All of that sounds really awesome, but I think I still stand by the conclusion I had even if some/most of my assumptions were wrong, it might be too much for a new person. I get that for you it wasn’t, but I’ve also seen people whose first distro was Gentoo. The rollback to a working state feature is really cool and I definitely could have used that back in the olden days when I first started using Linux and broke my system periodically, but those were different times (be glad you don’t know what a Xorg file is hahaha).

Overall in theory it seems that Bazzite is a system I would like to use, but I thought the same of NixOS and couldn’t get used to it. But I’ll definitely try it in the future.

As an anecdotal point I have in fact ran rm -rf /etc in the past, you are correct that the system doesn’t boot (had to do a full reinstall that time). And as a completely unrelated note be very careful with pressing enter in the middle of typing a command, for example trying to delete a folder inside /etc hahahaha.

Absolutely, and in most cases (while one shouldn’t rely on this since escaping a docker container is sometimes doable) even if there is a security breach the invader would be limited to the service image, which would get recreated upon restart.

My experience with Bazzite is very limited, so I appreciate the corrections. Since you seem to know a lot about it let me ask you a couple of things:

• Bazzite is immutable, right? I’m sure I saw that somewhere and Fedora Atomic is also immutable IIRC

Assuming it is immutable:

• How does the config changes not get overwritten? The whole point of an immutable distro is to prevent changes to files to ensure things keep working
• How are packages installed? The docs you sent recommend flatpak, which while very good in theory still has a small fleet of apps available. Also they suggest using distrobox among other things, that’s definitely not beginner friendly, although an interesting concept for an advanced user to have your main machine be an immutable host to any system you want.

Regardless of that, yes one’s first intuition should be to go for the docs for your distro, but we know that’s not the case and that most people will just Google their problems with Linux in front because we keep telling them that all distros are the same (which they are, once you know what you’re doing).

I think you got docker mixed with something else, since docker does the exact opposite, i.e. allows you run services without all of the arcane shit involved. Just put the compose file in a folder and run docker compose up -d and you’re done, whereas the alternative would be to install a database, configure it, install the immich service, connect it to the database, write a service file for both database and service to allow it to be auto-started, and face multiple issues due to missing dependencies or permissions.

I am fairly sure Gabe expected this, in fact I think he expected more. See, back when Windows95 was first released people were skeptical that Windows would be a good platform for gaming, they cited non-existent technical issues (similar to how they do with Linux now) that drove the employees at Microsoft mad, so one particular employee had the idea to port the most advanced game at the time to Windows, they contacted ID software, and got in an agreement that they would write the Windows port of Doom and give them the code back, ID agreed and after Doom was released for Windows more and more people started to port their stuff over since it was clearly possible. So essentially Windows being a gaming platform was only possible thanks to that employee, who after working with games liked it so much that he quit Microsoft to create his own gaming company which he called Valve. Yup, Gabe Newell is responsible for both Windows and Linux being seen as a gaming platform.

Why do you want SteamOS though? Unless you’re making a Steam Machine there are better options out there for desktop usage.

Exactly, they said desktop use to replace Windows that is more than gaming, by your own phrase:

If you want more than gaming as the central focus then sure look elsewhere.

They should look elsewhere.

Isn’t Bazzite an immutable OS with very limited package availability outside of gaming? At least that’s what I remember from a while back. If so it’s an excellent distro for getting a Steam Machine just like ChimeraOS, but I’m not sure it would be a good experience for someone just getting into Linux, since most of the help he will get online will direct him to edit config files which would get overwritten on update.

For example, say the person wants to install Skype, or something that is not in the graphical UI store on Bazzite. Most guides they would find for Linux would tell him to add a PPA, or download a .Deb, or if he manages to find something that works it would be to download an RPM and they would need to redo it every update, or they could find a guide on how to install it via flatpak (but for that they would need to know what flatpak is) or snap (and go into a lot of troubleshoot figuring out why he doesn’t have snap). We take a lot of Linux knowledge for granted, but people using it for the first time won’t know all of this.

If you want more than gaming as the central focus then sure look elsewhere.

That’s exactly my point, OP talked about replacing Win 10 desktop, not about a gaming machine (for which I agree SteamOS is an excellent choice).

