No idea if Ubuntu does some things better for gaming, but I just use the Steam Flatpak (+ the “steam-devices” package for much better controller support) and the Heroic Game Launcher Flatpak. Everything works fine on my end. I’m currently using an AMD card, but will probably switch to an Intel Arc in the near future (since they have better performance for 3d rendering in Blender, and I’m fed up with Nvidia’s prices).

Flatpak will probably be the official default format for non-open software in the future.

Great news. Should there be someday a community version with KDE, I will definitely give it a try. Anyway, I wish them success,

Mekuro will be interesting when they integrate email in it. And Elisa is already a great music player that I use for my local collection.

Linux Mint. People praise it as the perfect Window replacement yet when I tried it for a week, it didn’t do anything better than default KDE Plasma Desktop. And since the devs haven’t even started to work on Wayland support, the Distro will soon fall way behind.

For buying or donating (maybe even subscriptions). Both open source and proprietary software. They’re working on it.

Seems like Canonical wants to push snaps now really hard. I hope that Flathub soon implements its payment structure, before companies flock to the Canonical store.

Big yikes. In that case, I wouldn’t recommend Mint to beginners at all. Alone, the whole Sandbox concept of Flatpak needs Wayland to work properly. Wayland is the future, regardless if you like it or not.

Security (Future Topic): Security is mentioned as a potential future topic, with Linux Mint considered more privacy-oriented than Windows 11. Discussions about security are acknowledged.

Is Wayland support finally actively worked on, or is it still postponed?

The sad truth is that telemetry is only unbiased when it is on by default and not opt-in (Not that I advocate for that). Don’t know where I read it, but last month I saw an article about how Gnomes opt-in telemetry data showed that Fedora is the number one distro for Gnome users and Ubuntu was somewhere between 3rd or 4th place. That’s obviously not true, but it was true for the people who activated the telemetry.

But back to the topic. As long as the KDE devs give me the choice to keep single click selection, I don’t really care what the default is. A lot of people will never learn about it and miss out in my opinion, but whatever 🤷.

I mean, their telemetry is opt in and in most distros you don’t even get asked if you want to help them with it. If anything, most people aren’t even aware that Telemetry exists, if they haven’t looked at the specific section in the settings menu.

There is a + over the top left corner of the icon that you can click for selection without opening. Pretty easy to use if you get the hang of it.

edit: Or you just click the right mouse button over the file you want to select.

Big mistake in my opinion. Coming from Windows, it took me only one day to get comfortable with single click and now I don’t want to miss it anymore.

People that didn’t grow up mentally and continue their Xbox vs. PlayStation trash talk from their childhood.

For now, it’s Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. But I’m really interested in Immutable Systems. I like OpenSuse Kapla, but the KDE Integration is still in alpha. There are still a few shortcomings with the only flatpak approach, like the fact that the Steam Flatpak can’t provide smooth wireless controller support because of lacking permissions.

Oh, another Linux circlejerk. Man I like my Debian but this stuff is so obnoxious…

I just hope that SUSE keeps them in check for now.

Not sure how good this advice is since I’m not a professional, but: You could try out running Adobe programs in a VM with VMWare (vmware.com). They have an excellent 3D acceleration support already. Just give your VM a good chunk of your hardware resources (I use half of my CPU cores and 3/4 of my system memory). I use that for running Affinity Designer 2 from Sarif, and it works quite well for me. Windows VM boots up in between 6 – 8 seconds and I have a shared folder, where I can drop stuff to interact between my Windows VM and my Linux main system. But like I said, I’m not a professional.

• Blender for 3D modeling/sculpting + rendering.

• ArmorPaint for painting on 3D Models, but I learned recently about 3DCoat, and it has a Linux version…

• I like listening to Podcasts (while I work on my PC) with KDE’s “Kasts”. Use my Nextcloud provider to sync my listening status on the Desktop with my Android Podcast App (AntennaPod) for a flawless continuation on mobile.

Welcome fellow Linux beginner.

What are some really important basic commands I can use to start branching out into Terminal command structures

Since I refuse to touch the Terminal like my life depends on it, I can’t help you with this 😅

And if Cinnamon has shortfalls or weaknesses that I may run into eventually, what are some good alternative distros that I could leapfrog to eventually?

I’m a little biased, so take it with a grain of salt: Cinnamon’s biggest flaw is the lack of support for the Wayland protocol. It’s still running with x11. As far as I have read about it, X11 has several big security flaws, and it slowly dies a long, quiet death. As far as I know, the Linux Mint devs (makers of Cinnamon) haven’t even started on Wayland support. A good alternative would be the KDE Plasma Desktop. It’s insanely customizable, and the default look comes very close to classic Windows. As a KDE Distro, I would recommend KDE Neon since it’s based on Ubuntu too.