More than happy to help! Let me know if I can answer any other questions for you

I play on Arch with no issues. There's a lot of guides with varying degrees of value and required skill, but I've found that easy mode is set it up is to run the program called Bottles and follow the wizard to set up the container and install all of the dependencies. It's all automated.

There's a little bit of jank when it comes to signing into Battle.net the first time, but after that it's smooth. I'm all AMD in this build, but not super high end stuff and I manage 90+ fps with almost every detail setting maxed. There was a memory leak when I zone via teleport to anywhere in TWW, but I haven't played since the last point release so I'm not sure if they've fixed it.

A little bit more than two cents, opinions on your list of distros:

Bazzite/Nobara: solid choices, but my experience is really limited with them. Atomic distros are really cool for any situation where you want to safeguard the critical system software from a user--enterprise, your grandma, your Minecraft nephew, etc. - - Nobara is maintained by Glorious Eggroll, a Fedora (or RH? can't remember rn) dev who's been critical to the rise of Linux gaming in the past few years. Look up Proton-GE, it can't be overstated how important the work he's done, free and on his own time, has been for Linux gamers.

Drauger: maybe someone else can weigh in on this one as I don't have any experience. Looks like any other Ubuntu spin with a theme and some "gamer" apps pre-installed. Any time I see that, I prefer to just to back to it's parent since I can just install anything it has on my own.

Pop! _OS: Cosmic desktop is pretty cool looking, but I prefer KDE. Very very small amount of experience here (maybe like 5 hours on my laptop before I jumped), but it seemed pretty good. Most of my drivers, including touch panel, worked right out of the box and Cosmic is cool. Not for me, but like I said, in this case I'd probably just go upstream to Ubuntu instead as I prefer KDE.

SteamOS Debian: bad idea. That project is not the same as what's on the Deck (which is Arch based) and hasn't been updated for several years. Not worth the headache, and you won't get anything more than installing Debian and Steam aside from security issues. If you want the StramOS experience on something that isn't a Steam Deck, Bazzite and Nobara are much better choices. Or even CachyOS, if you want to stay Arch-based.

Manjaro: Not a fan, at all. They claim to be Arch-based, but are more accurately described as Arch-related. Others are less willing to ignore the personalities associated with the Manjaro team, but I don't really care about that. Whet matters to me is that they usurp, for lack of a better descriptor, the Arch repos for their own, which are not kept up to date with the same rigor. I've had system updates crash apps or nuke my system because of the mismatched revs of different pieces of system software causing issues. Plus there's another middleman to worry about in the way of the dev and me. In Ubuntu's case I let it slide because Canonical have a great track record with pre-release testing... Manjaro not so much.

I'd say that if you're looking into Arch but aren't confident in being able to go through the install, read up on the Archinstall script. Or check out Endeavors, you'll get Arch with a graphical installer called Calamares. The installer defaults to installing their branding and a couple of QoL apps, but you can prohibit that by unchecking one box in Calamares.

Ubuntu: a great jumping off point for anyone looking to get into Linux. They've got spins pre-configured for pretty much all of the mainstream DEs, including some that are almost identical in day to day function as Windows. Based on the rock solid-est distro, Debian, with a ton of resources that go into dev and testing. My go-to recommendations for newbies when I can't be present to troubleshoot things for them during/after installing.

Mint: all of the benefits of Ubuntu, plus out of the box proprietary software. Nice if you want an even more polished out of the box experience than Ubuntu. Again, they get a pass on the extra software they bundle in because it's all been tested to hell.

Other notes: I run Arch, not because I feel like it's a flex, but because I like rolling release models better than incremental ones. I don't like waiting for stuff if I don't have to, but I don't install anything too wild either. I also don't like reinstalling my system when a big update comes out... not an issue often these days, but it wasn't atypical when I switched over a decade ago. Worthwhile to mention there are rolling release model flavors of the distros above: Linux Mint Debian Edition, Rolling Rhino (Ubuntu-based with a heavily customized XFCE interface), plus OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Sid (close enough at least).

Incremental releases are nice too, because every once in a while (1-2 times a year, normally like October and April, or a little bit later), Ubuntu releases a big update. Usually that just means a lot of neat new functionality and stability. If you're cool with it, there's nothing wrong with that, but you'll often be behind on a lot of software, which can be frustrating when you're at the "I know this mouse lag bug is fixed in the new version of blueZ but it's not going to be in the repo for 3 more months..." stage. There's also the potential of nuking your system on a major update, or just losing personalization you may have put dozens of hours into.

Good notabot.

I keep coming back to KDE time and time again. It's so easy to mess with, I can set it up exactly how I like it without much effort, and it always looks good because someone else did all the work making themes and widgets I use.

That said, I love XFCE, I'm just trash with CSS so it takes me forever to get it how I like, and on my Surface I can't get the scaling to work so everything is beyond tiny.

Man this statement, while already sour, aged like fucking milk.

This is Ohio, for anyone else that didn't get that from anything on the article or anywhere you'd expect to see it on the website.

Short answer: no. Long answer: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck no.

Idk man, that sounds an awful lot like ~~socialism~~ waste, fraud, and abuse.

Just in case: /s

Well of course they did/do. They're the ones in charge right now.

As others have mentioned, Debian stable and Xubuntu are my default recommendations for anyone who wants a simple "just works" kind of system. Debian if they want it to be as clean as possible, Xubuntu if they want some creature comfort right out of the box.

Caveat: I'm not a statistician, but my job requires that I interpret large pools of raw data to interpolate outcomes for even larger systems. Think using 30 respondents and a week of observation/collection to represent 2500-10,000 respondents over the course of a year. The way I collect, analyze, interpret, and present my data is scrutinized heavily from every angle (as it should be) but still very susceptible to biases. Fortunately, I'm super autistic and it's basically impossible for me to lie so I'm considered really good at what I do.

These surveys are typically done via methods that are prone to significant statistical errors. For the most part they use phone calls, Facebook ads, emails that most people under the age of 65 just delete (or never even see because it's caught by spam filters). This, combined with the fact that the type of people who will reply to these sort of questionaires are always more right-leaning skews the data even further.

If someone approached you on the street asking you to take a survey, about Pervert Hoover what would you do? Uncle Jerry, who's known for providing his unsolicited opinions about librulz and the gays, and Aunt Elaine who doesn't want to get backhanded at home so she just stands there usually count as two respondents.

That's not even touching the bias almost always introduced by the question and answer formats. "Do you agree with the President's policy of deporting people with legal residency status due to excercising their First Amendment Rights? (Y/N)" is a totally different outcome to "Do you agree with the President's national security policies? (Y/N)"

These articles are always written to imply they've surveyed everyone in the country, done the math to adjust for selection bias, and written the survey questions to be fair, but time and time again that's proven to be untrue, or at least inaccurate. The interesting (and honestly the only good news we hear anymore) is that even with all of the cards literally and figuratively stacked in the orange skidmark's favor, he's only getting as positive an outcome as he is.

And there's also the need for clicks and ad revenue.

TL; DR: these things are bullshit and always produce wildly inaccurate results skewed in favor of the dumbest outcomes.

Nah, this is from her team. At best, she's furrowing her brow.