Alright, then I can be "I can afford experimental treatment to regrow my teeth-man!"

Is "good bot" a thing on Lemmy?

It doesn't seem like nothing at all! Great job and welcome to the fam!

Wow this takes me back to the first time I set up a FreeBSD desktop. That sense of accomplishment, I mean, wow. I haven't felt that in a while.

Maybe I'll build a new system with Funtoo… or I could go real crazy and use NetBSD…

This is a bloody brilliant summary. Well done!

Whether they're online or not, if they're preloaded with crapware they're preloaded with crapware, and they're still technically "smart". If you're trying to avoid dealing with those smart UIs, then they're still a problem.

Oh that is fantastic. I need to use that one.

What's stopping you? Just out of curiosity.

Gaming on Linux has gotten to the point that if it won't play on linux, I just shrug and play something else. Their are more native games, and games that aren't native usually run under Proton, Proton GE, or Wine. There's not much left that won't play.

The Nvidia thing is less of a problem these days with distros like Nobara, Gardua, and Vanilla installing proprietary Nvidia drivers out of the box. Heck, you can even do it with almost 0 extra effort on plain Fedora.

I can't help you with music production, though. Linux has some good stuff for that, but my understanding is that Mac and Windows are still the best choice.

Anyway, like I said to someone else, everyone's different, and everyone's threshold for horse hockey gets set off by different things. It's all perspective, really.

Unless you care about privacy. That one's more empirical than perceptual.

I totally get that. The world is a funny place, and no two people will habe the same lived experience.

And FTR, as weird as this may sound to you, the big deal to me was that on Linux (usually Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, or a derivative of those three) there were significantly fewer problems in the first place, never mind whether or not they got solved. I may just have gotten a lucky spin on the Great Hardware Roulette Wheel.

I don't mean to argue, but is any LTS a good recommendation for someone looking for more up to date software than Neon?

Don't get me wrong - it's stable and all that, I guess (although I haven't been a fan of Ubuntu over Debian in a long time), and it's definitely noon friendly. I'm just saying when one of their specific requests is "up to date" an LTS might not be the best choice.

Fedora's XFCE spin if you're happy with your current desktop environment. If you want to try a different Desktop, try the standard Workstation version, or the KDE spin if you're really into customization. Stable, up to date, and easy to maintain

Nobara linux on my media center/gaming PC. The same on my laptop currently, but I'm a habitual distro-hopper, so I may be on NixOS or Vanilla or maybe Void next week. Whichever I happen to be on, there's a 90% chance I'll be using the Gnome DE.