I’ve used it for VR, which is the only thing I keep Windows for. It’s pretty good however I’d say having experience with Linux is a good idea, I definitely wouldn’t treat it as a drop-in silver bullet for Windows minimalism (if such a thing exists).

By the sounds of it you’re inexperienced with OS-hopping, so if you’re going to start looking for things like this just do it properly and give Linux a go. You’ll learn so much more and get a much nicer experience at the end, then if you decide you still need Windows then go and use someone else’s computer to make a USB. I wouldn’t bother trying to make one on Linux, it hardly ever works in my experience.

For clarity, I now just debloat vanilla Windows 11 with Chris Titus’ tool. Still only used for VR and Game Dev.

If you go with Atlas, just know you’re putting your whole system into the hands of a team smaller than most Linux distros that’s doing more work than all of them, so I doubt Atlas is going to be around for much longer. Whereas something like Debian, Mint or Pop! is here to stay.

There’s also far less chance of your system breaking if you go with Linux. Really in this situation there is absolutely zero reason to not go the extra mile and hop to desktop freedom.

I think Gravitricity (obligatoy, stupid name) is trying to make it more space efficient and consolidated, rather than occupying massive amounts of land.

Water also isn’t the safest thing when in massive reservoirs, nor is it all too easy to get it there in the first place.

So while you’re correct in the sense that we have GPE batteries, they aren’t super easy to build nor maintain. I think this is where [stupid name here] is trying to place themselves.

First time I’ve heard someone call Gnome Software fast. In my experience that app feels like it’s on it’s last legs; the Flatpak CLI is far better than any desktop GUI.

This screenshot is from the Flathub website. The only good GUI for Flatpaks…

In my experience, theming KDE Plasma is an absolute no-go. Not only do the themes themselves just look off, but the desktop feels so much clunkier. Themes also ruin consistency on Plasma, making certain windows look like patchwork.

On the other hand, Breeze (Plasma’s default theme) does grow on you. It’s like Plasma has some weird spell about it, once it even caused me to prefer light mode! Gah :O

Somewhat unrelated, but by the sounds of it gaming is a focus for you considering the DE jump. I’ve had the best gaming experience on a distro called Nobara, I think they started shipping Plasma by default for the same reasons you switched. Could be worth taking a look at, if you aren’t familiar with it. Obviously it’s a perfectly good day-to-day distro too, it’s based off Fedora and follows their release schedule closely.

I’ve seen uBlue mentioned a couple times around the Fedora Atomic circle. I’ll go look into that a bit, thanks :D

I’ve been thinking about switching to distrobox, but I feel slightly uneased by replacing toolbox as thats what FAB ships with. I know it’s fine to do though.

Thanks for the info! :D. I use Budgie simply because it’s my favorite. I don’t like Gnome’s scale nor childishly large UI elements, but I want a desktop that uses GTK. KDE is Qt, so no GTK apps really look right there. Sure you can theme GTK to fit your Qt theme, but they still aren’t 100%. I’ll give KDE another try when 6 releases, but it’s obviously still gonna be on Qt.

I’ve used KDE, Gnome and Budgie extensively. Budgie is hands-down the nicest to use. It’s light, it’s consistent, it’s modern so on and so forth. KDE used to be my main, but after I learnt that Budgie development had picked back up I switched for good.

I agree with your X.Org distaste. I don’t like that I’m using it too but we know that Wayland is coming to Budgie very soon so I’m ok with waiting. Battery life on my laptop is good enough, and I experience no X.Org artifacts such as tearing on my desktop (probably thanks to a 165Hz monitor :P).

You could look into Atomic distros if you value sandboxing, such as Fedora Atomic or Vanilla OS. I don’t know much about the debian space as Arch was my first distro so I kinda ran before I crawled.

Amazing, will try this out on the Pi then.

Ok, hold on…

Can it be self-hosted?

I can’t wait for COSMIC, not so much because I’d use it, I quite like Budgie and so will need to do extensive test-driving to switch, but to just see System76 back onto the stage.

Pop! OS hasn’t been updated in a couple years now, making it an absolute relic. As far as I know none of the Pop! OS apps have been either. I get why they’re doing what they’re doing but it’s gotten to the point now where I, and many others I’d assume, are forgetting about them. Pop! OS was huge, now I hardly see it anywhere.

I don’t use Pop! OS nor any other System76 products, but the nature of our community means any developments anywhere grow it. I would recommend Pop! OS to my friends as a first-distro, but I can’t throw them two years into the past, no small amount of time for Linux, to give them a feel for how it is today. I currently refer them to Fedora, but Fedora is far from perfect for a total newcomer.