I personally vastly prefer mutable distros for my own system, but I understand the appeal for those who like them. As long as mutable distros remain an option I don’t mind immutable distros.

Mint or Pop_OS are likely the most widely recommended distros I know of for beginners. I haven’t tried either of them myself, but from what I hear about them I’m inclined to agree. Personally I would NOT recommend a rolling release distro to beginners. Too much potential to break things way too easily and way too often, which would likely require digging into the terminal to fix. Terminal-averse beginners wouldn’t be served well by that at all.

Even given that, I’d still think there would be an uptick in Linux market share, but only a small one. Certainly no “year of the Linux desktop” levels.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, a few days ago. Been busy or just didn’t feel like gaming since then.

I definitely do the Firefox to LibreWolf (and also install Brave as a backup). I also replace the default video player with Haruna and VLC (but default to Haruna). I change music players all the time so I just replace the default with whatever I feel like using at the time. In the past I’ve replaced Thunderbird with KMail, but on my latest install I left Thunderbird alone since I like having available RAM.

Nintendo’s lawyers doing something good for once?

I don’t remember if I went with the official or the pure KDE version. Either one should work. You can always try both out in a live USB before installing. The gaming focus refers to some modifications made to some drivers/software for the purpose of improving gaming performance. When you update your software you have to use Nobara’s update program in order to ensure that those mods are applied and preserved.

That’s a thing with Neon. It’s the “testing ground” for new KDE releases so they won’t guarantee stability. It literally is just Ubuntu LTS with a KDE repo thrown on top, and the Neon devs themselves only maintain that repo, with just a short delay after the new Ubuntu LTS release comes out. In Neon, the users are the quality control for KDE releases. I was using it for a little over a year until the rebase to Ubintu 24.04 broke my install. I went to Nobara, a gaming focused distro based on Fedora that uses a custom version of KDE as the default. I just upgraded to the newest version not realizing it wasn’t official yet, and it must have been the smoothest major version upgrade I’ve ever had in a non-rolling distro. It’s maintained by GloriousEggroll, who also builds/maintains the customized GE versions of Proton on Steam. I’m finding it’s not just a good gaming distro but a solid and stable distro overall. GloriousEggroll puts a lot of work into ensuring that on top of the Proton work he does. If you don’t want the gaming performance customizations he makes, try Fedora KDE spin, it’s likely to be pretty similar and I rarely ever hear someone have a problem with Fedora.

On your other question, next time you reinstall you can create a separate Home partition on your drive that should allow you to do what you’re looking for. So you have your boot and swap partitions and the one you install your distro to, and then your home partition, so you just install the new distro over the old distro and it should leave your home partition alone.

Yep, it’s a byproduct of the “bit wars” in the gaming culture of the '80s and '90s where each successive console generation had much more of a visual grqphical upgrade without sacrificing too much in other technical aspects like framerate/performance. Nowadays if you want that kind of upgrade you’re better off making a big investment in a beefy gaming rig because consoles have a realistic price point to consider, and even then we’re getting to a point of diminishing returns when it comes to the real noticeable graphical differences. Even back in the '80s/'90s the most powerful consoles of the time (such as the Neo Geo) were prohibitively expensive for most people. Either way, the most lauded games of the past few years have been the ones that put the biggest focus on aspects like engaging gameplay and/or immersive story and setting. One of the strongest candidates for this year’s Game of the Year could probably run on a potato and was basically poker with some interesting twists: essentially the opposite of a big studio AAA game. Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60, and indie hits such as the aforementioned Balatro are showing then that you can make games look and play great without all the super realistic graphics or immense budget if you have that solid gameplay, story/setting and art style. Call of Duty Black Ops 48393 with the only real “innovation” being more realistic sun glare on your rifle is just asking for failure.

Odd to say Veilguard was a success when from what I can tell, one of the few things uniting the very fractured and divided gaming community this year was that the writing in Veilguard was horrible. And you know that’s true when the various members of that community can give their own varied reasons why the writing was horrible and they would all be valid.

