Uebercomplicated

Mostly it boils down to three categories:

• Case build quality. This seems a be a frequent issue among System76 laptops; in my case (no pun intended), the laptop case was very badly made and easily broke. I carry my device around very much, always in my backpack, which has a padded laptop section, and in a fancy padded laptop case (or bag or whatever the word is—arg). I essentially have double padding, and I have had a good experience with this padding and previous laptops. This time, however, even simply putting the backpack down, was enough force to dent and eventually completely crush the empty corners next to the hinges. I had to manually repair the corners very often, but wasn't able to prevent damage to the hinges and stripping the threads holding the hinges in place. No other laptop, even ones much cheaper, has ever presented me with this problem, and it is extremely frustrating that the laptop isn't designed to be even mildly rugged.
• Faulty motherboard and bad quality-control. The laptop I bought had two M.2 NVMe slots, with only one occupied. I was planning to add one of my existing SSDs into the second slot. The second slot, however, did not work. This is such an easy thing to test before shipping it, that it really left a bad taste in my mouth.
• Faulty part and known issue. After about two weeks of using my laptop, the touchpad started malfunctioning. I looked the issue up, and, well and behold, this was a well known issue with this specific laptop. I contacted support and the problem remained unsolved. System76 released and continued selling a laptop with a known, unsolvable issue. This was the final blow, and I totally lost trust in the company after experiencing this.

Forgive the shitty writing, I'm doing this in my phone.

Hope I was able to help, kind regards.

I unfortunately had disabling experiences with the System76 Pangolin (12). Since then I would absolutely not recommend System76.

You don't need the laptop to run it, and I have unfortunately only had negative experiences with System76 laptops. I'd stick to the classic ThinkPads or maybe something like Tuxedo; the latter if you're based in Europe.

Yeah, I second this. You may want to look in to DEs/WMs like DWM (C), Xmonad (Haskell), and AwesomeWM (lua) that let you customize them through programming.

Unfortunately, you are likely wrong. "Abbreviation" — to my knowledge — is a borrow from French and simply means to shorten in time or length; nothing about words specifically, as you are suggesting.

“Abbreviation, N., Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8875868501.

Pre-word meaning: “Abbreviation, N., Sense 1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1149358652.

Word meaning: “Abbreviation, N., Sense 2.b.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3259923213.

It's worth noting that the OED is, in its nature, a descriptive dictionary; therefore, this rather general definition should be taken with a grain of salt. ~~The word may — indeed, as it is common — have a more specific meaning, as you suggest.~~

Edit:

Nope, you were definitely wrong (this time a free dictionary!):

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "abbreviation". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Jun. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/abbreviation. Accessed 19 February 2025.

“Abbreviation.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abbreviation. Accessed 19 Feb. 2025.

I recently got a tip from a friend, that drawing just the shadow a nose creates (so kinda a skewed pear-like shape) looks much better than the sharp lines people usually use for noses.

Huh, this may vary game to game or WM to WM. I lose like 40% performance (mostly in 1% lows), get insane stuttering, shaders start glitching, and some games won't even start. I've tried this on KDE Wayland and SwayWM, mostly with the games Counter Strike 2, Vampire Survivors, the DOOM games, and a few others. The only game that's worked for me in Wayland was Transport Fever 2 ¯\(ツ)/¯

Okay, people have said many good things so far, so I won't add much. Simply one thing: take one problem at a time.

By this I rather mean, make your life easier, and only progressively deal with more complicated things. When it comes to distro choice, this would mean picking something with plenty of default installed packages (since you won't necessarily know what to install yourself) — this rules out my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed as well as the popular Fedora and Debian — something that will play nice with NVidia (Desktop Environments use display managers/servers, the two most common being Wayland and X11; Wayland is better, but unfortunately will really mess up NVidia gaming, so try to stick to X11 for now — you can always switch later!), and, lastly, something with a large community (and by extension a large help forum and wiki).

I never thought I'd hear myself (see myself?) saying this (typing this!?), but Mint checks all those boxes.

I wouldn't recommend staying with Mint for long (though some people claim to enjoy it...), but as a first distro to introduce you to Linux, it really may be the easiest. Using a different DE is already difficult, don't overwhelm yourself from the get-go!

Alright, that ended up being longer than expected. I wish you the best of luck, and a lot of fun on your approaching Journey!

A stripped down version of pretty much any distro is gonna do the trick here. Minimal install Fedora (or the lxde version), openSUSE tumbleweed, Debian (lxde flavour), arch, or Void Linux (will give you very, very good start-up time, as it uses runit instead of SystemD. It also has a great installer, imo, and is pretty easy to get the hang of—more so than arch). These should all be fine. Depending on how much work you want to put in, my top recommendations are Void and openSUSE tumbleweed. You could also try a tiling WM like Sway if you want to make the whole experience even more lite weight. Good luck!

I literally laughed out loud at the pink panther thing!

Also shout-out to airwindows. Absolutely fantastic plugin collection, and entirely free!!!!

Edit: also, while I'm at it, Orca is a great, though very weird, sequencer.

I almost disagree with this.

IMO Reaper is fantastic and simply a better drop-in replacement for audacity. Audacity—despite the wonderful name, second only to Alacritty (maybe the greatest program name ever)—is wildly difficult to use, buggy as all hell, and insanely inefficient. Reaper, on the other hand, works for simple things and for complex synthesizer and wacky editing stuff perfectly. I still remember how surprised and bemused I was that the Electro-Akustik department in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin uses basically-free Reaper for their recording needs.

The only argument for audacity is the slightly faster start-up time, and the absence of a "buy-me" pop-up (if you haven't purchased one of the very affordable licenses). Seriously though, since I discovered Reaper I've basically used it for everything not related to work et al. Fantastic software.