Thanks for the summary!

I’m constantly switching between Gnome and KDE (Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, Kinoite, Silverblue, whatever) and I never had any issues.
The only thing that gets messed up a bit is theming, where I have to change the GTK theme, and sometimes the window buttons when I go from KDE to Gnome, which is also reverted in just one click in Gnome tweaks.

The Uncanny Valley is real.

I was undiagnosed my whole life until early adulthood, and therefore always tried to pass as NT, because I never knew what’s wrong with me.

I trained myself for years to mimic NT behaviour, including facial expression, gestures, voice tone, and much more.
Everyone here can probably relate to that how incredible hard it is to achieve that, but I somehow did! Great! Right? Right…?

NOPE!

While I was 99% there, the 1% missing made everything worse.
Those are the tiny tiny nuances that you just can’t replicate, like microexpressions, or some minor mistakes you made, like looking at the wrong direction while “thinking” or whatever shit they made up.

And those tiny incoherences are what will destroy everything. Many people will dislike or mistrust you, and the worst thing about that is that they don’t even know why!
They’ll accuse you to being a liar, because you act sketchy, or that you are “fake”, or whatever you can think about.

I’m currently in the process of un-learning all of that and stop being someone else. Sure, many people will dislike you just for who you are, but seriously, if someone doesn’t have a good time around you just because your voice sounds too flat or because you don’t laugh back at them then fuck that person.
We have 8 billion people on this planet, there will be at least one person out there that appreciates your weirdness

No, don’t. Good idea at first glance, but horrible on the second, at least from my experience.

While work will be way more pleasant, it might be too pleasant, and you’ll spend more energy and focus than you might realise.
Your boss will notice that too, and give you a heck lot of more work to do than your colleagues, for the same wage.
You’ll work and work and work, and then you wake up with a burnout.
No one, except you, will notice that.

And then you can’t give 200% anymore, but only 100% from now on.

In your bosses eyes, you have gotten just lazy and not interested anymore, just because they’re used to you overstraining yourself.

And last but not least, they’ll dump you into the trash because they can’t extract even more resources out from you, and no one will care. You are just a human resource, that’s why the department in companies is called that way.

Don’t be stupid. Don’t be me!

100% AMD, for sure. AMD won’t make much problems and works ootb.

Nvidia on the other hand… if you already have a Nvidia GPU, then the proprietary drivers work pretty well, but even those won’t work flawlessly and still cause problems for many people.
And the FOSS drivers are still in the early stages and won’t cut it. So why spend lots of money for a piece of hardware that won’t give you the performance you paid for?

Also, Nvidia clearly doesn’t care about PCs or its’ users, so why support such a shitty company with your money?

1. Distro choice

I would recommend you either Aurora or Bluefin.
Both are pretty much the same, but differ in their desktop environment.

Traditionally, Gnome (Bluefin) always has been the champion in terms of being tablet-like, but from what I’ve heard, KDE has surpassed Gnome in terms of how well it works as a tablet UI.

You can install the one or the other, and then later “rebase” to the other variant without needing to reinstall anything if you want to try the “competitor” or if you’re unhappy.

This basically switches out the base system, but your installed apps and pictures are decoupled and kept. Like just doing a big update :D

Why do I recommend you exactly that, and not just base Fedora or Kubuntu or whatever?

Simple - you need to install the linux-surface kernel (and stuff), because without it, nothing will work, no stylus, no sleep, no battery, basically nothing.

But said modified kernel is nothing ordinary, and might shit itself randomly.

Not only would you have to install everything by hand, which was a task that not only let me return to Windows once, but twice as Linux noob! It also causes a lot of headache when you have to spend your evening fixing it via CLI or whatever.

Here uBlue comes handy: you can “fix” your system with just one click.

• Smort silica rock not thinking?
• Grub says “NØ” after system update?
• Me not care, me pressing space while booting, me selecting yesterday image, me watching YouTube when eating because me don’t care, knowing that dev daddy is already working on fix that ship tomorrow.

You don’t even have to do manual updates or whatever, everything is done in the background for you, just like on your smartphone.

You have to select the “I have a Surface device” option, and then everything comes pre-bundled and (hopefully) just werks™

2. Note taking and PDFs

I don’t know 🤷

3. SD card

🤷

4. Stylus

I believe KDE is better, because it has many wacom tablet input settings and features, but I sold that crappy Surface ages ago when Gnome was the obvious choice. The 🤷 also applies here I guess, because it was two years ago and felt like a completely different age compared to today.

I recommend you doing so, but not as a security measure, more of so as a “keeping everything organised”-measure.

I like to keep my host OS clean and install everything containerised

You did everything right. Boot into the image that works, and then apply rpm-ostree rollback. This reverses the broken image and the working one, so you’ll boot into this one the next time you boot up until you change something in the order, e.g. by updating.

In the meantime, wait a day or so and then update again.

On what channel are you on? bazzite:latest or bazzite:stable?

Hey! I’m new to this community and just wanted to say hi! :)

I have pretty much no clue what to expect here. I just find it cool to see other weirdos like myself, but with other interests, struggles and brains.

