http://www.styluslabs.com/

Maybe try Write?

I’ve been working on a fix for a similar issue, but it might not apply because my issue is caused by my mouse’s wireless reciever. I wrote a little script to replace the bluetooth wakup config file, and it works when I manually run it. However, this resets every time I restart and I’m having difficulty getting it to run on startup, probably because it requires sudo.

About a year ago I somehow fucked up installing a new window manager on my tablet so badly I had to start from scratch - to this day I have no idea what happened there, but it just wouldn’t boot properly or anything after that 🤷 I needed it for school pretty quickly though so my top priority was getting it working again, so I set up a fresh install instead of continuing to fuck around.

Not the same level of destruction, but I fucked up my first ever install a couple months in trying to resolve dependencies related to python and wine, which is why I’m more interested in sandboxing whenever feasible these days. After only two months I guess I had been fucking around with linux long enough to have a little too much unearned confidence, lol

I used Pop on my main computer for almost a year before switching back to Mint last year. There were a lot of good things about it - for instance, it had the best compatibility out of the box with my hardware out of everything I tried. But I also saw some stability issues, and I personally dislike it’s aesthetic, and I’m not really interested in trying Cosmic. I still recommend it to people but it’s not for me.

Wow! With vpn on (as usual) I get tons of other people’s stuff - almost entirely movies and TV, lots of Bluey episodes in particular? Makes sense I don’t see anything of mine, bc I haven’t torrented anything in the past few days. When I turned the vpn off, nothing showed up. I suspected my rommate wouldn’t be torrenting bc he always asks me to do it for him lol, he’s less tech savvy, but it would be funny if something of his actually did show up.

My vote is for mint. If you’ve been a long time windows user it should be the easiest one to get used to. PopOS is also newbie friendly if you’re not into the feel of Mint for whatever reason.

My biggest recommendation though is to spend some time with a few different OS’s and try setting things up different ways. Like if you start with Mint, try something new a month or two later. It’s a good way to get used to the way linux OS’s work under the hood.

I’m not a programmer at all, but if you have some background with computers and are willing to sink some time into learning and setting up a new system you’ll be fine.

I tested it out bc I thought I’d need it to get teams running for school, but it turns out we’re only using teams’ video calls so Vivaldi works too. Edge is fine I guess? I dislike that it’s chromium and I dislike microsoft but it’s good to know edge works fine, in case I need it for some reason at some point. I still uninstalled it when I realized I didn’t need it.

Normally, I use firefox for normal personal browsing and vivaldi for school (since some sites we use work much better on chromum, and it’s nice to have that separation anyways).

Not technically the first, but what got me into it was libre office. I was too broke too afford word so I was looking into alternatives.

Try a few distros before settling down - setting things up a few times is a good way to get to know the ins and outs better. Try something other than plain Ubuntu - I really enjoyed Mint and PopOS personally, both of which are forks of Ubuntu. In my first 6 months I tried around 4-5 different Ubuntu family distros, and that was such an important learning experience for me.

If you want to use wine, get bottles instead of running plain wine. The dependencies are much easier to manage, and you can run separate configurations of wine. As I know from personal experience, the sandboxing also helps prevent you fucking your computer up.

On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.

Look up some terminal games - there are a few that are designed to help you learn. I don’t remember the names (I’m down to track them down later if that would help), but in particular I remember an SSH-based file searching game and a folder exploration dungeon crawler themed game.

Learning commands is less useful than understanding how Linux is setup, but it’ll all come together with time - just keep playing around with it and learning new things.

I switched to linux before the steam deck came out, and things were already pretty good then, but it’s even better now that more folks are invested in it. Since then, I haven’t come across any steam games I have major issues with - however, I still have issues getting my controller running (I don’t use it often though, so I haven’t really looked into that much) and on certain games I have issues if I switch windows while it’s running. Generally for me, if it runs, it runs well, aside from occasional issues from needing more ram. It looks like we have similar cpu’s, and you have a better graphics card and more ram than me. I can’t speak for everything on your list, but I did play some civ fairly recently without any problems. Check protondb for the games you play most before making the switch - and if you’re worried, check lower rated games on there for examples of issues and fixes. I suspect it would be fine for you to switch.