My argument is not targeting people who pretty much don’t have a choice.

It’s that those who can afford a choice, and sometimes even complain they’d rather support green/fair/local businesses… they aren’t ready to pay the greater prices for those products. They want green/fair/local but cheaper than amazon, that’s never going to happen.

The problem is that users are reluctant to pay more for the same product.

In my country the difference in price for a dozen eggs laid by free vs caged chicken is 1 euro. The caged chicken live their entire life in an overpopulated cage and are never allowed to walk outside. People don’t care, they’d rather save 1 euro.

Companies like Fairphone seem to advocate for the values you describe but they can’t possibly provide the same price of those other “dirty” companies. While most people sees the benefit and appreciates the values of such a product, they just aren’t willing to pay more for an inferior product spec wise.

This is what’s so great about Linux, you can use whatever the hell you want.

Flatpaks provide some cool security functionalities like revoking network access to a specific application. Maybe you care about this, maybe you don’t.

My personal policy is to always install from the repos. Occasionally something is only available in flathub, which is fine for me. I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and diatributions and totally respect the devs using a format that just works everywhere. If I were to release a new Linux app, I would totally use flatpak.

You can use any firefox fork on Linux and any other firefox fork on Android. They sync fine.

First off, do not buy a blue yeti, ever.

Thanks a lot for this. It’s quite a popular microphone so I always wondered if it was any good.

It seems like I’m pretty screwed either way. I’ll look up these condenser mics anyway! Thanks!

I’ve tried a bunch of configurations, a bunch of noise supression software such as NoiseTorch or EasyEffects but nothing seems to work. It either sets a threshold so low that I have to speak very loudly for it to activate or the mic just picks up her voice near perfectly.

In Microsoft Teams there’s a “disableAutoGain” flag, which I have enabled a long time ago. It certainly helps, otherwise teams will just boom my microphone input to 100% gain every time. It helps but doesn’t solve the problem.

I’ve tried a bunch of configurations, a bunch of noise supression software such as NoiseTorch or EasyEffects but nothing seems to work. It either sets a threshold so low that I have to speak very loudly for it to activate or the mic just picks up her voice near perfectly.

Thank you for pointing me into the right direction, I’ll take a look at Cardioid microphones!

Different people deal with things in different ways. Some (most?) people feel like learning linux is undesirable or a chore, while others embrace the sense of discovery and exploring a new and exciting thing. After using Windows for decades I don’t want the same experience, I want something completely different.

Before I installed Linux I played a bunch on a virtual machine. I installed several distributions, desktop environments, hardware compatibility. I ended up landing on EndeavourOS more than a year ago. Never borked my setup, never had update problems, never had a problem I couldn’t solve (more like Arch Wiki solving it for me).

I like to learn things by doing things, I like to fail fast and learn from the mistakes. EndeavourOS provided the exact experience I was looking for and would recommend it to someone with a similar mentality. I wouldn’t recommend Arch (or arch based distros) to people who aren’t tech savy, but people make it seem more complicated and brittle than it actually is.

I’d just like to vent that these kind of discussions are one of the big turnoffs of the Linux community in general. People speak “in absolutes”.

You either do it this way or you’re a dumbass. You either use the distribution I like or you’re doing it WRONG. You shouldn’t use Arch because you’re not experienced enough, you should use Mint for an arbitrary amount of time before you graduate to the good stuff.

You friends get way too worked up over other people’s personal preferences and push your biased and subjective views as facts.

Is Arch Linux the right fit for a newbie to Linux? The right answer is “it depends”, not “never”. Would I recommend Arch to my mom? No. Would I recommend it to my programmer colleague who already lives in the Powershell? Sure, why not.

From what I’ve read, you just need to start the CUPS service.

sudo systemctl start cups.service

Start on boot:

sudo systemctl enable cups.service

You should be able to play just fine with Arch Linux… The SteamOS is based on arch after all.

I guess it depends on what you’re going to do with it. I own a Steam deck and love it, but the screen is too small to work.

I would rather buy a small laptop, install arch and go wild. To each their own.

What’s the point of having a gaming handheld and not game? Get a laptop instead

Sure, nvidia drivers suck and I haven’t had the best experience migrating to Wayland. However, it’s important that people know this “limitation” in using SteamOS, especially since many other Linux distributions run both steam and Nvidia video cards just right.

SteamOS is a distribution that is great for a gaming device but I see people believing this is going to be a generalist Linux distribution and it’s not. Having a clear idea of what SteamOS is, what is good for and what are the current limitations is very important. Linux is amazing, Valve is amazing but SteamOS is not replacing Windows. Which is fine, that’s not the goal. I can recommend a bunch of distros that do replace windows if you want…

When it happens I will. Currently, installing SteamOS with a nvidia card just borks.

It borks when you try to install SteamOS. It does not work. Bazzite just added beta support for nvidia, so check that out if out really want something as close to SteamOS as possible.

Or just use a generalist distribution because gaming on Linux is in an amazing state right now. Install steam, boot games.

No, their Micro-compositor was written exclusively for AMD cards. The SteamOS setup just borks if you try to install it with nvidia. People coming from Windows won’t really care who is to blame, they’ll just be baffled it doesn’t work.

It makes sense since steam deck only has AMD cards. SteamOS is targeted at gaming devices, not as a generalistic distribution.

I understand that people are hyped about a Linux distribution developed by a company they really care about. However, please be aware that SteamOS is focused at being an (almost) exclusive gaming OS with very limited hardware support. It doesn’t support NVIDIA video cards, for instance.

Steam already runs perfectly fine in most generalist distributions and you’ll have a wonderful time if you install them.

Is there a (Linux) command I can run to check my power consumption?

Check out keyd, it’s very powerful.