The only time I was really caught off guard by a game like that was Darksiders II. I went into the final area expecting a gauntlet of challenges, beat the first big boss enemy in there… And final cutscene and credits. That guy was the final boss. Made me literally put down the controller and say “That was it?” I’ve always known long games were going to be long going in to them.

Combination of software availability and the perception that Linux is only for developers/servers and you have to be a computer genius to use it. Even if you can convince someone that just running Linux isn’t rocket science, there’s still commonly used software like the Adobe suite and MS Office that just don’t have feature-parity level alternatives, even if those alternatives are almost there. I can do most of the stuff I used to do at work on LibreOffice compared to MS Office, but not everything. And while compatibility with the MS Office file types has really improved leaps and bounds over time, there’s still some noticeable issues when opening those documents with one program after making changes with the other. People mention Photoshop a lot as a deal-breaker, but especially with GIMP 3.0 coming, GIMP will be a lot closer to Photoshop than most Linux PDF editors are to Acrobat. The only one I can find that has even close to Acrobat’s features is Master PDF Editor, a piece of paid software (if you want all those features without an annoying watermark) that I don’t think the free version of is in many repos. People say to use LibreOffice Draw, but that’s drawing software meant for entirely different file types and is really not good for any PDF with any type of formatting in it because Draw isn’t designed to handle it. I don’t need those features on my own home PC, so I’ve been running Linux on my personal machines since 2009, but for those who do need those things, it might be a hard sell.

Sounds a lot like Hypnospace Outlaw, which came out a few years ago and had you exploring a fictional Internet from the mid/late-90s era on an OS designed to mimic Windows 95/98 (with an upgrade to an XP-like desktop later in the game). You were basically a mod/censor who went around and busted people for copyright infringement and stuff. Also a real nostalgia trip if you miss that kind of aesthetic.

I’ve used GNOME in the past but currently use KDE Plasma. Both are good, but as for recommendations most Linux people I know of say for new users that if you’re coming from Windows start with Plasma and if you’re coming from Mac OS start with GNOME since those are the closer desktops to what you used before and will make things a bit easier. Depending on the distro you choose you may also have access to other desktops like Cinnamon, which I haven’t used but have heard is even easier than Plasma for new users coming from Windows. It’s not ready for daily use yet, but the upcoming Cosmic desktop may also be quite good for that.

You have a narrow taste in games and that’s perfectly OK, nothing to be ashamed of at all. Enjoy what you like. You have no obligation whatsoever to play the newest, most popular thing just to keep up with the gaming Joneses. The list of popular games I haven’t tried myself is MUCH longer than the list of them I have played, either because they don’t appeal to me or I just don’t have the spare time or money, and I am 100% fine with that. I buy the games I know I’ll put time into and enjoy and don’t worry about the rest.

Checks out. I’m the same as others have mentioned, after work I’d rather just tune out and watch someone play a game (or have it on in the background) than actually build up the mental strength to play one myself, or at least a game that has any challenge to it, most days. If I play a game on an evening after work, I’m usually just cruising the Paldea region in Pokemon hunting for shinies or some other interesting pokemon to catch. I can just shut my brain off, move my character around, and look for a different colored pokemon.

TBF, the Smash Bros community brought their all-but-destruction on themselves. The rest is pretty valid, though.

A better question would be which one doesn’t, the list of those who don’t would be a lot shorter than those who do in some way, shape or form. All three major console companies, any second party devs associated with them, and most major third party console or PC devs and publishers pull some sort of anti-consumer BS or another. The wall of shame includes the likes of EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, Square-Enix, Activision Blizzard, and many more. One of the huge selling points of BG3 was that it was a major release that didn’t have anything in it designed to screw fans over, and it was (deservedly) greatly praised and rewarded by the fans for it, to the point that other jealous devs/publishers freaked out about the future of their business if more of them followed suit. That should tell you all you need to know.

Pokemon, either Pokemon Sword or Pokemon Violet, I would have to look at the Switch itself to compare, but last I looked at either one it was around 400-something hours. Shiny hunting can be a surprisingly cozy time-waster, lol.

I would imagine Astro Bot and Balatro would have to be the frontrunners given their reception and popularity.