The gatekeeping I was referring to is giving people shit for being weebs, furries, etc. etc. Feels skeezy and moralistic. One of my favourite things about the Linux community is how openly eccentric so many people are. Even if it isn't my aesthetic it's way less contrived than the bland wastelands that corporate culture generates.

It wasn't really relevant to your question, but you do you, weeb OP.

Idk, I feel like gatekeeping is a bigger problem than anime thumbnails.

My approach has been to slowly learn how to play to the strengths of Linux and not pine after anything on Windows because ultimately I've gained a lot more than I've lost.

The one piece of software I haven't been able to avoid keeping around is Sigma Studio, so I have a 10 year old shit top for running it, but it also runs in a VM if I need it. Thankfully I only need to use it once or twice a year.

If you rely on multiple pieces of software for important everyday activities and they aren't usable in wine or a VM, you probably have no choice but to use the operating system that is the best vehicle for those tools. Doesn't stop you from also using linux for other stuff, but I can understand how that's not the same as going all in.

You mean like https://tauri.app/ ?

I feel like microsoft's gameplan is less "everyone must use windows" these days and more "we want to gatekeep tech on as many levels as possible". I'm wary of relying on anything they put out. I think we've all recently seen what big tech companies do when they decide its time to monetize more aggressively.

Right now helix is pretty good for what I do with it.

Hell yeah, raptor is great.

I can declare the complete state of my systems in a config file that I store on sourcehut with git and pull down to have a fully configured system on new hardware whenever I want it.

I can use tiling window managers.

I can work with native containers easily.

I can run an operating system that is designed to be the most useful tool it can be, not the most profitable product it can be.

This is one of my favourite things about tracker music. It's obviously a lot more complicated to share the full source files for music that uses a workflow involving paid tools or that is complex to replicate. The de facto openness of the tracker format is something that is unlikely to be seen again, but rendering stems / sharing patches / encouraging sampling are all still valuable.

I'd love to see a healthy foss music scene that encorages building on one another's work and would definitely participate. Music is way more interesting when we don't have to fight economic territorialism to make it, as complicated a path as that has become.

At the moment I pretty much only buy games on Steam. GoG has been pretty hostile to Linux over the years, whereas Valve is the only gaming focused company that robustly supports Linux on both a hardware and software level. The money I give to their platform directly supports Linux gaming and everyone directly benefits from this.

Valve is also an exceptionally rare example of a privately owned, not publicly traded company of their size. Gabe Newell himself owns a majority stake and has shown that he is more interested in running a company that can make effective long term decisions than a company that desperately suckles at the teats of short term profits and corporatocracy. As long as this stays true, Valve is in a vastly better position to resist enshittification than most big tech companies out there. Valve doesn't need to pull a Red Hat unless fundamental things change, and Gabe seems pretty happy to be in a position where he doesn't need another layer of corporate overlords.

I'd definitely prefer to have DRM free stuff, but Steam is a pretty good compromise at the moment. If Valve ever goes to shit, I'll just take steps to access the games I own in a way that is independently well supported on Linux. I suspect there will be multiple ways to do so if it ever comes to this. Proton being open source counts for a lot.

Yeah microsoft is unlikely to pull the rug out from under windows users in one go, their strategy is much more likely to be pushing people in the direction they want to move computing slowly and incrementally over a number of years. They appear to want everyone who plays games, does office work, runs a business, or writes code to have a microsoft account, which they can then monetize in various ways using cloud services because that will be the main way they will deliver what people need.

I feel like we are in the middle period of this strategy.

NixOS is absolutely worth the effort. You have to frontload a bit of effort setting up configs, but you get a whole lot of incredibly valuable stuff in return, and a lot of things become easier in the long run.

I also haven't noticed a significant performance hit from using nixos on desktop coming from arch a few months ago. Nix definitely does a lot of stuff and that can chew through bandwidth at times, but overall I think the time saved from not compiling heaps of aur packages has outweighed the time lost to nix updating and maintaining the overall state of my system on every update.

I tend to run relatively lightweight systems these days and haven't really noticed sluggishness compared to an equivalent system on arch. My desktop environment has been sway on both for a while and this may account for my experience of a leaner and more reliable system on both, but it's hard to say.

I'd definitely want to investigate bandwidth optimization strats for nix if I was heavily constrained in that area, or possibly move to something where cpu and bandwidth constraints were given priority over reproducibility. For my current setup nixos has been a game changer on both desktop and server, but I only really have arch as a direct comparison.

( For context, my current desktop nixos systems are a 9 year old low-end cintiq, a 2017 dell optiplex 7050 minipc, and a steam deck. They all have ssds and at least 12gb of ram. All feel super snappy for everyday work with a web browser and a heap of open terminals and workspaces. )