Übercomplicated

I was short on time but wanted to recommend a book that drastically changed my life and improved my mental health. I have no moral issues recommending it; one can always look up a summary, or easily read it free of cost using shadow libraries (not that I recommend that).

However, I will humor you, and include a short summary here:

• better memory for stories
• better ability to think three dimensionally
• better ability to think dynamically (changing or uncertain variables)
• and some others I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Hope this helps.

Too much to cover in a comment! Here’s a good book on the subject: https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/

Edit: wait, that may be the wrong link. Here’s the book I meant: https://www.amazon.com/Dyslexic-Advantage-Unlocking-Hidden-Potential/dp/0452297923 (sorry for using an Amazon link)

A note in left-handedness:

In primary school, I first learned to write with a pencil and then with a fountainpen, as you describe (I grew up in Europe). This has made no difference to my experience with writing whatsoever, because our <insert strong swear word> language/cursive/alphabet is designed for right-handed people. I could talk for hours on the subject, but it would involve much swearing — I will spare you the pain. Just know that we should be writing top-to-bottom instead of left to write, and should re-design our alphabet, cursive, fountain pen nibs, and how we teach lefties to write.

Absolutely! In fact, I’d argue that this is true for many conditions that we treat as disabilities, like dyslexia (which is rarely disabling) and the aforementioned autism. Both of these conditions have disadvantages and advantages. The situation is not black and white; simply because society was designed one way, does not mean that everyone who does not perfectly fit in is disabled or has a illness.

I’d go with grimshot then, which I think works for hyprland as well (it’s made for sway). It provides an interface over Grim, slurp, and jq, and makes life easy. Combine it with a image viewer like imv, and your set!

It’s just stigma against the Grüne; hypocrisy at its purest. In other words: I don’t think he actually cares about immigration, he was just using it as a scapegoat.

Yeah, that’s why I specified fedora 40. I guess eventually I’ll need to try fedora again

Your Fedora vs. OpenSUSE comparison is amusing to me, as I’ve had exactly the opposite experience. Fedora 40 DNF was hella slow for me, fedora broke regularly, etc.

My experience with Fedora (about 2 years of daily driving) has lead me to almost hate it, while my experience with Tumbleweed (approx. 6 months daily driver) has lead me to live it dearly. And I’ve never even used YAST!

Well, I guess a lot of this really depends on what packages you use, how you configure your OS, etc. — it’s good to know both sides of the coin no matter what.

Fair enough. While I myself wouldn’t vote for them, I do agree that they are by no means evil. Their position certainly may even be valuable, I concede. I don’t want my preferred party (the Grüne) to be the most radical left party, it’s always good to have an even more left party to balance things out. We don’t want to end up like the US, where even moderate things like universal healthcare are viewed as radical in the state. Democracy serves it’s purpose. In other words: you’ve pretty much convinced me (though I would still vote Grüne).

I absolutely agree with this, people really seem to not take Putin seriously enough. Putin is already at war with us; he’s literally had people killed in Moabit and invaded Europe. This is not Nato’s fault, it is blatant aggression from Putin, which we need to respond, and should have responded, to accordingly.

I agree with you on the SPD, but Habeck was pretty fucking clear that Abschiebung is not the way to go. The Linke on the other hand seems great until you see their position on NATO, rearmament, Russia, and Ukraine…

My dad literally voted for Volt instead of Grüne because “the Grüne was to positive about immigration”

OpenSUSE is my favorite distro.

I first installed it after having an abysmal experience with Fedora (bad repos, unstable, etc.). It took me a while to really enjoy, but after figuring out how to update the system properly (it’s zypper dup not zypper up), all my issues were quickly resolved.

OpenSUSE is extremely stable, has great repos (stable, large, up-to-date, good naming and dependency schemes, etc.), has a strong focus on security, provides appealing defaults (much better than fedora’s), while remaining minimalist enough to have good performance and to be useful for someone like me who is going to extensively customize their system anyway.

I’ve tried bazzite but hated it, as it’s difficult to customize, breaks very easily, and doesn’t seem to have a notable performance improvement over something like Nobara (unfortunately fedora based, good otherwise if gaming is your main thing).

To somewhat answer your question: openSUSE Tumbleweed is the best “normal use-case” distro (in my opinion). It is, however, not super beginner friendly, has a smaller community and fewer docs, and isn’t laser-focused on performance. It’s good for someone who wants to settle down in their Linux experience, and find a daily driver for their most used device.

