This was my general takeaway. My laptop is showing it’s 9ish year old age considerably. I picked up a used Steam Deck and I actually love everything about it except that it’s really not powerful enough to replace my laptop. I’m interested in building a desktop, and SteamOS taught me that modern Linux is not super complicated, and now I know that it’s not a huge pain in the ass to troubleshoot because the community isn’t nearly as toxic as I was expecting. So unless I learn of an even better distro for general use, gaming, streaming, audio recording, and video editing, all for somebody who is experienced with Windows and not much else, I’m leaning towards Nobara.
The only real hurdle I have is that it’s hard to justify dumping like $1200-1500 on a computer when I already have a PS5, Steam Deck, and gaming laptop. I really don’t need it.
Depends on what you want to do. I sold my 2 year old gaming laptop and managed to spend 2 months getting amazing bargains on secondhand parts to make an amazing gaming PC. The Steam Deck and that does a great job of streaming the more demanding games from the PC.
The 9 year old laptop might be surprisingly functional if you use something like ZorinOS on it.
I’ll be honest, troubleshooting is still a gigantic pain in the ass sometimes. But if you can get over the hill of setting up the OS, then you’re good to go. The thing that’s made Linux bearable for me is AI. If I have a problem then I write it out in Copilot or ChatGPT, and it usually gives me the solution on the first try with a command o can just paste into terminal.
This was my general takeaway. My laptop is showing it’s 9ish year old age considerably. I picked up a used Steam Deck and I actually love everything about it except that it’s really not powerful enough to replace my laptop. I’m interested in building a desktop, and SteamOS taught me that modern Linux is not super complicated, and now I know that it’s not a huge pain in the ass to troubleshoot because the community isn’t nearly as toxic as I was expecting. So unless I learn of an even better distro for general use, gaming, streaming, audio recording, and video editing, all for somebody who is experienced with Windows and not much else, I’m leaning towards Nobara.
The only real hurdle I have is that it’s hard to justify dumping like $1200-1500 on a computer when I already have a PS5, Steam Deck, and gaming laptop. I really don’t need it.
Depends on what you want to do. I sold my 2 year old gaming laptop and managed to spend 2 months getting amazing bargains on secondhand parts to make an amazing gaming PC. The Steam Deck and that does a great job of streaming the more demanding games from the PC.
The 9 year old laptop might be surprisingly functional if you use something like ZorinOS on it.
I’ll be honest, troubleshooting is still a gigantic pain in the ass sometimes. But if you can get over the hill of setting up the OS, then you’re good to go. The thing that’s made Linux bearable for me is AI. If I have a problem then I write it out in Copilot or ChatGPT, and it usually gives me the solution on the first try with a command o can just paste into terminal.