NormalC [he/him, comrade/them]

You could just call the Free operating systems GNU/Linux or NonGNU/Linux.

“Vanilla linux” is vague terminology and distorts history.

Privacy and best practices are nearly universal across most user-obsessive distributions like Mint or Zorin and by extension most if not all distributions. Don’t let anyone tell you that one distribution is more “private” than another.

Mint is simply just better than Zorin in everything that Zorin tries to do, perhaps if this was a year ago things would be different, but Zorin is just not as well maintained as Mint is.

If you like the look of Zorin, that’s okay, most people do. But all desktop environments can be customized to your liking.

Use Mint instead, Zorin is not as well maintained or looked after like Mint.

I’m not familiar with warp+ but having used Mullvad VPN with most distributions I’d say to see if it supports OpenVPN or Wireguard configurations. That way you can talk directly to NetworkManager or the respective vpn program.

Perhaps Fedora does not have a unique package dependency that Ubuntu has since Fedora is heavily oriented toward systemD and selinux for most system tasks that may be handled by different packages on Ubuntu/Debian distributions. Warp+ may be designed in a way that only expects a ubuntu/debian derivative distro.

I’d try consulting cloudflare customer support for more guidance and to see if they can replicate the issue on their end.

Are you sure that Steam is uninstalled completely from your filesystem. Steam creates a “.steam” user directory and leftover data in the directory may be conflicting with the flatpak. Delete it if it exists and then try restarting your computer. The flatpak version of steam sandboxes the .steam directory.

As always, Steam is proprietary software and doesn’t bother to follow freedesktop standards. The support I can give can only go so far. GOG is always a better solution as it can be used with a libre client like Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris without DRM or invasive anti features. You do not need Steam to leverage Valve’s contributions with Proton and Vulkan.

I would recommend using the flatpak version of steam and seeing if that works before heading any further.

Yeah, it’s misleading but technically still correct. GNU/Linux is a variant of an OS using the linux kernel.

Edit: nevermind they didn’t even mention GNU tar but instead calls it “Linux”

ZorinOS is definitely overrated, their update cycles are too slow (two years between major releases) and its unique features like ZorinConnect, Windows Software Tool , and their Zorin customized GNOME 42/XFCE isn’t good enough against its sibling Mint.

Of course, there’s always the special cheat code called archinstall that you can invoke immediately after login if you have a wired connection. Honestly, installing GNU/Linux isn’t hard, maintaining it is. Installing Gentoo is following a handbook, maintaining gentoo requires rigorous application logic and configuring.

Since presuming the computer came with Windows activated preinstalled, then the license key is likely embedded into the BIOS of the device. Reinstalling Windows will not void that license key because you already paid for it with the “windows tax.” I’ve reinstalled windows on my pre-built “gaming” PC and the license activated automatically.

There are some pains getting a USB bootable installer image with Windows on a full GNU/Linux system, but it is entirely possible. It’s also possible to virtualize windows with GPU pass-through or use Wine/Proton which should always be examined before attempting to reinstall Windows (which is always a last resort).

Valve’s contributions to Wine can be used without using Steam’s DRM-based client such as in applications like Bottles and Lutris. However, we should call on Valve to release the steam client API to the public and to only distribute DRM free games (like GOG).

This is super cool, the ability to use embedded offline translators is terrific and shows that the author does consider all use-cases. I’m definitely installing this to my Librewolf.

That’s a shame. Lenovo is your next best bet. If you are in Europe I would recommend Slimbook or Tuxedo.

If you have the money to spare and are based in the US, you could look at System76 laptops. They all have the latest hardware and coreboot. POP!_OS will allow you to do everything on that list for 7+ hours since you can install a foreign package manager like Guix, Nix, and Homebrew for all your tinkering needs and use flatpak for graphical applications.

• a minimal, fast system

• keyboard / shortcut based - all interactions can be done from keyboard (within common sense limits)
• all keys can be custom mapped (i have muscle memory of my custom keys for certain actions, so i’d like to keep them)
• all can be configured from dotfiles (worse case shell scripts and ansible)
• very low ressource consumption, snappy system with no delay

I’d recommend Debian 12/testing/sid with the Sway compositor. Homebrew, Nix and Guix can all be installed on top of any GNU/Linux distribution to provide containerized packages. Flatpak can be used to obtain the latest version of graphical applications as well. Terminals like alacritty and kitty are Wayland natives and Foot is widely considered to be the most minimal “default” terminal for Wayland compositors. You can use Sway’s built in “swaybar” or status bars like Waybar and eww. Sway configuration is just like i3 where you can configure specific devices like keyboards and monitors from a single file.

Technical documentation of API, Language constructs, and usage (a la mandoc) should always have a standard-compliant (any widely accepted help manual format like mdbook or texi) text form licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). This is to ensure that freedom 01 (“The freedom to study how the program works”) is not obstructed in any way.

Videos are tougher due to having a much wider arrange of factors. First off, you’d want to make your videos accessible (using subtitles, on-screen graphics and not just a narration all the way through, translation to other languages). You’d also want to be able to share that video among your peers without obstruction. Just having it be hosted to a proprietary mass-media site like YouTube will not be enough. I have doubts about the “hit record and magic happens” premise, videos are a lot more daunting than text formats if you don’t have the prerequisite equipment and skills beforehand.

If you really want to create videos, you should have a text alternative to the video or at least a technical summary of the video’s topics attached alongside the video so that you can leverage both text and video alongside each other.

Then likely you can ignore it, or configure GNOME notifications to not display it to you. You could also seek help in NixOS related forums or continue trying to replicate the issue.

Really strange… Was there any pattern you could discern from the occurrences?

-l Make bash act as if it had been invoked as a login shell (see INVOCATION below).

--login Equivalent to -l.

This is an excerpt from the bash manpage. So likely no, this isn’t a bad thing and this is just GNOME sourcing your environment variables. You need to tell us how frequent these notification are and when they happen (also what GNOME version you’re using as well as which distribution you are using). We can’t help you if you don’t provide that.

Correction: POP!_OS has their own APT deb farm that has the latest hardware stack. This includes the proprietary 535 nvidia driver and later as well as the kernel and mesa.

This is part of the history of the distribution as it was made to support system76’s latest hardware lineup on top of an Ubuntu base.

Nouveau is the libre driver for Nvidia on GNU/Linux with Nvidia slowly segregating their proprietary driver into a firmware blob.