methodicalaspect

Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.

If you’re using Debian as a daily driver you can always use a Flatpak if you need a newer version than what’s available in the repos. The foundation is solid, though, and that’s what matters - it’s one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Debian for office workstation use.

Powerwash Simulator.

I’ll second the Pop!_OS recommendation that others have been posting. Don’t get me wrong, Linux Mint is great, though I personally prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition over the Ubuntu-based one, but I think Pop!_OS is just as easy to use while presenting a different look & feel. Pop tends to support newer hardware as well: despite being stuck on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base until Cosmic is finished, System76 releases new kernels to support the hardware they sell. They’re currently running kernel version 6.6.6, as opposed to Ubuntu’s 6.2.0 (I think – that’s what server’s on, at least).

I gave my wife, who “hates computers,” a laptop running Pop!_OS when her Windows 10 one failed and, apart from the standard new PC complaints, I haven’t heard anything Linux-specific. She runs two businesses on the thing; the only changes I made to the standard Pop!_OS software were to replace LibreOffice with OnlyOffice, and to replace Geary with Thunderbird.

Not entirely sure why this reply is being panned (was at -6 when I first saw it).

OP is in the process of upgrading their PC to a Ryzen 9. If we make the assumption that this Ryzen 9 is on the AM5 platform, the CPU comes equipped with an IGPU, meaning the RTX 3060s are no longer needed by the bare metal. So, installing a stable, minimal point release OS as a base would minimize resource utilization on the hardware side. This could be something like Debian Bookworm or Proxmox VE with the no-subscription repo enabled. There’s no need for the NVIDIA GPUs to be supported by the bare metal OS.

Once the base OS is installed, the VMs can be created, and the GPUs and peripherals can be passed through. This step effectively removes the devices from the host OS – they don’t show up in lsusb or lspci anymore – and “gives” them to the VMs when they start. You get pretty close to native performance with setups of this nature, to the point that users have set up Windows 10/11 VMs in this way to play Cyberpunk 2077 on RTX 4090s with all the eye candy, including ray reconstruction.

Downsides:

• Three operating systems to maintain: bare metal, yours, and your partner’s.
• Two sets of applications/games to maintain: yours and your partner’s.
• May need to edit VM configs somewhat regularly to stay ahead of anti-cheat measures targeted at users of VMs.
• Performance is not identical to bare metal, but is pretty close.
• VM storage is isolated, so file sharing requires additional setup.

Upsides:

• If you don’t know a lot about Linux, you’ll know a bunch more when you’re done with this.
• Once you get the setup ironed out, it won’t need to change much going forward.
• Each VM’s memory space is isolated, so applications won’t “step on each other” – that is, you can both run the same application or game simultaneously.
• Each user can run their own distro, or even their own OS if they wish. You can run Fedora and your partner can run Mint, or even Windows if they really, really want to. This includes Windows 11 as you can pass an emulated TPM through to meet the hardware requirements.
• Host OS can be managed via web interface (cockpit + cockpit-machines) or GUI application (virt-manager).

It’s not exactly what OP is looking for, but it’s definitely a valid approach to solving the problem.

I’ve been waiting for a beta of the Debian-based version. The Ubuntu-based version seemed to run reasonably well on my old Thinkpad T460, but I didn’t try too much serious stuff on it that I don’t already do on regular Debian with Distrobox.

Single-node k3s deployment with Pi-Hole, then?

I use Docker inside Debian LXC on Proxmox, there’s a way to avoid the crazy disk usage and it works really nicely. I followed these blog posts:

https://theorangeone.net/posts/docker-in-lxc/

https://theorangeone.net/posts/docker-lxc-storage/

I’m certainly not using it in production but it’s great in the home lab.

It’s the default browser on my computer, and it doesn’t suck, so I’m not motivated to seek an alternative.

All the extensions GNOME 44 users installed to make it usable are now broken.

Sweet. First line of the neofetch logo is still off doing its own thing, I see…

Same - Thinkpad X395 (R5 3500U) for casual use, RX 6750 XT for gaming, FirePro W4100 for work, and zero thinking about GPU drivers between the three.

Far from it, Debian is one of my favorites, though I run EndeavourOS on my main machine.

It’s Linux Mint Debian Edition that’s the oddball, but in a good way.

LMDE didn’t install the DKMS modules on my kid’s PC, so the nVidia drivers never loaded after a new kernel got installed. I do enough tech support at work so we chucked Pop!_OS on the PC (and set it up with btrfs and timeshift-autosnap) instead. No more problems.

May not be a problem with mainline Mint, of course, but there are weirdos like me who prefer the Debian edition.

nVidia has entered the chat

That’s going to be killed off in favor of Outlook in the near future, from what I understand.

If OP is willing to do a bit of extra legwork and somewhat masochistic, then pretty much any Linux-based mail client is fair game with WSL2. The only one I’ve used lately other than Thunderbird is Evolution, but that was just to test a particular distro’s default offering.

More like purple Arch, but you don’t have to mess with your date/time because the certificates don’t break, and you can install stuff from the AUR without worrying about breaking your system.

Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.

The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.

As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.

Same. Every problem I’ve had with it, I’ve caused…and have been able to fix from the live image. EndeavourOS is definitely my favorite at this time.

OpenSUSE, both Leap and Tumbleweed, use btrfs by default. Do you switch those to xfs during installation?

I’ve had btrfs snapshots pull me out of the fire multiple times on my home machines, but I don’t fully trust any file system at all, so I rsync stuff to two local network destinations and an off-site location as well. Those, too, have come in handy.