I jumped to Tidal many years ago because Spotify could not be bothered to provide high quality output. Yes, you can ear the difference, even on shitty gear.

For the stuff I could not get on either platform I started buying CDs on Discogs and ripping them to FLAC.

Edit: ear, not eat.

Sorry, I don’t have VR gear.

I’m sorry to disagree. I’ve been using Microsoft crap since the days where you had to free up memory in config.sys to load Novell Netware drivers, and never has Microsoft been the cool kid in town. It was always the fat bastard bully kid that would beat and extort the other kids.

I’ve been running Steam as a Flatpak for a long time, it works just fine regardless of the underlying distro. Don’t panic.

smaller pool of desktop users

There, I fixed it for you.

This is about desktop Linux, so I was wrong to correct you. My bad.

That’s pretty much the only advantage of getting old.

I bet that if I switched today from Linux to MacOS I’d feel the same.

In fact, I sometimes feel the same when dealing with Windows, but mostly I just reboot and hope for the best, or bother the IT guys some more.

I see what you did there…

Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.

Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.

I’ll take code with swear words over closed code with corporate babble anytime.

The Halo series.

I like shooters, so I got the full bundle and I tried hard to like it.

None of the games gave me a lasting impression. The plot didn’t stick with me, the enemies were weird, the guns felt weak and flimsy, the rooms kept repeating in some sections and it got very boring. There were some fun bits with the vehicles, etc., but overall the experience was… pretty much average.

I was expecting something like the Half-Life series, but this wasn’t it.

My Manjaro desktop already migrated.

I decided to install Plasma next to XFCE to see if I liked it. Then I thought I might as well try Wayland too.

Turns out the combo works great, even with games and Steam, so I’m quite happy with it.

Well, for starters, games are going to get more expensive.

That is their prerogative. Mine is not buying overpriced games.

I’m surprised nobody posted the surprised_pikachu.gif yet.

Oh no, my desktop is fried!

1. Create a new user.
2. Login as new user.
3. Copy your old files over.
5. Profit.

I always treat the system as discardable and only backup the /home and /etc directories. Saving those, I can afford to wipe the system and re-settle on a new distro if I want to.

Of course if you throw Windows into the mix, all bets are off. Personally, I stay the hell away from that.

Mark it as an achievement on your learning path and move on. We all did something silly like that at some point.

Great that you have backups, get a fresh install and restore it.

Lessons learned: don’t work as root unless you absolutely positively have a good reason to do so.

Maybe it’s time you invested some time in finding alternatives that let you stay in control of said hardware. I know time is in short supply for all of us, so consider your priorities.

You will find unhelpful people in any group of people. Linux community is not special in that regard.