Had several issues when upgrading to 41, so I only upgraded to 42 a month or two ago in order to give them time to iron out the bugs first…

Still are, but I guess a lot of people don’t know much about them

I’m not up to date on hardware, so I’ll refrain from recommending specific components. I went with AMD Ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU (using closed source driver) last time I upgraded my PC and it usually works fine, though I know many recommend AMD GPUs nowadays for Linux. If €1000 is your total budget, it might be worth considering a second hand GPU. For example a used RTX 3080 goes for around €300 and they are still quite capable, though someone else will have to say if that’s enough for the flight sims.

One thing you might want to look up is if the game uses hardware raytracing, and if that works on Linux. Out of the games I play, World of Warships looks worse for me than what I see on youtube, despite that I have set all graphics settings to max. Maybe it’s possible to fix by configuring Wine/Proton/DXVK etc. I haven’t really looked into it, but just so you’re aware of potential issues.

I used this list for help when choosing a power supply, but I think that becomes more important if you buy a high end GPU.

I use Steam for almost all my gaming, and it makes running (most) Windows games a breeze.

So far that has never happened because I’m not using that much storage :) But I shut it down when I need to turn off the mains electricity, and for powering it on afterwards the fake wall can be lifted off. It’s just the area underneath the desk so the panel might be smaller than it sounds like, and it hangs on some hooks so it’s fairly easy to remove if you know what you’re doing. Painted in the same colour as the wall, and with some some random junk on the floor in front, it blends in quite well though. I think the risk of burglary is fairly low, so it’s primarily to soothe my own paranoia.

I mounted mine on the wall under a desk in a room with no other electronics, and then put up a fake wall in front of the server. It can draw in air from the sides, and exhaust upwards behind the desk. But the only real solution is offsite backup, which will also protect against fire and other disasters.

If you specify a budget then people might be able to give some recommendations, if you like.

As for aesthetics, Fractal Design offer a few cases which look really nice, if you like the Scandinavian design style. The overview shows all cases with glass or mesh sides, but there’s usually an option to get an opaque door if you don’t want LEDs from the electronics shining through

My friends are currently throwing a tantrum because I won’t “just enable Secure Boot and run Windows” to play Battlefield 6 with them. But I’ve never felt that I must play a specific game, so the few ones who are incompatible (usually due to bad anti-cheats) have been easy to ignore. There are plenty of good games I can play on Linux.

Offline updates is one of the things that annoyed me most back when I was using Windows, and somehow they’ve managed to make it even worse in Fedora. Luckily you can turn it off in F41 by going to the “Software Update” section in system settings, and then changing “Apply system updates” to “Immediately”. Haven’t upgraded to 42 yet but I hope the setting is still there.

BF1, BF5 and Apex Legends all worked perfectly fine on Linux with anti-cheat fairly recently, until EA changed to use their new Windows only anti-cheat.

I’ve got a MSI MAG Tomahawk wifi which has had a lot of issues, but nothing related to Linux

Can’t help but think about this old XKCD from 2010.

Products targeted towards businesses have always been unreasonably more expensive than those targeted towards consumers. It sucks for us AI hobbyists that Nvidia are stingy with VRAM on consumer cards, but I don’t find it surprising.

Personally I only have a single RTX 3090, but I know a lot of people online who are stacking multiple consumer cards to run AI. Buying used 3090s and putting them in a mining rig is probably still the best value for money if you need a large amount of VRAM.

How much VRAM do you actually need btw?

If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don’t more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

My guess as to why this isn’t a more central feature of Linux distros is that this is not something most users need. If you need to reinstall the OS because you broke it, then a full system backup is probably more convenient, even if it’s less than optimal to back up packages which you could download. If you need to reinstall the OS because you want a clean slate when upgrading to a new version, then your package list for the old version could cause a lot of conflicts as maintainers regularly remove and add new packages.

I have backed up my zsh, vim, tmux, etc. configs and written a few shell scripts which install them and download vim plugins etc. If I ever need to reinstall the OS I would use these. However, in the last 20 years since I ditched Windows I have reinstalled Linux exactly two times: Once because I was an idiot and didn’t have a proper backup when I accidentally formatted the wrong HDD, and once when I switched from Xubuntu to Fedora in which case a package list wouldn’t have been usable.

I use Fedora (KDE) and game a lot. While I mostly like it, I’ve had some problems with it that were non-trivial to solve, so if you’re a Linux beginner I would not necessarily recommend it to you.

Perhaps Bazzite would be a good option? It’s based on Fedora and created with gaming in mind. I got it recommended here and installed it on a friend’s kid’s computer and he’s very happy with it so far.

There’s also Nobara which builds on Fedora to create a gaming-focused distro.

Paper GTK theme is a little bit similar, though with more vibrant colours ofc.

The game, the movie, or the keyboard?

Tbh the majority of my FOSS contributions were to fix problems affecting me personally :) but I’m glad that they’re helping others too. This one is definitely the one that goes on my CV though hehe

Thanks for the kind words :)

In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)

For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.

The problem I’ve had with bad themes (e.g. black on black text/icons) seem to stem from apps using system/fallback colours, e.g. not defining it’s own list background because it assumes it’s always going to be white. But I can’t say if it happens more often with Gtk or Qt… Most recently it happened both with GIMP (Gtk) and FreeCAD (Qt)