Other, more specialized options, you might find interesting:

• Nobara Linux: by far the best gaming distro, maintained by the glorious glorious eggroll (proton-ge creator). It breaks every once-and-a-while, but everything is always fixed within one update, at most a day apart, and the breaks are never disabling.
• Void Linux: uses runit instead of SystemD, meaning it’s super, super fast. Has a great installer, is stable, and has good defaults, but absolutely a horrible choice for beginners, if you consider yourself such.

Again, openSUSE is absolutely fantastic, and my own daily driver — but I have Nobara installed on my gaming PC, and Void installed on my portable laptop. In the end, it’s all a matter of use-case.

Edit: sorry for the insanely long response, my thoughts have been meandering today…

It’s better than any built-in history tools (including zsh and fish) and I find the sync feature very useful. It’s definitely saved me time in having to re-find old commands I used once. Probably the second best quality-of-life tool for the shell after zoxide (a brilliant cd replacement).

Mostly it boils down to three categories:

• Case build quality. This seems a be a frequent issue among System76 laptops; in my case (no pun intended), the laptop case was very badly made and easily broke. I carry my device around very much, always in my backpack, which has a padded laptop section, and in a fancy padded laptop case (or bag or whatever the word is—arg). I essentially have double padding, and I have had a good experience with this padding and previous laptops. This time, however, even simply putting the backpack down, was enough force to dent and eventually completely crush the empty corners next to the hinges. I had to manually repair the corners very often, but wasn’t able to prevent damage to the hinges and stripping the threads holding the hinges in place. No other laptop, even ones much cheaper, has ever presented me with this problem, and it is extremely frustrating that the laptop isn’t designed to be even mildly rugged.
• Faulty motherboard and bad quality-control. The laptop I bought had two M.2 NVMe slots, with only one occupied. I was planning to add one of my existing SSDs into the second slot. The second slot, however, did not work. This is such an easy thing to test before shipping it, that it really left a bad taste in my mouth.
• Faulty part and known issue. After about two weeks of using my laptop, the touchpad started malfunctioning. I looked the issue up, and, well and behold, this was a well known issue with this specific laptop. I contacted support and the problem remained unsolved. System76 released and continued selling a laptop with a known, unsolvable issue. This was the final blow, and I totally lost trust in the company after experiencing this.

Forgive the shitty writing, I’m doing this in my phone.

Hope I was able to help, kind regards.

I unfortunately had disabling experiences with the System76 Pangolin (12). Since then I would absolutely not recommend System76.

You don’t need the laptop to run it, and I have unfortunately only had negative experiences with System76 laptops. I’d stick to the classic ThinkPads or maybe something like Tuxedo; the latter if you’re based in Europe.

Yeah, I second this. You may want to look in to DEs/WMs like DWM ©, Xmonad (Haskell), and AwesomeWM (lua) that let you customize them through programming.

I recently got a tip from a friend, that drawing just the shadow a nose creates (so kinda a skewed pear-like shape) looks much better than the sharp lines people usually use for noses.

Huh, this may vary game to game or WM to WM. I lose like 40% performance (mostly in 1% lows), get insane stuttering, shaders start glitching, and some games won’t even start. I’ve tried this on KDE Wayland and SwayWM, mostly with the games Counter Strike 2, Vampire Survivors, the DOOM games, and a few others. The only game that’s worked for me in Wayland was Transport Fever 2 ¯\(ツ)/¯

Okay, people have said many good things so far, so I won’t add much. Simply one thing: take one problem at a time.

By this I rather mean, make your life easier, and only progressively deal with more complicated things. When it comes to distro choice, this would mean picking something with plenty of default installed packages (since you won’t necessarily know what to install yourself) — this rules out my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed as well as the popular Fedora and Debian — something that will play nice with NVidia (Desktop Environments use display managers/servers, the two most common being Wayland and X11; Wayland is better, but unfortunately will really mess up NVidia gaming, so try to stick to X11 for now — you can always switch later!), and, lastly, something with a large community (and by extension a large help forum and wiki).

I never thought I’d hear myself (see myself?) saying this (typing this!?), but Mint checks all those boxes.

I wouldn’t recommend staying with Mint for long (though some people claim to enjoy it…), but as a first distro to introduce you to Linux, it really may be the easiest. Using a different DE is already difficult, don’t overwhelm yourself from the get-go!

Alright, that ended up being longer than expected. I wish you the best of luck, and a lot of fun on your approaching Journey!