Cool, so did I a while back, what’s your point? It’s still not a great replacement for Windows as it’s not the intended use of the OS, and will be frustrating for someone without Linux experience.

Yes, for you and me who understand what that means it’s just the same, but for someone with no Linux experience is going to be very different. Googling any issue he has will direct him to alter config files or install packages, neither of which would be permanent on SteamOS, while the OS is the same the usage of it is completely different, so for a person with no Linux experience to try to use it as their daily desktop system it would be frustrating because none of the help online would apply to him.

Don’t use SteamOS as a desktop OS, that’s not what it’s meant to. You might be used to Windows and think that a different distribution of Linux is just a different customization of the OS, but it’s almost an entirely different OS that happens to run the same binaries.

If you’re interested in getting an alternative to Windows, try some beginner friendly Linux distros on a Virtual Machine or an old laptop. I recommend Linux Mint to newcomers, but if you’re used to the desktop mode on SteamOS maybe Kubuntu. The closest you can get is Bazzite but that’s also not a desktop OS so I wouldn’t use that unless it was for a Steam Machine. The second closest (that’s also somewhat beginner friendly) is Manjaro K DE version, but being Arch based I don’t tend to recommend it to new Linux users, but of you’re dead set on getting something as close as possible to SteamOS that’s it.

Wine was in a great state, it just wasn’t integrated on Steam so it was clunky to get it working. Long story short Steam Machines only had a handful of games available (those with native binaries) unless you jumped through hoops to install steam on wine and launch steam from steam or something of the sort.

At the time we thought that the steam machines would make devs port their games, but that didn’t happen, so Valve invested heavily on Wine to make the games come to Linux regardless of the game devs. If Valve hadn’t invested most games that run today would still run, wine has always been an amazing piece of technology, their investment was mostly on a library called dxvk which translates directX calls to Vulkan instead of OpenGL, for technical reasons this was needed for any game that only supports DX12, but also gave some performance boost to other titles. I’m not trying to downplay Valve’s hand, dxvk was a much needed piece of the puzzle that Valve singlehandedly financed, not to mention all of the other stuff they’ve done that benefitted Linux gamers over the years, but if they had integrated wine on Steam without dxvk 99% of cases would be mostly the same (but that 1% are heavy hitters).

Check out https://www.nushell.sh/ I use it for exactly that, i.e. complex extract and convert files

I used jq for something similar before, recently I’ve discovered Nu Shell and have been using that for converting and analyzing data since a full shell is a lot more powerful than a command (e.g. open a yaml, for each element on key X grab the first element of list Y and export to a CSV)

It’s not though, but people have used it to promote pyramid schemes so it gets the bad faith. It’s almost like considering e-mail to be spam, it’s not, even though a large chunk of emails are spam the rest is very useful.

Ethereum can be used to represent ownership in a way that’s non-transferable by anyone other than the owner, this can have real life applications such as deeds for houses or car registrations. Someone noticed that another excellent application for this is art ownership, for example a token that represents a painting could be used by art collectors as a proof of authenticity, since only one person could be the owner of the token, and that person can prove that he owns the token, if the painting were to be stolen there’s a way to prove you’re the rightful owner. Someone heard that and convinced artists to sell art using those tokens without fully understanding what they were selling, and a bunch of people bought them without understanding what they were buying. Then they noticed that this would only work if others were onboard, so they tried to push it to other people, and eventually you had people who didn’t understand a thing paying thousands of dollars for a drawing of a monkey…

Ethereum could be used for so many awesome things, but obviously we live in the awful reality where the biggest and most known application for it was used to scam people.

That’s like compiling a list of all of the hacks that happen on the internet and jump to the conclusion that the internet is bad because of it.

Some of those are just people falling for old scams/phishing that could have happened anywhere and are not a Cryptocurrency problem. Pyramid schemes are much older than Cryptocurrencies, people falling for it there would fall for it elsewhere.

Not aware of any, but I’ll do my best on my own.

Let’s abstract money to its bare minimum, in the most basic form money is an abstract fungible (i.e. 1 of it is the same as another one, they’re interchangeable) token that can be sent or received, and the most basic way to keep track of this is with a ledger. A ledger is in its most basic form a lot of entries saying stuff like “Alice earned 5 coins” and “Alice paid Bob 3 coins”, by looking at these 2 (and assuming they’re the only ones in our ledger) we know that Alice now has 2 coins and Bob 3. Therefore if now Alice tries to send 3 coins to someone else we know this is invalid because she doesn’t have that amount of coins.

