I am finally getting around to doing this! I will admit, I had Windows on all of my machines... I first rehabilitated my laptop, and I finally brought back my main desktop from hell.

Running the script. Let's see what my computer becomes!

Rent-seeking. That is a term I finally see defined.

I do not mind buying software, it is continuously paying for it that feels wrong.

I just wanted to see if I was missing something, but the programs I trialing are either way too expensive or do not do anything better than what is available to linux.

Okay, I will drop the hundred for a Bitwig license because I know it is worth it.

This is what I needed! I have gone through every distro, including my favorite MX Linux, but settled on Linux Mint because it works better than everything else.

I have a MacBook Air from 2014 that I have upgraded to Sonoma that works just fine.

I think I could use macOas forever if I had no choice, but I am glad I can just use linux.

This is solid. I am so happy for this advice, never heard of Yabridge. I am willing to mess around if it actually means I can use my plugins with Linux!

That is actually pretty cool. I know about portage, but I think it defeats the point of gentoo. Compiling from source is the point, right? That way the user gets all the speed benefits and optimization for their particular hardware.

Flatpaks are a great preview to see if the compiling is worth the time! Or a permanent solution for some software. I am happy that people don't seem to have qualms about mixing software managers.

Whoa. I had not considered backing Home that way! That is slick.

Honestly, reinstalling or moving to a new distro is such a bear precisely due to the time setting up my environment and all the software. I KNOW I can script all this, or at least have a list of packages I use, but it does not really work when different package managers use different naming schemes.

Most software does not change that significantly, so there is no loss in holding back, and usually just the benefits of not breaking your workflow, or your system.

It seem that whatever problems Flatpaks may have, due to sandboxing, is truly isolated. I think as a non-power user, I do not have strong opinions about any kind of technology, I just enjoy the magic of things working without effort on my part. I will dive deeper as my needs change, but my needs are kind of simple too.

I have been learning about it, and what really has motivated was seeing my current provider ProtonMail have an anniversary sale, and just having the least affordable pricing just to get a couple features I need. I have never been a fan of cloud storage, I have never needed an online service to handle my calendars or whatever else.

I need to do do this out of principle.

You are right, that is a lot of software in use. However, I have been given a lot of recommendations. I got my own domain name. I am almost ready. I just need to setup a few more things. I am taking a long time to do this, I got distracted with other self-hosted applications, but I do want to try running a mailserver.