Maybe a dumb question but what kind of case do you have? Hopefully not metal because I had some crazy wifi behavior before I realized the case was either dampening the signal or capturing too much noise.

She’s pretty much not in my party unless I know I’m going to fight undead.

Tried the native installer again (was using Flatpak up until now). No freezing and the encoders are found!

Only problem now is getting the resolution to change based on my client. Any other screen is going to be much smaller than my desktop widescreen so changing resolution is pretty important. The Sunshine suggestion didn’t work (script to run nvidia-settings command).

I’ll try that again but the first time I tried that I had to rollback because the desktop would freeze immediately after login.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Linux gaming (started using Linux as my main OS for games) and the biggest issue I’ve run into is Nvidia drivers. They’re technically supported on Linux but that doesn’t mean it’s equal to AMD or fully featured. Waydroid (Android emulator) doesn’t work with Nvidia nor does Sunshine (game streaming server). These cases may not apply to you but if I started from scratch I wouldn’t buy an Nvidia card. Hopefully this doesn’t apply to you.

If the laptop supports dual drives (not unheard of but not the norm) it’s way safer to dual boot from different physical drives.

Whatever OS you choose make sure they have a guide for dual-booting. Any Linux OS should be capable of dual-boot but not all will support that configuration equally.

As a failsafe I would also make a rescue USB, especially SystemRescue because of the findroot option.

Could’ve made the middle panel smacking a fly.

Haven’t bought an EA title in years and no regrets. It’s like donating to the GOP at this point.

Again, capable of a lot but it’s best at configuration management. I like to use Ansible after I install an OS to do things like tweak SSH to be more secure, install Fish shell, set common environment variables and aliases, create a bin folder in my home directory, and clone down a bunch of custom scripts I have and a remote Git repository. You can do this kind of thing with a bash script also but with a well written ansible playbook you can run it over and over and it can fix configuration drift (in my example it could ensure my repository of scripts is up to date).

Using it on my latest install. Not bad. I mostly picked it for the visual aspects but I’m in the fence about it’s functionality. It feels like it takes more clicks than it should to open stuff.

Ansible is a legitimate way to provision a VM, but that’s not it’s strong suit. You should look into Teraform as it’s more industry standard.

Yup

Been using it a few weeks and mostly happy. 2 gripes are waydroid not working (didn’t have a big desire to use it but still) and leaning into the immutability aspect can be tough. I say it’s tough because it didn’t take long to run into a case where I really need to use rpm-ostree install and I’ve so far failed at using workarounds.

Really. For a new user, fixing the repos is one of the less intuitive things to do.

I’d recommend dual booting right now so you can transition over a longer period. Also make sure your chosen distro supports dual-boot. Technically any distro can dual-boot but if it doesn’t support dual-boot you’ll have to put in some extra effort to make sure both can boot safely and easily.

Hoping it remains viable for a long time without updates. Syncing my KeePass database is really key for me. I need to fluidly add and read passwords from at least 3 devices.

I’m new to Gnome, been using XFCE and Budgie for the longest time. Does this or any other extension allow offsetting the location of the date and time? A webcam attached to my monitor mostly blocks it.

Wow. I might have the same model. What distro are you running?

I’m running Ubuntu Budgie Jellyfish. My biggest gripes are battery life and notifications (only low battery warning I get is the screen flickering 1 min before it dies at around 5% power), video (maybe once a month the screen will go black and I can’t do anything but hard reset), and Wi-Fi (5G connection is much more likely to drop than 2.4G if I’m between APs). Might be a bit of a lemon since I had to get the mobo replaced in like the first 2 weeks.

My Dell XPS is my most hated computer. 90% stable with Ubuntu but that 10% really stings.

Not that it would eliminate every shell command but you should learn Ansible. This is what’s it’s built for.