Yeah, they were common to Arch. Specifically, Steam would cause the entire system to stutter for a good 30 seconds when starting it up. Found a tip online about it doing something with some extra config files, followed the tip and now it’s working fine.

Even using the CachyOS versions of Proton and Wine libraries (which have the same kind of optimizations applied as the rest of the OS) has worked flawlessly, and my games are smoother than they’ve ever been. Pretty impressed with it overall.

Don’t get me wrong, Mint is great for everyone. I was using it primarily for ages, and I’ve been using Linux for decades as well.

It’s been great so far. Minimalistic in its philosophy (even with a choice of DE, it doesn’t install the typical slew of utility applications and such), and it’s easily the fastest distro I’ve ever used. I’ve had almost zero problems with Steam and Heroic. Overall I think I’m gonna stick with it for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, I’m actually on CachyOS now. I just always point newcomers to Mint because it’s easy and well supported.

I finally switched to Linux as my daily driver when I found it took significantly less time than Win11–mainly driver support. Spent several hours trying to get Windows to recognize all my hardware, Mint had it all out of the box.

There’s an easy way to thoroughly and permanently remove the recall feature.

Install this

It was a test shot, they probably just found a landlord or something.

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

Fair enough!

Related:

Congrats on finding what is possibly the douchiest shirt of all time! Wear it with a mix of pride and shame!

It’s called a crisp because it’s crispy (at least to my knowledge).

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.

It’s almost like multiple types of food can have a brittle texture…

As opposed to the UK, where a crisp is a chip and a chip is a fry.

Alberta separation movement criticized by business groups everyone with at least two brain cells

FTFY

Inkscape is one of my favorite applications out there. I use it almost daily, both for my day job and hobbies. Thanks Martin!

I mean, anything can become airborne for a substantial period of time if you have a large enough trebuchet.

It can be quite painful for the person on the receiving end if you don’t get it in the right spot.