Vuescan is great, and near as I can tell it's one guy. Totally worth it.

Pop has automatic updates now.

Ahhh, it seems like you're experiencing the dichotomy of Linux. The best part about Linux is the community, and the worst part about Linux is the community.

I've been using Linux off and on for over 30 years, and have been using it full-time for the last 7 or so. I'll try to cut through some of the elitist bullshit out there and answer your questions, and hope it helps.

Distro: Honestly, what really makes a distro a distro (from a new user perspective) is the package manager, and the DE. Yes, I know you can change the DE, but a new guy won't. I would try a bunch of distros in a Virtual Machine and try out the various different package managers (apt, yum, dnf, etc) and see which one clicks. Of course, this is only going to be used at the command line, but at some point - once you get your feet under you, you'll be using the command line. I prefer apt, therefore, I use an Ubuntu based distro.

Gaming: Honestly, it's hit or miss. A lot more hits as of late. However, if you're into online multiplayer games that enforce a kernel level anti-cheat, you'll be sorely disappointed. Look at protondb.com and look up the games you play, and see how well they work. If it's silver or better, you'll probably be happy with it.

Nvidia: This would tend to get into the weeds. AMD has native drivers in the kernel. Plug and play, unless you want to install proprietary drivers for Machine Learning, and even that can be a hassle sometimes. Nvidia has open source, but not great. Their proprietary drivers are better, but the compositor may cause problems.

Dual Boot: If you do (I do), do it on a separate drive. Microsoft can fuck with your bootloader if it's on the same drive. I've had no problem dual booting.

Easy to Learn: Depending on distro and hardware, you don't really have to know how to do anything other than install via a usb drive. You can do everything with a GUI if you want. It's not like you have to jump in feet first, set up a VM and play around.

Everything works OOB: This is mostly true. However, it is important to understand that most stuff's drivers are written for Windows. As you build/buy hardware, you'll get used to looking to see if it works with Linux. Some stuff does, some stuff doesn't, some stuff needs some "hacking" to get it to work.

I love Linux, would love for you to join us, but if you're getting overwhelmed, I can understand. I would start fiddling with them in VMs, see if you even like the idea of it. After that - start looking at your hardware and see if it works with Linux and you want to go bare metal - go for it. But keep your windows drive ready to swap in. Eventually, you'll be calling guys noobs and bitching about them not reading the Arch wiki... :D

10

The other partner in FUTO is Louis Rossman. Maybe one cancels out the other?

Ummm, their SteamDeck runs Pop? Have you modded it? Because last I checked it ran SteamOS (an immutable Arch variant) and used KDE in desktop mode, whereas Pop uses Gnome...

What are render times like?

I've built every NAS/home server I've ever had. There's lots of options out there for the case as well. You could take an SFF Mini ITX case with a single 5 1/4" drive bay and put an icy dock 8 x 2.5" SATA backplane in it. Don't know if icy dock (brand) is widely available in Europe...

Just pointing out that if you imagine it (form factor with 8 hot swappable drives) there's probably a solution to build it from scratch.

More than likely. Since the description clearly states "8x3.5 HDD Hot-Swap drive bays." It's not the only case of similar form factor that you can get 8 hot swap drive bays. There are literally tons of NAS case designs to choose from.

https://www.newegg.com/black-jonsbo-n3-mini-itx/p/2AM-006A-000E1?item=9SIAY3SJYT0310&cm_sp=SP-_-974336-_-0-_-1-_-9SIAY3SJYT0310-_-nas+case-_-case|nas-_-1

The problem isn't with Nextcloud (I had the same issue happen with me). The problem is with the default sync settings on Thunderbird and DAVx5 (at least for me). Thunderbird defaulted to a longer than I wanted synch schedule, so I dropped it down to syncing every 15 minutes. DAVx5 was set to 240 minutes unless the event was created on my phone. Once I updated both schedules to every 15 minutes, I haven't noticed an issue.

For the life of me, I can't figure out the search terms I need to find what I'm looking for. On top of that, I'm beginning to think I heard it on a podcast. But I seem to remember an interview with someone at Valve talking about how they were upstreaming EVERYTHING they were doing. I would assume that meant kernel work as well.

I can't be the only one that gets giddy when I see Jeremy Soller or Michael Murphy post... My LemurPro is eagerly anticipating the upgrade to COSMIC.

One question, Gnome has an extension that makes turning on my selfhosted wireguard VPN a simple toggle. Is there a plan to integrate something similar?

I use some of their switches using Home Assistant's Homekit integration. Set them up on wifi in their app, add to HA, then block internet access in my router's firewall. Kind of the best of both worlds at that point.

Ombi comes to mind. It's for requesting new movies/TV shows, but it also has a search feature and shows a tag on results of it's already in your library.

OpenMediaVault is a Debian server with a Web UI.

I did. This should teach me not to try and cook dinner and post at the same time. I'm NOT that good at multitasking...

AM5 sockets are now LGA like Intel. AM4 was the last PGA socket, so bent pins on the chip are a thing of the past. Make sure to leave the socket cover in place while installing the CPU. Now, the fear is bending a pin on the MoBo.

Not to sound flippant, but it seems like a solution looking for a problem. I use the --cleanup flag, and if there's an issue, rolling back is as simple as changing dockerimage:latest to dockerimage:version that worked.

Unless I'm missing something.

For Corsair - I've been very happy with ckb-next. https://github.com/ckb-next/ckb-next

It is pretty robust, allows remapping of key/button bindings, changing of RGB, DPI, etc. Their goal is to replace iCUE. Very robust for mice and keyboards, but they also list other hardware that it is known to work with in their wiki. Might be worth a look.

Did you encrypt your whole drive during Pop installation? If so, I've never found a good way to dual boot with an encrypted drive other than refind.