I’ve said it here before and I’ll continue to say it. All the Linux nerds (myself included) have strong opinions when it comes to distros or x vs Wayland, or flatpak vs repositories, blah blah blah.

But in the end - none of it matters. You could randomly eliminate all options except for one distro - and we’d happily pick that over windows. The trick is that you could make any distro like any other - it’s just that the distro did all the work for you. So pick the one that matches how you want to use your pc.

Maybe the only thing that’s not changeable is the philosophy behind the distro. Debian - older stuff for stability. Arch - bleeding edge rolling release. Fedora somewhere in the middle. You get the idea.

Tell us you don’t have a full time job without telling us.

None - see above.

Literally zero flex on the keyboard. I just pulled it out and pressed hard on it. No flex of the keys pushing down through the metal (like a gasket mounted mechanical keyboard would do), and zero flex of the aluminum.

I’ve been daily driving a framework 13 for like 9 months now. I’m pretty happy with it as a Linux machine.I can and will nitpick here to some of the points made in the article - but I’d buy another / recommended it regardless.

• the touchpad. It’s a diving board style. It’s also got a good amount of play in it prior to clicking. The diving board style means it’s tough to click at the top. Tapping works great. The extra play takes a little getting used to. It’s 1000% functional and works well - but if you’re snobby about trackpads, you won’t like it. It’s way worse than an Apple touchpad, but an upper end windows touchpad. The trackpads play also tends to allow “crap” and dirt to fall in there. I’ve had to take it apart once to clean it out (which is super easy to do on a framework, but it’d be nicer if I didn’t have to do it at all)
• the price - it’s a bit high for the specs. But that comes with the territory of a non glued laptop
• battery life is ok
• speakers are kind of crappy. They are fine, but they ain’t wowing anyone.
• the keyboard is ok

That’s it. 9 months of daily use, I love it, that’s my complaints list. The idea here is that someday, a better trackpad, or keyboard, or speakers will become available-and it’ll take me 5 minutes to upgrade. It’s a desktop laptop. And for me, everything “just works” on fedora 42.

Everyone overthinks it, and you are too.

Mint is great. It may not work for you if you have super new hardware.

Fedora is great. It’s mint but with newer stuff.

Arch is great. Bleeding edge. But it’s not “set it and forget it”.

Linux is great. There’s a million other options. Any of them work if they work for you. Find someone bashing Ubuntu - they would HAPPILY choose Ubuntu over win11.

And you have to realize the “what version I’m on dependency hell” thing is a thing of the past for the most part. Flatpaks just about solve this problem. You’ve got containers and vms too. Switching to another distro ain’t hard either as a nuclear option.

Just install mint or fedora like everyone says. Your requirements aren’t special, and both options are great.

Same I run the flatpak app on fedora workstation 42 with zero issues.

Has that ever happened across drives? Without user error?

Every Linux distro I’ve ever used has been pretty damn specific about where it installs boot, and respectful of all other drives and boot loaders.

I’ll concede defeat, but I find your claim hard to believe.

Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.

1. the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)

2. dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.

3. dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.

My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.

Gen x with boomer parents who barely parented, so…. Everything?

How’s this for a list? I swear every one of these is honest to god true and I did them all.

• jarts
• Being kicked out of the house for the entire day with zero supervision
• ice fishing / pond hockey. We decided if the ice was safe or not. Like 10 year old kids…
• being allowed to ride our bikes on literally any road except for highways
• riding bikes on the roads with no helmets
• being allowed to go literally anywhere we could get to on our bikes
• being given firecrackers
• carrying and using real guns on the farm at about 10+ years old unsupervised (22s and 410s - the 12 gauge unsupervised wasn’t until I was older - like 16ish)
• riding with no seat belts
• riding in the back of a pickup truck
• riding in the way back of a station wagon
• riding on the edge of a tailgate with our legs dangling over (we used to drag our sneakers on the road and make white lines by burning off the rubber soles)
• riding on the side edges of the bed of a pickup
• holding ladders and whatnot onto the roof & tailgate of a pickup (like not tied down - the kids held it down)
• working / playing all day in the summer sun with no suntan lotion
• making jumps and going off them with bicycles
• jumping over our friends with said bicycles and jumps
• riding three wheelers (they stopped making them because they were so dangerous)
• mean green machines
• candy cigarettes
• buying real cigarettes for our fathers from a vending machine
• drinking from the hose
• we we had “real” ninja stars and we hucked those things at everything
• we had real knives at very young ages - like maybe 5?
• I had a real slingshot early. Like 5ish. That thing could kill. Dangerous af.
• I always had a bow and could use it as soon as I could draw it. My friend was lucky enough to have a compound bow. Totally cool to walk around with bows and shoot shit.
• I learned to use a chainsaw around 10yr old
• drove tractors unsupervised at about 8 yr old
• drove tractors on the road
• learned to drive a real car (Datsun pickup truck - stick shift) at about 10. Unsupervised on the farm. Not allowed on the road. We used to drive it fast and do donuts and shit. Parents and grandparents didn’t care - we were just having some fun. “Be careful and don’t crash into trees” was all I ever got warned about.
• siphoned gas with a hose
• sprayed herbicides pesticides and fungicides as a teenager with no mask
• being allowed to camp outside in the woods for the night with friends
• being allowed to make campfires at said campouts (we cooked hotdogs and ate them)
• going to concerts with older brothers (anyone’s older brother) at young ages (basically once you started getting into music - 10ish?)
• carrying a house key with you since day 1 of kindergarten
• being a latchkey kid - I came home alone and took care of myself and my younger sister by about 3rd grade. Before that we got dropped off at grandmas house after school. If we had a problem we just called grandma on the phone.
• allowed to cook anything anytime since about 5
• it was a responsibility to light the wood stove and keep the fire going in the winter.
• mowed lawns unsupervised since a young age. 8ish maybe?
• used weed whackers about the same time
• had a dirt bike at 13ish. Allowed to go anywhere unsupervised
• totally cool to swim unsupervised or even alone once I learned how to swim
• totally cool to eat things that had fallen on the ground - the 5 second rule definitely applied
• it was ok to drink at home a little bit with friends as a teenager. Like a sleepover or out in the woods. Better than drinking and driving. Getting shitfaced wasn’t cool, but drinking some of dad’s beer / liquor was - as long as we didn’t drive. Party at a friends house? Gonna be booze? Ok if parents are around and nobody drives.
• when tromping around the neighborhood-I didn’t have to tell my parents where I was. They didn’t care. There were no cell phones either. If our parents wanted us they’d yell. If that didn’t work, they’d call neighbors and once they found out where we were last seen - that neighbor would yell.
• people had chicken pox parties (I never went to one but they happened - I think I got it from my sister)
• monkey bars - big ass ones at least 15 feet high. Hard packed dirt underneath. Totally could bust your head open or break your back if you fell off one. Wicked dangerous. Was actually scary to climb to the top but you bet your ass we all did it, otherwise you were a pussy and got picked on forever.
• huge Fn seesaws - like would go up in the air maybe 6 or seven feet
• those spin-y things in the playground-dunno what they were called. You know all the kids piled on, others grabbed the bars and spun the shit out of it. We all got dizzy and tried not to whack our heads falling off.

I dunno, that’s all just off the top of my head.

Openrgb is what you want. It’s tricky to figure out though. It’s not just going to recognize the device and poof magic. You’ll have to fiddle with HOW it’s connected - through your rgb header, bios settings, separate controller etc. Once it’s recognized, you may have to play with the settings for how many lights it has etc.

When I first used it, it thought it didn’t do anything. Then I learned and got it to do everything.