are all prominent distros focused on gaming.

DraugerOS is Ubuntu LTS based.

Mint, not gaming focused, has been around for ages and is Ubuntu based. I’ve used it previously on older hardware with no issue. Just apparently doesn’t like newer hardware.

Garuda is arch based, probably why it was such a pain.

Popos is Ubuntu based as well.

I’ve also tried KDE plasma, ubuntu based, and man was that slow as hell. Works great on some hardware not on the hardware I tried.

I’ve installed Ubuntu in the past and had WiFi driver issues.

You mentioned any modern distros should work out of the box. The only one listed that mostly worked out of the box with semi reasonable performance was popos.

if someone is looking to install a distros to play games, theyll probably google “Linux for gaming” install one of the prominent distros listed above geared toward gaming then bang their head against the wall and quit.

We may understand arch is a full time job, but when Joe from sales builds a new gaming rig and took someone’s advice to install Linux and save money he doesn’t know all Linux distros are not created equally. Maybe he gets garuda or draugeros and bangs his head against the wall then goes back to windows.

There are a million different distros and yes some of the major ones work fine, but not always and if you run into issues it can be exponentially harder to fix the issue especially if you have no IT experience. Making it even worse is toxicity in forums or other support places where people treat you like you should know better because they have of knowledge of Linux and forget that we all have different levels of experience, many people have no experience.

DraugerOS wouldnt even boot from the thumb drive for me. Garuda sort of worked, the live boot was damn near perfect, from a stability and basic performance perspective, but after a basic install there were some annoying artifacts like a block behind the cursor on some windows, steams store page would flash rapidly and performance was trash in any game even on low settings. A Logitech mouse scroll wheel was hit or miss working. I mean like you spin the wheel and while the wheel was free spinning the browser would start and stop responding to it. 8 hours of messing with kernels, drivers, and settings it I threw in the towel. Not worth the effort to just get it to run normally let alone

Arch was similarly poor performance. Mint was also poor performance. Im not a fan of the PopOS style, but it actually ran great on my machine so, I’ll take it.

Point being, I tried 4 different distros before finding one that worked mostly well out of box.

Edit: wrong name for draugeros

The cost of something isn’t always in the form of money. In many cases with Foss there are comprises in either simplicity, stability, documentation, or compatabiliry.

For instance I can boot my machine into a live garuda instance and it runs great, but as soon as I install it, it runs like trash. I spend something like 3 hours fiddling trying to get it going then wipe and try to install smaugos and it wont even boot. I install debian and it works okay but sluggish. Popos works fine. 2 days of fiddling around and I find something that works. Windows may cost more than just money, but it worked out of the box and I didn’t have to fiddle or try a bunch of different distros. We can go down that rabbit hole, but let’s look at other things.

Foss often has volunteer support that can be hit or miss and often requires more advanced knowledge of the os or software. There’s also often toxicity like people shaming for not knowing everything about the application or os. Commercial support is often dedicated and may even remote into your computer. I’m not saying Foss can’t do that, but I’ve never heard of it for free.

FOSS doesn’t work nearly as easily or reliably as commercial software a lot of the time. Nextcloud is a good example. There are a million ways to install it, but now you need to learn docker, or how to setup a web server and even then maybe the docker image is buggy or straight up doesn’t work. The different Linux distros is another example.

Then there’s the learning curve. Even if FOSS has 1:1 parity in functionality, it often comes at the cost of learning a LOT about a new application, or the functionality is different or harder to use compared to a commercial alternative.

Don’t get me wrong I live foss. I self host, I’m slowly getting rid of windows and degoogling. But there is cost to do all of this, even if its not monetary. Plus not everyone has the time, patience, or interest in it.

That seems excessive, maybe let’s make it 25. :p

This is the correct answer. Dell, and other oems, have stored their windows keys in firmware on motherboards for years now. You could literally install on a fresh drive and it should auto activate. Typically at most you have to go to click activate yourself.

This is all assuming the machine came with a pro license and wasn’t upgraded of course. It should have a sticker on it.

Also thank you for pointing this out. Not sure how I missed this. I already looked in the passwd file to make sure it was an actual user account, they’re right next to exciter and had the same uid. You saved me a boat load of time trying to figure that one out. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

This was the issue. I did an update recently of truenas and apparently the polkitd user took over the uid for my plex account. Unfortunately it looks like this also caused some level of corruption since even changing the uid and gid haven’t fixed the issue and plex is borked.

Luckily I have backups, so not all is lost, and even if it was, I could probably just regenerate that data.

Oh man free advertising for vermin Supreme.

Gross, don’t give car manufacturers any ideas.

How does this have any effect on work provided laptops? No job I’ve ever had gave me full control of the software installed in my laptop.