EndeavourOS. It’s the only one I tried that worked with my sound card out of the box strangely enough…

If that’s the actual splash screen that pops up when you try to access it (no, I’m not going to go to it and check, I don’t want to be on a new and exciting list) then kudos to the person who put that together. Shit goes hard. So do all the agency logos.

I believe in Australia, by law it has to be green, except for parliment house because it’d ruin the aesthetic, so its allowed to be red (take with grain of salt, it’s been a while since I went to Canberra).

Understood, I will continue aware of that distinction.

Thank you kindly for the advice. I’ll look into cachy. I’m sure I can figure it out.

And here’s me using a 15m long HDMI whenever I go to the loungeroom.

It kinda looks to be perfect if I end up going with Fedora (It’s the most recommended so far).

I didn’t quite capture the intent of this sentence. My bad. Would you mind elaborating/clarifying/explaining? Apologies if I’m coming across as obtuse 😅.

Ah, sorry. Just wanted to express that Bazzite seems to fit my needs quite well and that fedora has been recommended to me more than any other repo so far. So if after my investigations I do end up choosing fedora, Bazzite seems to be a good flavor to try.

I think your response has so far been the most comprehensive. Thank you so much.

This is a thing of the past. With the excellent Distrobox, you can install any package from any distro on whatever distro you’re running.

I’d not heard of Distrobox sounds to me to be a perfect foil to the disparate package solutions out there. It gives me some peace of mind about not being locked into a package manager (Although as you point out, even without distrobox that wouldn’t be an issue).

Lastly, some distros and/or (so-called) desktop environments might collect telemetry to improve themselves. But this is done in a way that suits free and open source software. Thankfully, if you’ve got problems with this, you can always turn it off.

I’ve really not got any problems with telemetry so long as it’s just limited to the technicals and for OS improvement purposes. Sounds like I should be fine.

So, all distros allow you to tinker. My question is: What is it you’re tinkering with?

“Tinkering” in my case is pretty broad. You’re correct when you suppose that I like to mess with UI aesthetics and workflows. The other misc tinkering I more mentioned in case there’s some distros that are unsuited to working with strange or niche programs (such as the media encoding and physical media management stuff I mentioned). It sounds like that’s not really much of a problem though. Anyway what counts as “niche” is very subjective so probably wasn’t that helpful to mention.

Have you considered Bazzite?

I have not heard of Bazzite. It kinda looks to be perfect if I end up going with Fedora (It’s the most recommended so far). My only concern is longevity, It seems to be quite new and I don’t want to jump on just for it to be a flash in the pan. As I understand it though, even if it is, it’s easy enough to change distros. Others have said to not be worried about locking oneself in and to just jump in and try. Also not a fan of “Gaming Mode” style UI but I guess I can just not use it.

Out of everything, this could be a slight concern. You could make it work through Wine, and it seems to have decent results. If you’re not opposed to using Photoshop CC 2021, there’s this GitHub repo worth looking at as well.

Honestly, not married to Photoshop at all. That’s just what I use and I’m not any sort of power user by any measure.

Again, thank you very much for your detailed response.

Good recommendation. Seems like it’d be a good way to rapidly try a few. I’ll look into it. Thank you kindly.

Hadn’t heard of zorin. Will add it to deliberations. Thank you kindly

Got some mates who are fans of Mint. but yeah. I’ll set up a boot USB and start playing around.

Just went out and got a USB to use. Will start playing around when I get a free day.

Will take under consideration. Know a few mates who reccomend mint

Thank you kindly. All is a learning experience in life so this should be fun.

Your laptop has a gyro?

I’ll give Fedora a go.

Thank you for the advice. I’m definitely approaching this as a learning experience, something I’ve never really shied away from.

/s

Copy that. I’ll look a bit more into the baked in differences then. I understand that different packages can be converted with some effort. Will need to research the others.

Wow, that was really comprehensive and clear, thank you. I’ll digest and factor into the deliberations. Reckon I’ll also switch to AMD with my next build. Main reason I went Intel/Nvidea is cuz AMD’s old reputation was still ringing in my ears when I build it.

Copy that. Got myself a USB so I’ll do some playing. Thanks for the clarification. As for hardware, only weird thing might be my sound card but we’ll see how that plays out.