Ok, so that’s the basic of what money is, but as a general rule the ledgers for most coins are centralized, e.g. your bank has that ledger for your account. For years people tried to have a way to create a decentralized ledger, so anyone could have a copy of the ledger and validate it on their own, that way this currency on that ledger could not be controlled by anyone. There are two big problems with that, first you need a way to ensure that only the owner of an account can give away those coins, and secondly we need a way to ensure no one cheats the system, for instance in the example above if Alice could remove her previous transaction from the ledger and input a new one she could convince Bob she paid him, but actually send the money to someone else.

Problem 1, ownership. This is a slightly difficult answer, so I’ll not explain this fully, if you’re interested read about public and private keys. Essentially in cryptography there’s a way to sign a message in a way that you can verify who signed it without being able to reproduce the signature, in practice this means each account/wallet has 2 numbers, one is the private one used to sign messages (anyone who knows this number can spend the coins) and the other is a public number used to verify who coins are sent to and that the spending of coins was properly signed. This has been a solved problem for decades and it’s a very secure and acceptable solution, we use it on things like ssh, SSL and the likes.

Problem 2, consensus. This is the hardest problem to solve, and this is the brilliance of Bitcoin. The way Bitcoin solved this issue is: A block is several entries in the ledger; The entries can be arranged in multiple ways, each way yielding a different hash for that block; Each block has a reference to the hash of the block that came before; Only certain hashes are acceptable (e.g. hashes that end with 0, or with 00), and this hash cannot be predicted, so it needs to be brute forced; Whoever creates a block can insert a transaction giving themselves some amount of coins. Phew, that’s a lot, but what does it all mean? It means that everyone sees every transaction in the network and try to build a block that will be accepted, the first person who does shows their block to the world, and everyone tries to find the next block after that. For Bitcoin the largest chain is the valid one, so if someone found a block it’s in your best interest to start to try to find the next one, it’s also in your best interest to show the world your block as soon as possible so others will build on top of it, the more blocks on top of yours the more unlikely it is that someone will be able to overwrite it (they would need to find more blocks that what has been built on top of yours, and even finding one block is hard because of the specific hash that needs to be generated). The difficulty (i.e. rules for which hashes are acceptable) are adjusted in order to make sure that on average one block is found every 10 minutes by the entire amount of people trying to find blocks.

All together now: Currently Alice has 10 coins, she uses her private key to sign a transaction giving Bob 6 coins. This transaction gets picked by several miners. One of them finds the next block and includes this transaction there. Now all miners are trying to find the next block from that one, and when they do this transaction will have been validated by 2 blocks so it’s way more likely to keep being validated. After 6 blocks it would take the entire mining network 1 hour to undo that block, and unless 51% of the random strangers mining Bitcoin decide to cooperate, the rest of the miners will keep adding blocks on top making this transaction impossible to be reverted. If after that Alice now tries to spend 5 coins no miner will include that transaction, because it would create an invalid block that other miners would just ignore.

There’s a bit more to Blockchains, for example each transaction also pays some amount to the miners as an incentive, so you can have a transaction be more priority than another by paying more to the miners.

What about other coins? There are lots of them out there, I’ll only mention one, Ethereum. Ethereum takes this concept to the next level, instead of a ledger storing transaction it stores programs, so one can have a program that if you pay it X coins it gives you Y other tokens, or any other number of complicated stuff. Also recently Ethereum changed from the proof of work (i.e. finding the hash) to proof of stake, in which people pay some amount of coins to be allowed to validate transactions, but if they generate an invalid transaction they lose those coins.

I strongly recommend you read the Bitcoin white paper, it’s not as difficult as you would think, and it will go into a lot more details on how things work.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I got a >100% in 3 years from a >50k by switching companies. That being said I don’t think I would change my current job for a different one, if I ever get made a significantly higher offer elsewhere I’m more likely to use it as leverage to get a similar raise here, so I can definitely understand the not wanting to leave a given company.

You probably don’t play mouse heavy games, but if you like strategy games they’re a must. Playing Stellaris, RimWorld, Crusader Kings or Factorio without a touch pad would get annoying really fast.