I too install Linux Mint, though Fedora Silverblue and Kinote is another good alternative.

I didn’t have to do that. Bought my parts from Canada Computers and they open the Motherboard box in store before the sale, to inspect it, and I had to sign off on it.

That said I had some issues of my own design. My PC has a space for a 3 1/2" floppy and I wanted it internal so I got a USB adapter for it to run off of the internal header. The damn board locks up on boot if its in.

Probably a setting but still annoying

While its annoying, its so easy to unsubscribe that I see it as a fair price for a free game.

Ram is x2 16GB sticks, my BIOS yelled at me for not putting them in the optimum channels.

M.2 has my 2TB Linux Mint install and my 1TB Windows install. I’m not dual booting, just having the Windows install nearby just in case.

Well I did enable XMP, but since I’m on a B series board I don’t think I can overclock. And she’s toasty as is with the intel cooler.

I have the old physical copy. The DRM on it is awful, get the GOG copy.

For an alternative, when I was looking into server os’s, from what I can tell RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is the go to since it’s stable. That said RHEL is not free, so what people use to do is get a free OS which is down stream to RHEL, that’s your Alma and Rocky Linux.

However back in 2023 IBM made some changes, and now Alma and Rocky had to rebase off of CentOS Stream which is what RHEL is based off of.

For all intent and purpose I’d recommend using Debain, but Alma and Rocky are alternatives you may want to look into. Personally using Alma and outside of the learning curve of using a RHEL based OS, it has been quite stable.

I presumed the issue was probably Flatpak Sandboxing (Steam is natively installed but my emulators were not). However Sunshine + Moonlight isn’t a viable alternative since I am trying to play on my TV with a Gamepad, and Moonlight wasn’t controller friendly on Android the last I checked.

That said if this was PC -> PC then yeah Sunshine + Moonlight is amazing.

Buy some games on discount. I can easily get Fallout 4, or about 7-10 other games on steep discount. PC gaming is the best.

Oh how I wish I had nemo on the iPad rather than apple’s own files app. The issue with SMB is getting files off of the iPad, this is a little easier for me since I can do so from my PC. And I’m not dealing with Apple’s files app silently crashing on me.

According to a brief Google search: Apple File Conduit (AFC)

In most non Apple Desktops, the most you’d get from connecting your iPad/iPhone is access to the photos and videos. You’d need to use iTunes to access the music or device documents.

On Macs it “Just works” and gives you full access to music and files.

While I can’t access my iPads videos and music in Mint. It’s nice to at least get me access to the documents, along side the camera videos and pictures. Not as good as I’d like it to be, but a lot better than what you can do with Windows… without installing iTunes.

I think how happy I am depends on what I am comparing it too.

Compared to Windows? I am very happy with Mint since thus far everything I need works, and I can even play some games.

Compared to my dream distro which doesn’t exist. Not as happy. Since it works, but asks me to use the terminal more than I want to.

You can do this with 10 but not 11. Tested on both a VM and hardware.

Windows 95 -> Windows 98 -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista -> Windows 7 -> Dual Boot Ubuntu -> Windows 7 -> Dual Boot Ubuntu -> Windows 7 -> Windows 10 -> Ubuntu (VM) -> Pop_OS! -> Windows 10 -> Manjaro -> Fedora -> Manjaro -> Open Suse -> Linux Mint -> Linux Mint DE -> Fedora -> Debain -> Linux Mint

Was more focused on the online games with kernel level anti cheat. But yeah, it’s surprising how many online games work. Excluding native games like CS2/CS GO and TF2, I was able to play non-steam online games online like EA’s Battlefront 2, OG Battlefront 1, with wine-ge.

While I agree with this video. As someone who did migrate from Windows to Linux, I feel the biggest issue which wasn’t address here was the planning for migrating to Linux.

Migrating to Linux means loosing access to Windows native applications like Adobe and kernel level anti cheat online games. What I found helped the most was transitioning to cross platform application and learning their ins and outs in Windows, or discovering ways to validate which applications work well in Proton and Wine.

With games ProtonDB is your best bet to see if there are issues. Or finding ways to solve issues.

With Professional software… you’re not going to be as lucky, so transitioning to an alternative which works for you might be the best solution.

The best way to check if Linux will work for you is to run Linux in a VM or on an external SSD on your actual hardware. The best way to check if something works for you is to try it yourself.

I too do not understand social media. The best I get is it’s about people shouting into a void and hoping someone else heard you to interact with it, by repeating it, liking it, or shouting back at you.

Hashtags are the only way to organize these posts and you need to add them or no one else will hear your shouts into the void.

Mostly a guess as to prove it is outside of my reach. The CPU was new out of the box, and there are a lot of reports from Reddit, and other tech forums about Gigabyte B350M boards having issues with Ryzen 5000. I forgot where I this tidbit came from, but from my understanding, Ryzen 5000 has a larger instruction set, which first gen Ryzen Motherboard BIOS Storage didn’t have the space for. Some boards would loose functionality for Ryzen 1000 if they wanted to use Ryzen 5000.

So I feel it’s a safe assumption that at least with my board it probably was an issue. Wasn’t going to dig deeper when my 1600x still worked and I was within the 15 return period.

I too considered that, but as I have been unlucky I’ll probably run into an issue where the power from the wall was bad and I would need to buy a new house, I felt it was safer to keep the original CPU, since it still worked.