Our senior Karma has this problem as well. Her kittens (adults now, though) clean her quite often. You can help out by damping a cloth, and “petting” him with it. It should be very pleasant for the cat as well, since it simulates grooming. She has dementia, and that has caused her to not groom as well or as much as would be necessary, so we pet her with a damp towel if she stinks, and she loves it.

I would recommend a consultation with a vet to rule out underlying issues that would make him unwilling/unable to groom himself, as cats are naturally very clean and prone to grooming, it’s worth checking out just in case.

All 3 of ours are quite vocal, but only Ciri drives me crazy. She is extremely social young cat, and every time someone leaves the house, goes to the bathroom, takes a shower or goes out of sight for any reason, she will start yowling after them, and not in a cute way, it’s a banshee wail. She will also do this if she thinks it’s feeding time (1-2h before actual feeding time) or if she “can’t find anyone”. If ignored, she will escalate to clawing doors or bullying the other two to provoke a reaction.

We know the only way to make it stop is not to react, but she is REALLY good at provoking a reaction, especially when she starts this operation 04:30 in the morning when I need to get up in 2 hours for work…

Otherwise a very pleasant, smart cat.

On the left, the criminal herself, chilling with her (suspected) mom.

Thanks for the suggestion, bookmarked, will have a gander if I get stuck!

Oh yeah, I was thinking about that today, too; get a “for most stuff” distro as the baremetal, and VM specialist distros (like Kali or something) on top of it when needed.

I will definitely check out KVM at some point! I was just gonna chuck VBox at it, but your salespitch convinced me to try at it. Been mostly working with Azure and ESXi for the past 10 years, had no idea KVM was so advanced now, I saw something about it back in the day, but it was a tech demo -level back then.

Thank you kindly for the insight!

Aye, audio latency was a big question I didn’t find a good answer for during my research period. It is a headache on Windows as well.

You do make a really good point I didn’t think about the immutables for music stuff. Cheers for that.

Does the dickish attitude come with the package or is it extra? So sorry for asking questions after being out the scene for a bit, glad to see nothing’s changed in the past 20 years.

Thanks for the alternative take. Good to know that Fedora supports Flatpak that easily.

Blender has a video editor?! Geez, used it back in the day for 3D rendering, but didn’t even cross my mind for videos. Inkscape is a great idea!

Had a couple of recommendations for Ardour from other folks as well, will have to give it a go. Free is free after all.

Games fortunately I have the most experience with lately, was in another country with my ancient T530, and was bored, so did some gaming on Ubuntu, got mostly everything working pretty quickly.

Cheers for the music points. I got some pointers, that Nobara is great for music stuff, and Bazzite can be optimized for it, but takes some effort and fiddling. I gotta take a look at Ardour and Bitwig, see if I vibe with them. How are they with older (my keyboard is around 2010 I believe) MIDI devices, do you happen to have experience?

Thanks for the POV. Mint I tried back when it was step up from Damn Small Linux, like early 2000’s, no clue how it is now. I’ll keep it in mind.

I got interested in the immutable concept, since it wasn’t a thing back when I was more of a linux user, and I’ve gotten lazy and burnt out on fixing my OS when I just want to do something fun. But you do make a good point of sacrificing flexibility, and I might get annoyed at that later.

Sorry mate, not what I’m looking for.

I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance, I get to fix linux servers at work enough already, I don’t want to bring that home.