Having to deal with a drug dealer that wants to also sell you actually addictive drugs is the gateway.

Marijuana is addictive though. Maybe not as addictive as some other things, but pretending it’s completely non addictive is disingenuous and misleading. It’s more addictive than say LSD or psilocybin for example.

That isn’t to say it should remain illegal though. Legalisation has positive benefits even for harder, more addictive substances than marijuana. See the history of alcohol prohibition for example, or the disaster that is the war on drugs.

That’s why you use multiple drives with bitrot protection. Modern SSDs and HDDs have protections against bitrot built in, including internal checksums.

If you are running your hard drives once in a while, then bearing failure isn’t really a concern. You probably should be doing that anyway to refresh the data and make sure it doesn’t degrade. Regardless people have had 10 year old drives of older spin up first time. It’s not likely you are going to have a mechanical issue on multiple drives anyway.

If you refresh an SSD once every couple of years it will last decades.

You keep doing this thing where you presume I don’t know about some issue. Rather I know about these things, but they have fairly easy mitigations or are already solved.

Hard drives break down from use, not from sitting around. We aren’t talking about SSDs which while they don’t break down will experience data corruption over time. It’s not really a gamble at all with mirrored drives.

You’re also telling me things I already know. I already use ZFS. I agree that you should be using something with data integrity protection. Though ZFS isn’t always what you want for archival purposes.

Modern hard drives come in 20 TB or larger. 4K movies don’t need to be anywhere near that big either with modern compression technology.

I think we are talking about archival storage rather than storage in use. In which case hard drives can last decades.

How are you managing to break Linux OSes so much?

If you haven’t heard of EndeavorOS that’s because you are out of the loop. Entirely your issue. It’s a much better alternative to Manjaro essentially.

Also that’s general popularity according to page hits, nothing to do with newbies. Newbies aren’t the majority of Linux users.

Not that there is anything wrong with recommending EndeavorOS to Newbies. The whole point of arch derivatives like that is to make installing arch simpler and easier for the user. Arch is actually a better base distro imo than say Ubuntu for this. It has packages for pretty much anything in the AUR, no digging up PPAs for everything. Likewise it’s all up-to-date too.

I don’t remember MX Linux ever being that popular before, but maybe I am out of the loop.

Yes it does. Your whole display server is your desktop/WM when using Wayland. Using the newer versions you get things like VRR, HDR, fractional display scaling and so on.

Beat me to it lol

Sudo actually has very granular permissions, just almost no one and no distros use them. You might as well replace it with doas for most people.

Why not UBlue or Nobara?

I have an Nvidia image and haven’t had these issues. I can run Wayland just fine. I believe they include X11 as well.

6.5 is not a new kernel though. I am on 6.9. Maybe they should move the normal release to 6.5 and make edge use the latest stable kernel or something.

Screen tearing hasn’t been a serious issue in X11 for years now, unless you run XFCE. It’s just not an issue in Gnome or KDE.

I run Wayland+ optimus and it worked on PopOS just fine. Took a slight bit of tweaking on Universal Blue, but nothing major. Mainly it works with gaming on Bazzite but not Aurora for some bizarre reason. CUDA worked fine in all of the above.

Arch is actually reasonable as the foundation of an easy to use Linux OS, provided you don’t care about stability. It’s up to date with all the latest stuff, has support for many apps and packages without having to add extra repos, and it has fantastic documentation. All that’s really missing is the GUI installer and stuff to help newbies. Projects like EndeavorOS and Garuda provide that.

If you actually need stability though, which lots of new users would appreciate, use Fedora or a derivative like Nobara or Universal Blue.

I daily drive Nvidia plus Optimus with wayland, but it’s easy enough to switch back to X11 just using a menu on the login screen.

Ubuntu isn’t the most popular and hasn’t been for a while. It actually has a lot of issues new users are likely to run into, including lots of spurious error messages. Apparently the top 5 according to distro watch is: MX Linux, Mint, EndeavorOS, Debian, and Manjaro.

So essentially debian, arch and ubuntu derivatives.

This is where Universal Blue and Nobara come in. They are made to be plug and play versions of fedora inc. media codecs, Nvidia, steam, and so on.

I daily drive Optimus plus Wayland. Doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore.

Why the fuck would you try Gentoo as a Linux noob? I am guessing no one told you it was for advanced Linux users only. Fedora and OpenSUSE are nowhere near as difficult to install as Gentoo, as they are made for normal users.

What about Lutris?