It’s not open source. I was saying, if you must use chrome based browsers, suck it up and use non-OSS, because Brave is just awful in so many ways.

Not necessarily. With the awful things about Brave, if I need a chromium based browser I’ll absolutely go non-OSS and use Vivaldi. It’s a million miles better, and it’s not worth supporting Brave just to say you’re still using an open source browser.

Yeah, I like what they’re putting down, but I don’t understand the AI = immortality bit.

I thought either; the AI is going to help research a biological immortality solution, or; the AI is going to be an immortal avatar for these dickbags.

Agreed. I’d say Ubuntu is generally fine except for defaulting to installing snaps (which are terrible, the worst package management).

Yes. This opinion piece pops up every couple of months and it’s always related to “this is how we get more Mac and Windows users”.

If your collection is in GOG or itch.io, yes you can do that. But I don’t think there’s a good practical way to do it with Steam games.

Jc141 does compress games in a wine wrapper for ready use on Linux using dwarFS. I could see those working for this is it’s a steam only release. So if you put in the work yourself to do something similar then maybe so. I think must be including Goldberg emulator or something in there to keep them running without steam.

Can’t help but feel none of them have ever watched tv or movies, beyond a cursory glance to say “that’s not the big thing anymore”

Putting it out there; Badlands was the better overhead circuit style racer.

So go and use it then? I don’t care what you do.

CachyOS and Endeavour OS are the two common Arch derivatives - basically “Arch in easy mode”. They’re both very good.

Manjaro is another but it brings its own set of problems that I never have the time or patience to deal with.

I’m using CachyOS now since October. I’m enjoying it and haven’t come across any issues yet that weren’t easily fixed.

This is the first time in 5 years I haven’t been on opensuse.

Manjaro is significantly worse with updates breaking.

I used for a little while in 2018 and again in 2019, both times ended because it once became stuck in a boot loop after updates, and another time couldn’t boot after updates.

And also PCLinuxOS and Mandriva, those were the big recommendations as well. But we’re pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions I think we had in mind by going back that far too.

Oh yeah, there’s a big difference now in distro conversations.

Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping, discussions around “best distro for me”, starter for new users, etc. Just an occasional; “of you’re going to choose Ubuntu, just pick Debian and go straight to the source”.

But it was often pointed out that Debians pros is what made it not recommended for general end-user. It’s strong for servers and productivity. But its stability meant kernel and mesa updates were slow, many programs lagged. Gaming performance suffers and new hardware support is weaker. It was recognised that Ubuntu and Mint would add convenience for everyday use cases on top of Debian.

Especially the early to mid 2010s was all about “bleeding edge/rolling release is too likely to break, Debian is too stable to get updates, pick something in between”

Now, this problem is being lessened, at the same time people are liking the stability for general desktop use. Bleeding edge became highly recommended 5 - 8 years ago, and now in 2025 people care less about that and it’s easy to make stable distros work for your needs just as well.

Now people will regularly say “use Debian, it’s solid and reliable” and not follow up with “you’ll have to deal with old packages though”

The Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. They’ve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. It’s paid off for them and Arch isn’t really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.

Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedora’s proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesn’t hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.

Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I don’t know how they’re going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.

Fedora. I’ve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 I’ve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of “being there” but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.

Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, can’t run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you don’t need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I don’t know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.

On the other hand:

Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. They’ve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that it’s not super “new user friendly”. Even amongst people wanting to try out Opensuse, you often see “I’ll give Slowroll a try.”

PopOs’ cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.

Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like “Nobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedora”.

The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesn’t come up as often as a couple years ago.