I commend and congratulate you! As a born American, it was never a problem for me. However, as a Jew I know full well the fragile and tenuous peace can vanish in a moment if any one or more ethnic groups become a convenient scapegoat for a regime. My grandparents got out of Germany literally with moments to spare. At the same time my grandparents were boarding a plane, SS were bashing down the doors to their home.

So if you are in a position that you could ever face persecution like that, getting the F out is the smartest thing to do. I sincerely wish you all the best and hope you make a peaceful life somewhere that isn’t headed down the hellish path that America is. Even being a white American, I still sometimes worry because of being Jewish. It can very easily happen again to my people, especially since antisemitism is in vogue again lately. And the biggest problem is that it’s familiar and comfortable for most people; my people are expected to have acclimated to oppression - hey aren’t you used to it?

I hope someday soon, the USA will be safe again for you, though I would further admire if you’ve made a life somewhere that is preferable even over a safe USA.

Kudos to you and your family.

Salud, cheers, prost, l’chaim!

Honestly fine by me. I prefer Linux remain non-mainstream. It has integrity like this. The moment any suits see dollar signs on it, it’s as good as ruined.

Why? Office is such shit.

I’m just gonna run it solo either with multilaunch, or I’ll do separate vm instances for the different game instances. I don’t need Steam for anything as of yet.

Thanks for the info about the front-ends.

Yeah I don’t play it on Steam, I use the old launcher because I run multilaunch. I was playing it back in ‘06 and am stuck in my ways.

I’ll take a look in Lutris, though, thanks.

How different is it, then, functionality-wise, from VirtualBox or VMWare?

What’s actually the best one? I used to use PlayOnLinux and it worked so well. But then it started to have problems and I read it was abandoned.

So, for example, if I wanted to play Guild Wars with multilaunch, what integrator would be smoothest and least complicated?

I happen to really like a lot of the motifs used by Ubuntu. Regardless the merits or demerits of the distro, the graphical iconography is pretty cool. Likewise with Arch. Like, that Arch pointing forward on the surface would be cool. The Ubuntu circular logo on the wheel rims, as well.

I’ve found two distros I enjoy on really old stuff: Bodhi and Q4. They run fairly well and for the footprint, they’re pretty feature-rich. I love the Moshka desktop on Bodhi.

I cannot understand why anyone would be so childish. It’s not even as though money is involved; it’s some kind of juvenile popularity contest by people who clearly don’t believe their work speaks for itself, and clearly don’t take pride in their product.

Manjaro defaults to a defective dock that is riddled with bugs if you customize it. I broke it dozens of times just by making some minor modifications in the preferences. It also slows down a little gradually. That’s only minor but the dock thing really irked me. Really? Can’t just get the dock settings finished so the thing completely works? Anyway, that was a few years ago and I haven’t touched it since.

Distrowatch has been gamed for years

In what way? Elaborate, please? How and for what purpose?

I tried MX a few times on different machines maybe a few weeks/months apart. Every time I did because of it being up there at the top and I was like “What am I not seeing?” It’s a decent distro, yeah, but some of the customization is distracting to be honest. I can say it’s good but the top? For what… more than a year or two even, it’s been in the top few.

I just don’t get it.

Electron is useful, I’ll give you that.

I’m mostly de-googled in everything at this point. Still a little bit of stuff in isolated usage.

Exactly! Also many people especially early on, seem to think distros are vastly different. They’re really not, so much as they’re a different assortment of bits and pieces from mostly the same pool. Some things differ significantly across I wouldn’t say distros but across like, kernel bases? Like Debian, Arch, etc. The big thing is if it has 99% of what you wanted straightaway, then there’s nothing wrong with just using it, optimizing it for your preferences, and learning what distinguishes it, if you’re interested.

When I got a new laptop, I was psyched because it was not long after Debian had finally dropped that whole opposition to things that aren’t 100% open source, as of v 12. I like Debian but prior to 12 I often had driver issues. BUT: lo and behold, my laptop was so new that Debian didn’t have drivers for the audio yet. Nothing did except Ubuntu. They’re usually very quick to get stuff compatible, and so I installed Kubuntu so I could be on my fav desktop right off the start.

Now, quite some time later, Debian almost certainly has my audio drivers by now, but I’m not rushing to change because what I have works. End of story.

Whatever is working for you, enjoy it.

I think I’m gonna grab an old external USB drive and live boot from there and test things out

Just keep in mind, in such a case, that your performance will be quite reduced due to limits on I/O. When you have Linux on a real drive - especially a striped RAID, the system is blazing fast. It’s a substantial difference you should keep in mind when evaluating.

I’m not Linux-savvy enough to understand everything you said lol. But I’m glad at least that I don’t have to rely on CUPS I just have two printers with static IPs so it’s easy-breezy George and 'Weezy.

I have been fine with both Canon and Lexmark and also a Brother unit that someone in my family owns that their new Win11 machine refused to talk to; I opened up my ASUS t-pad with Ubuntu and printed in five seconds.

But yeah CUPS has actually caused many a headache to the point that I’ve disabled it on some units.

This has been a real issue yeah.