I had to use a borrowed iphone for some time and the only thing I really missed about it was Apollo for Reddit. And that’s gone now, so yeah. To change my ringtone, I had to use Bandcamp since there’s no way to run itunes on Linux. There’s no way to install third party games downloaded from places like itch.io. If I want to use my own phone to test mobile game prototypes, it’s simple and cross-platform for Android. I need a damn Mac for iphones. I don’t think Android phones are very good OS-wise or UX-wise either as of late, but at least they’re slightly less locked down. Slightly.

Every fucking suggestion you received can be bought for ~30-50$ right now. If that’s “crazy expensive” to you, maybe you should consider just getting a regular mouse. I’m pretty happy with my 10$ wireless mouse from Amazon. Neither regular or gaming mice will have issues with Linux, as you’d know if you just spent five minutes with any search engine.

So long as you’re not playing competitively, for which you’ll generally want a computer that’s actually “crazy expensive”, you don’t need a gaming mouse. It’s a luxury item.

You said you’re looking for a new mouse and that Linux support is a concern in the same message. That is going to lead most people to assume you’re at least open to suggestions. For sure sometimes people in nerdy forums will try to ‘correct’ you rather than help you, but come on.

And the only thing I’d worry about is customization software. Mechanical keyboards are generally well supported on Linux in that regard, but #Gamer #RGB, consumer peripherals will often only target Windows users on the software end of things.

“Disrespect of poor people”
My dude, you never even posted a budget. Gaming mice are usually around a hundred dollars since they’re meant to be of a higher build quality, as well as equipped with more, better bells and whistles. Your scoffing every time someone mentions a mouse more expensive than an Amazon basics one doesn’t matter if someone is answering your post without having read everything that was said prior.

Man… At this point we really should actively be telling people to stay the hell away from Ubuntu. This is some M$Windows levels of sneaky and borderline malicious behavior.

I’m sure EndeavourOS is perfectly fine for the people who work on it and their core user base. That’s not my issue. It’s still happily running on my laptop. I just keep on seeing people say “Don’t use Manjaro, use EndevourOS! It’s much better.” But your average computer user would lose their shit at having to deal with those ^ issues. “You just had to enable it at installation if you wanted printing. You didn’t see the checkbox?! Oh mah gaaa” …Seriously? It’s not a checkbox to turn it back on if you miss it and should be opt-out to begin with. Are you going to tell me CUPs is a significant memory/storage drain and a gaping vulnerability in a residential network? If one’s not familiar with Linux, CUPS, pacman and Systemd it’s a huge headache for most people to get this working.

I just think that EndeavourOS shouldn’t be presented as a Manjaro alternative for your average person, when it’s an opinionated Arch-based distro with spotty defaults aimed at somewhat experienced Linux users that want nitty-gritty control over their system. (Users which, again, might as well be using vanilla Arch if that’s fun or important to them) And it has some weird update/mirror manager that prevented me from just using pacman to update my system at one point and I had to figure out whatever it was they wanted me to use. Never had this kind of crap happen to me in Manjaro. Nor was printing disabled by default. Nor were network shares hard to get working.

And in my case, I kinda don’t like Endeavour OS. I installed it on my laptop to try it out a couple months ago. It looked to me like a convenient no nonsense installer for Arch with some nice defaults, then you stumble on their custom update/mirror manager nonsense. Then you want to use a printer and realize they left CUPS disabled, as if to give you an “excuse” to use systemctl. Then if you want to use Samba, you need to go out of your way to find a default config file. I’ve had to jump through more hoops and dealt with more quirky nonsense than with Manjaro stable on that distro.

It’s like it doesn’t know who this is meant for. People who want their hand held through a GUI for something basic as updating their system, or people who love writing their own config file for everything.

Might as well install Arch, really.

-Other happy Manjaro user

Not only is this a really interesting idea, this has to be one of the most beautifully written and structured bash scripts I’ve ever seen. I’ll give it a try later!

On Firefox I can easily send a tab to another one of my devices using a Firefox account to link them if something like that sounds acceptable to you. I imagine the same is possible with Chrome.

Weiner is a surname… and also a misspelling of wiener.

Now I’m just hoping AppImage will follow in Snap’s footsteps.

Game and media preservation, for one. But I’m sure part of it is the technical challenge. There’s still websites where you can download those old flash games to run them locally, but one day Adobe Flash player will cease to work on modern operating systems.

