Nefyedardu

Philosophically there isn't much difference between a Windows game running in Proton and a native Linux game. Devs that port games to Linux are going to be doing most of the same things Proton is doing anyway. In that sense, Proton is basically just an automatic porting tool that works in real time. And I'd like to say there is still value in native Linux games but... is there? Proton is open source, so devs could (theoretically) just submit changes to it themselves if they want to optimize things or fix bugs. And that could benefit everyone, not just that one game.

Quick example: When I install a new OS, the first thing I want to do is install Brave. That should be as easy as “click on this thing, type in brave, select Brave, install.”

Why would you expect that from Linux, that's not even how it works on Windows lol. Basically every Linux distro comes with a software center these days, so that shouldn't be a concern.

Someone who wants to be able to get up and running without having to learn how to manage the OS using the cli.

Your usage of the CLI will be determined by how much stuff you want to do. If all you want to do is use a browser, than any distro will work. If you are a techie that uses a bunch of peripherals and like the latest greatest hardware, I would recommend Endeavor because your hardware will be better supported and installing drivers from the AUR is easy. If you are OK with a slight learning curve with the benefit of having a stable distro you don't have to mess with, I would recommend Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite.

*freed from Microsoft's monopoly. Valve is still a corporation.

They have a lot of work to do before they can publicly release it. They really messed up basing it on Arch, IMO. Whereas Fedora has their Silverblue and SUSE has their CoreOS, Valve is really treading new ground with an immutable Arch distro. As it is now, the immutability is a major barrier to doing even very simple things. If I want to install an external driver on Silverblue, I just navigate to it's folder and run rpm-ostree install -driver-. SteamOS has no rpm-ostree equivalent, so you have to disable read-only which is more complicated and defeats the purpose of immutability anyway.

Valve will have to develop a bunch of brand new tools or (more likely) contract the work out, which as far as I know hasn't happened yet even 1.5 years after official release.

Steam is not a corporation, it's an online video games store lol

I think GNOME being minimalist with extensions is a good thing, but I disagree with what GNOME considers basic functionality or not. Two things that stick out:

• an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn't considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is in real time. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME's hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.
• tray icons. GNOME treats background processes like bugs to be squashed. Let's just get real here for a second: sometimes you want programs to run in the background and sometimes you want to be able to see what they are doing in real time. I want my email clients to tell me when I get emails, I wan't my Nextcloud to tell me when there are sync issues, and I want Discord to tell me if I get DMs. This should be considered basic functionality.

Well I hate to disagree with all the doomers here, but I don't think flatpaks are the devil. Flatpaks are as good as the person shipping them, there are not many flatpaks that actually have official dev support so a lot of these programs are packaged by volunteers in their spare time. So no, they may not have the best default settings.

That said, I run flatpaks almost exclusively on Kinoite I've never had an issue with flatpak theming or my cursor changing. Some applications are very obviously made for GNOME or KDE explicitly but flatpak doesn't have anything to do with that. Of course if you are running a WM rice or something with very specific theming then that's another story. You can customize a Linux desktop in countless ways, you can't really expect these applications to keep up with that by default (flatpak or not). It's the same concept as something like Discord or Steam, it will look the same for everybody but you can theme it if you put some effort in.

IDEs are another issue, the whole concept of an IDE is antithetical to a sandbox in the first place so it's simply not a very good use case of flatpak. Flatpak isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, that's why even the Fedora immutable desktops give you additional options like rpm-ostree, podman, buildah and toolbox.

Are there any plans for tray icon and desktop notification support? Those features are the only reason I would run a desktop email client, without them I'll just use a browser. I know Birdtray exists but I can't get it to work with flatpak Thunderbird.

Oracle's OEL is the reason all of this happened in the first place, lol. I don't think there are any good guys or bad guys in all this, just corporations doing what corporations do: make money. Oracle and SUSE smell blood in the water and are trying to capitalize as much as they can. I don't blame them.

SLES is OpenSUSE's own competing product to RHEL. There's also Ubuntu Server.

I switched to Wayland for VRR and (future) HDR support and I don't really notice any downsides. I mean changing your display server will be 99% transparent for most users. There are some features like PTT on Discord which don't work (I believe because of Discord, not Wayland) but I've never used it anyway. Hell I use X KDE on the Steam Deck and Wayland KDE on my desktop and I would hazard to say that Wayland even seems less buggy at this point...

People always say to avoid gaming headphones, but gaming headphones are often the only ones made with built-in external mics. If I'm gaming, I need at least a decent mic. Internal headphone mics aint going to cut it, they are omnidirectional and have terrible quality.

Sure you can get the perfect set up with some high quality headphones and a separate recording setup but there are issues with this. Boom mics are the highest quality of course but they take up a ton of space and are unsightly. You need to get the perfect length of boom and hold it close to your face at all times... it's necessary for content creation but not practical for everyday playing. There are "mod mics" you can attach to the side of your headphones, but there is only one company that makes them (Antlion) and both of their products in this line are terrible. I've had nothing but issues and they are not cheap.

So in the end I settled for the Sony Inzone headphones and they are fine. They are ugly as sin and the sound quality is obviously lacking, but it's way better than most in the category. You can connect via Bluetooth but the dongle works OOTB on Linux. The headphones are poor without a firmware update, and that needs a Windows VM and it's a bit tricky. The update will disable the USB device at points, so you will need to re-enable the USB passthrough when this happens. Pretty easy to do with GNOME-Boxes.

Centos is 100%, factually not a rolling release. Rolling releases don't deploy based on version, they do it based on snapshot. That is quite literally the only defining characteristic of a rolling release and Centos does not share it. Centos deploys by version AKA a point release schedule. Centos 9. Centos 10. Centos 11. Actual rolling releases don't have this characteristic. There isn't an Arch 5, or an OpenSUSE Tumbleweed 23.1, or a Void Linux 4.8. There is just Arch, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and Void Linux. Maybe you have Arch 2023.29.6 snapshot but that is not the same thing.

"This is in contrast to a standard or point release development model which uses software versions that must be reinstalled over the previous version."

This is exactly how Centos works. It's also how Red Hat, Ubuntu and Debian work. Are Red Hat, Ubuntu and Debian rolling releases?