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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Cachy - you might have some extra hoops to jump through. The performance difference is negligible for just desktop usage.

    PopOS - no real benefit unless you’re running Nvidia, and then it’s only for the moderately useful graphics switching stuff.

    You sound like you want Fedora for simplicity’s sake, honestly. There’s really no other major performance differences between desktop distros. Any tunings that one has you can just apply to another if you know their benefits.

















  • There’s lots of shady things happening in the HDD resale space, so be weary. Most of what gets resold are datacenter drives that have hit a max number of hours and are pulled on that alone. Not because they aren’t still working, but because they don’t want to risk it. This number varies from place to place, and is only a preventative measure to pull them from service before they fail.

    That being said… understand that this is what you’re likely buying.

    For the shady bits: resellers frequently pull some tricks to obfuscate the real state of the drives including:

    • swapping controller boards to hide issues
    • resealing failed seals
    • wiping/resetting SMART info

    All of this culminating in a real grab bag of things you probably don’t want to mess with. If you were buying, say, 10 drives to host a bunch of junk you don’t care about, it may be worth the risk. Otherwise, read what I said above and understood what you’re likely to get.

    If you just want cheaper than retail drives, get factory refurbished drives directly from the manufacturer that carry a warranty. You’ll feel better about it.



    1. Not really unless you’re hyper-focused on a very specific type of performance. Even then, you can always enable/disable whatever bits and pieces because it’s all software, and it’s all open. There are guides or threads for absolutely everything out there. A distro only organizes it simpler on base install to make it easier ootb.

    2. Linux itself does not do any data collection. Never heard of any distro enabling anything by default, and you can rip it right out anyway if you want, though it’s more work. If you’re concerned about this though, stay away from Ubuntu, as that is the one corporate backed distro that is more likely to lean into this.

    3. Fedora is probably what you want. It’s taken over the helm Ubuntu used to have as the default to try. Clean, simple, no bullshit, huge community.

    4. Linux, no, but you’re conflating a few things. Linux is the kernel. The desktop you choose to run is what does the graphical session management. Both KDE and Gnome are fine with this, though there is an argument that KDE is a tad ahead in this realm with their VRR implementation.

    5. Gnome is more akin to MacOS. KDE is more Windows-like (but still not at all). Try both on a liveUSB for a bit and see which you like.

    At the end of the day you can run practically anything on a liveUSB for as long as you want before installing, even games (within reason). Be comfortable in the knowledge that if there is something you don’t like about a particular thing, you can change it to act however you want. Like I said above, it’s all just software. It’s going to be a little tough coming from a Windows-centric world to realize this at first, but I assure you, installing and running one distro absolutely does not lock you into anything at all because you can just install and remove absolutely everything.

    Now, hardware compatibility is a different story. The Linux kernel itself is what does all the hardware management, so if your hardware is too new, there may not be full support for a particular thing. It sounds like you’re on an older machine though, so unless it’s got some really obscure hardware in it, everything should be detected and load straight out of the box. Again, try a few liveUSB runs and make sure, it’s that simple.