Hasn’t Steam just beat its record of simultaneously online users? And while I’m sure Steam Decks contributed to this, we’re taking of numbers an order of magnitude bigger. Hell, PC gaming is doing so well that we’re seeing until then console exclusive games come out on Steam.

Nope, no thank you… I’m not touching anything other than native, AUR or Flatpak packages. AppImage has only been an inelegant and overall inferior alternative in my experience. The Windows experience, with Linux portability issues. “Find an installer online from some website, have it do whatever the hell it wants, polluting my home folder with random crap and hope it’s not a virus” with essentially zero advantages over Flatpak or even Snap.

I decided I preferred dealing with issues caused by the limited resources of a well-meaning community (And often largely corporate contributions, I know) rather than issues caused by some giant company’s malice and greed. Goes without saying I don’t use Chrome either or any Chromium-based web browser. It’s not just Linux. There’s no surprise “Now you gotta pay a subscription to get the next updates!” catch when I get up in the morning and I never have to figure out how to disable anti-features.

Basically every non-game program on my home computer I don’t strictly need for work is open-source, often worked on by volunteers or crowd-funded and that just kinda feels good, y’know? I decided to completely switch to Linux around 12-14 years ago and I sometimes laugh when I hear of the deliberate nonsense Windows users have to deal with at every major update. Or when installing basic software.

To install any program I want, it’s just a matter of opening a terminal, or GUI package manager like Pamac and typing its name or often a related keyword. It gets installed along with anything it requires. No need to cautiously find the proper website (Anyone remember when SourceForge messed with Gimp’s installer to put ads in it?), download an installer and launch that. All my programs get updated for me through that very same GUI, along with my desktop environment, drivers and the kernel. Don’t gotta think about it or wait for some popup in each and every program to tell me “Click here to update! 😌”. And my computer doesn’t randomly reboot or slow down on me.

And Edit:
Last thing, but the Windows basic desktop utilities, like the file browser, text editor and such are all so much worse than the most common Linux alternatives that it’s kind of sad. I don’t know how people function without tabs and split-view when moving files. And I haven’t even touched on how ridiculously customizable Linux desktops are. Nothing compares out there.

Probably never. They’re my third option after native packages and built-from-source packages/installs either manually or using the AUR. They’re convenient and the only option I tolerate of those newer package styles (Flatpak/Snap/AppImage), but seemingly having to download a new 800+MB runtime for small 32MB applications is ridiculously wasteful and I wouldn’t touch them if I didn’t have at least a TB of storage.

Pretty much my only nitpick is that we have no “Commenting as:” and “Posting as:” warnings. It blurs the line between accounts a bit too much in a platform that already adds lots of complexity by splitting the communities and accounts between various servers. Beyond that, its search function is everything I could ask for and it looks great! I’m sure it’ll only keep on getting better over time.

There’s a line right at the end of an extremely obscure animated film from when I was a kid. It ain’t a great movie. And I didn’t fall in love with it even at the time, but that line somehow stuck in my mind to this day and I re-discovered it a couple months ago. I’ll just hint that it takes place in a sky world and Mark f*ckin’ Hamill does the narration. “Comme des anges” is the line in question (Since I saw it in French as a kid) but it probably translates to “Like angels” in English. I tried to find it and it was impossible to stream or buy that movie in any form nowadays.

I’d have gone with a Kbin server. Lemmy just happened to fit more what I like in Reddit and its interface. The servers I mainly interact with seem calm and healthy enough and I get to see fun posts, shared articles and handfuls of discussions here and there. If there was no alternative? I’d just have moved on. Either federated social networks (Or something similar, one day) thrive, or social networks are all bound to gradually become pits of hostility no one wants to or can moderate. Just takes a single rich idiot looking to capitalize on his “product” to tip the scale in the wrong direction. I like connecting with people, having calm conversations about low-stake stuff with strangers. Keeping the heavier stuff for those I know and understand. Hasn’t been possible in places like Twitter for ages and if the smaller, chill subreddits I like are all bound to see more spam and negativity? Pass. I’d just get back to reading novels regularly. Which I still should, honestly.

Flatpak’s the only one I’ve had good experiences with. Tangentially related, but I especially dislike AppImages. I’m not a fan of how bulky installing various flatpaks ends up being and use native packages or the AUR usually, but beyond that they’re really convenient for non-critical applications that otherwise would mesh poorly with my distro or aren’t available there. Friend of mine tells me it’s also a nice system to package Windows applications/games with a preconfigured Wine version.