You comment strongly implied that you thought Maple Engineer thought this was a MAGA-specific phenomenon. There isn’t the same strong implication in Maple Engineer’s comment.

Reading books or playing video games. If I have the energy then also working on projects.

Agree. “Link aggregator” is understood to mean “reddit-like” without having to refer to a specific link aggregator as a point of reference. “Forum” is a different though similar thing. And a lot of the lemmy communities I subscribe to are literally link aggregators like people link to articles, git repos, etc to draw people’s attention to, although I can see the issue with it referring to text posts too.

Won’t your state know you’re using the VPN based on the fact that all your internet traffic is going to the VPN lol

Mullvad or AirVPN. AirVPN has port forwarding so good if you need to torrent

1. Filesystem doesn’t matter hugely but as the other user said, ext4 will be the fastest anyway (possibly xfs, not sure how ext4 and xfs compare). CoW filesystems like btrfs are slower, though most people don’t notice a significant difference. People use CoW filesystems for other features like self-healing ability and backups.

2. I would strongly recommend getting an AMD card. As the other user says, AMD’s drivers are fully FOSS and work well with Linux. Nvidia has a bad reputation with Linux and especially Wayland, though these days it’s mostly usable, but IME is still prone to breakage upon updates. IME AMD GPUs “just work”.

I know. I never said otherwise. I’m responding to someone who said they can’t seed at all without port forwarding.

idk I don’t port forward and have 10+ ratios regularly

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=j2TyrLZT0r0

I don’t like the aesthetic but a lot of my stuff is “gaming” branded for functionality reasons (eg high refresh rate monitor; mice with extra buttons; the mech kb I wanted happened to be gaming branded but I would’ve bought a keyboard with same specs and price that was not gaming branded). The gaming aesthetic is a bit weird when you think about it.

I think it would be fine if it were opt-in, but then you wouldn’t get enough data to get accurate traffic estimates

Most 10xx work perfectly fine, and were also still being sold till recently.

Can I ask what the job was?? That sounds like such a dream job if you can do other work at that job and pays well

I’ve had mixed experiences myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it randomly breaks. I just wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants it to “just work” and be stable and not do maintenance. For me, I’m someone who’s happy to do maintenance, but I don’t want that to extend to my graphics card, which in this day and age ought to just work.

nvidia cards are always giving people grief, especially on Wayland. Technically supported but practically not recommended if you want an easy time

I think those three will be completely fine, but also I think base Arch would be completely fine for you. I have no idea why it’s a meme that Arch is so “hard”. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone coming from Windows or Mac who has no idea what they’re doing and had no poweruser tendencies on Windows/Mac either. But for someone who’s used Linux for a few years, I think doing a base Arch install is no biggie at all. It’s got a very annoying meme reputation but I think it’s completely inaccurate.

That’s an aside, and I’m not saying you should use base Arch, just that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it if that’s something you’re interested in. Although if you’re coming from a “beginner” distro and your intent is to learn, I do think doing a base Arch install (even if you don’t stick with it) is a good idea. You’ll be entirely capable of the install process and probably get a better understanding of how your system works. Then after you install it you can switch to some other distro you prefer.

Oh amazing. Seems like it’s still in early development and only supports Stardew and Cyberpunk but I look forward to it being more mature and supporting more games.

I’ve not really tinkered with any kind of settings and just use Steam’s default which is to have a separate C: drive for every Proton game, so does that mean I’d need a separate install of a mod manager for every game? Ideally I’d like to have just one mod manager that recognises all my games (that are supported by the mod manager at least)

Isn’t this better than trying to make it so that you never click off YouTube, the way it works if you are logged in? I would much rather have no recommendations than have an algorithm give me recommendations with the express purpose of maximising ad revenue extraction from me

Depends on your threat model, the degree of interest in you from states, the resources and competency of the states interested in you, etc… Also, I think privacy for privacy’s sake and without any real threat to which it’s responding to, is entirely fine and understandable. If nobody were interested in my data at all I’d still practise a reasonable level of privacy because I think it’s creepy for other people to know my business.