How often do those threads get posted? Weekly?

Just to start a conversation, a random thought I had today: How do you think would have neurodivergence shaped human society in the ages of hunters and gatherers?

What unique thing, that annoys you, like sensory overloads or pain tolerance, would have been an absolute gamechanger and huge advantage, when we didn’t have shopping malls and Tinder, but wild berries and a camp fire?

Same. I still really love Gnome with my heart, but it just felt… inferior… compared to KDE 6.

Everything looked sharper, like if I had switched from 720p to 4k, I could access my hardware better (e.g. control the brightness of my monitor, etc.) and much more.

Regarding backups: check out, if your WiFi router supports network sharing. If so, you can just plug in an USB or external drive and share it over your local network

Here’s my perspective. I’m exactly that kind of guy you mean.

As soon as someone mentions “immutable distro”, I get triggered and start shilling for Bazzite et al.

Why you might ask? Because I like using it, and because the guys behind it are chill dudes with a great vision and a lot of know-how.

I’m just a normal guy without IT skills. I can’t code myself, I can’t review someone’s else code, I can’t do anything.

But I wish I could.

The only thing I am able to is making it more well known.
If someone asks “What distro do you recommend for gaming?”, I’ll say “Bazzite”.

Someone else might say “Arch”, and another one “Tumbleweed”. Everyone likes their own thing, and everyone shills for something else :)

I really wish your theory was real, then I could make some $$$, but everything here is FOSS. The devs are just as broke as I am…

Depending on your use case, some high performance polymers like PEEK or Ultem (PEI) can have many advantages that metals have, but are still considered plastic, so you can print them relatively normally with SLS or sometimes even FDM printers.

Printing metals is often way harder than polymers, due to high temperatures needed, and post processing is also way harder.

What are your needs?

Awesome! I didn’t know this existed, but I definitely have to check that out. Thanks!

Usually only as long as I play games. After that, I shut it off. Why?

• I run Bazzite, which updates itself in the background, but needs a restart to complete
• It boots in seconds, because modern hard drives are crazy fast
• The standby-LED is annoying when I sleep

My laptop is usually on for a week, but I restart it from time to time, for the same reasons, and because devices need some sleep too! 😴

Fedora Atomic IS immutable. Rpm-ostree just layers (or hides) stuff on top of the already existing image. If you layer something, e.g. Nvidia drivers, you still download the same image everyone else uses, but basically compile the driver from fresh and put it on top. And that takes time. This is the reason using rpm-ostree to layer stuff is not recommended.

That’s why uBlue exists for example. It gives you a sane start setup, where all drivers are already built in into the image. And then you can either use the clean base and add your own stuff to create your own image, or use already great ones like Bluefin or Bazzite, where everything you want is already included.

Atomic just means that every process is either completed without errors, or not at all. This way, you don’t get an half updated and broken system for example in case you loose power. Happened to me quite a few times already, but never with Fedora Atomic.

Pretty much anything outside of /var/ (even /home/ is placed inside /var/) is read-only, and if you want to modify your install, you have to build your own image. Therefore, it is both immutable AND atomic.

That’s why I prefer the term “image based”

• You can still apply updates live, e.g. on Bazzite (Fedora Atomic) with the --apply-live tag (or however it’s spelled).
• The root partition isn’t read only per se, but you have to change the upstream image itself instead of the one booted right now. You can use the uBlue-Builder for example to make your own custom Bazzite spin just for you if you want.
• Both aren’t inherently secure or insecure. It’s harder to brick your system, yeah, for sure, but you can still fuck up some partitions or get malware. It’s just better because everything is transparently identifiable (ostree works like git), saved (fallback images), containerised and reproducible.
• And you can still install system software, e.g. by layering it via rpm-ostree. Or use rootful containers in Distrobox and keep using apt or Pacman in there.

FYI, the creators of Aurora/ Bazzite/ Bluefin are currently working on bootable CentOS stream based OCI images. This means, that you will get a LTS version, similar to Debian, but image based and WAY more slow paced.

My experience with uBlue has been flawless, but I don’t know if I would recommend it to an elderly person, because they might change a bit, and change is a stress factor for many people that age.

KDE Connect has a remote feature for presentations. Maybe one can create a small interface/ WM for it?

For example, Niri WM, configured with just left, right, and laserpointer as confirmation button. Based on uBlue, so it updates itself. Does that sound practical?

Not only that. It can either be an almost 1:1 replacement for SteamOS (if you choose the -deck variant), or just a normal desktop distro with a lot of gaming optimizations, like the fsync-kernel, gamescope, hardware enablement, and quite a lot of QoL improvements.

It’s basically a “Download the iso and begin gaming in 30 minutes”-distro.

It also ships some additional software that is optional, but quite neat. For example, I discovered LACT through it, which made over a year of GPU humming gone by allowing me to set fan curves.

For some diehard Arch users, it might be “bloated”, but I find it just right. I never had the feeling that the included tools are useless, and those that might be (e.g. Discord, OBS, etc.) are only installed when you tick the checkbox in the installer.