IIRC their web site used to make it sound like it was a paid product but it was always possible to get it for free. Can’t remember the exact details, perhaps something similar to those “name your price” softwares that have a pre-filled recommended value but it’s also possible to choose €0? I checked what it looks like nowadays and the Pro version does come up first if you go to downloads, and then there’s a free Core version below it.

Had several issues when upgrading to 41, so I only upgraded to 42 a month or two ago in order to give them time to iron out the bugs first…

I’m not up to date on hardware, so I’ll refrain from recommending specific components. I went with AMD Ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU (using closed source driver) last time I upgraded my PC and it usually works fine, though I know many recommend AMD GPUs nowadays for Linux. If €1000 is your total budget, it might be worth considering a second hand GPU. For example a used RTX 3080 goes for around €300 and they are still quite capable, though someone else will have to say if that’s enough for the flight sims.

One thing you might want to look up is if the game uses hardware raytracing, and if that works on Linux. Out of the games I play, World of Warships looks worse for me than what I see on youtube, despite that I have set all graphics settings to max. Maybe it’s possible to fix by configuring Wine/Proton/DXVK etc. I haven’t really looked into it, but just so you’re aware of potential issues.

I used this list for help when choosing a power supply, but I think that becomes more important if you buy a high end GPU.

I use Steam for almost all my gaming, and it makes running (most) Windows games a breeze.

If you specify a budget then people might be able to give some recommendations, if you like.

As for aesthetics, Fractal Design offer a few cases which look really nice, if you like the Scandinavian design style. The overview shows all cases with glass or mesh sides, but there’s usually an option to get an opaque door if you don’t want LEDs from the electronics shining through

My friends are currently throwing a tantrum because I won’t “just enable Secure Boot and run Windows” to play Battlefield 6 with them. But I’ve never felt that I must play a specific game, so the few ones who are incompatible (usually due to bad anti-cheats) have been easy to ignore. There are plenty of good games I can play on Linux.

Offline updates is one of the things that annoyed me most back when I was using Windows, and somehow they’ve managed to make it even worse in Fedora. Luckily you can turn it off in F41 by going to the “Software Update” section in system settings, and then changing “Apply system updates” to “Immediately”. Haven’t upgraded to 42 yet but I hope the setting is still there.

I’ve got a MSI MAG Tomahawk wifi which has had a lot of issues, but nothing related to Linux

If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don’t more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

My guess as to why this isn’t a more central feature of Linux distros is that this is not something most users need. If you need to reinstall the OS because you broke it, then a full system backup is probably more convenient, even if it’s less than optimal to back up packages which you could download. If you need to reinstall the OS because you want a clean slate when upgrading to a new version, then your package list for the old version could cause a lot of conflicts as maintainers regularly remove and add new packages.

I have backed up my zsh, vim, tmux, etc. configs and written a few shell scripts which install them and download vim plugins etc. If I ever need to reinstall the OS I would use these. However, in the last 20 years since I ditched Windows I have reinstalled Linux exactly two times: Once because I was an idiot and didn’t have a proper backup when I accidentally formatted the wrong HDD, and once when I switched from Xubuntu to Fedora in which case a package list wouldn’t have been usable.

I use Fedora (KDE) and game a lot. While I mostly like it, I’ve had some problems with it that were non-trivial to solve, so if you’re a Linux beginner I would not necessarily recommend it to you.

Perhaps Bazzite would be a good option? It’s based on Fedora and created with gaming in mind. I got it recommended here and installed it on a friend’s kid’s computer and he’s very happy with it so far.

There’s also Nobara which builds on Fedora to create a gaming-focused distro.

Paper GTK theme is a little bit similar, though with more vibrant colours ofc.

Tbh the majority of my FOSS contributions were to fix problems affecting me personally :) but I’m glad that they’re helping others too. This one is definitely the one that goes on my CV though hehe

Thanks for the kind words :)

In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)

For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.

The problem I’ve had with bad themes (e.g. black on black text/icons) seem to stem from apps using system/fallback colours, e.g. not defining it’s own list background because it assumes it’s always going to be white. But I can’t say if it happens more often with Gtk or Qt… Most recently it happened both with GIMP (Gtk) and FreeCAD (Qt)

Glad you enjoyed it!

As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was “can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?” so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn’t sure what they meant)

So fun watching someone try Linux as their first OS, none of the “Linux is difficult because I learned how to use Windows” or “Linux is bad because it’s not exactly like Windows” comments :D Roblox stopped working when the devs intentionally blocked Wine, but he just shrugged and said he didn’t play it that much anyway.

It’s a little heart breaking hearing him often ask which parts he could buy to get more FPS, because he’d need to replace half the computer to get a newer CPU and DDR4 RAM, since I suspect the DDR3 could be the current bottleneck. But other than that he’s very happy with the computer.

Glad to hear it’s working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it’s more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.

I think I tried to compile Gentoo about 20 years ago for some reason… Took many hours, and I don’t remember even getting it running. Later I tried dual booting Ubuntu, but ended up using Windows all the time since that’s where my games were. Started using Linux only (Xubuntu) some time around 2010.

I’m using Fedora KDE on my own PC, and it has been soft-bricked by updates multiple times, or by doing seemingly trivial things like choosing a theme from the built-in store. Seems quite unstable to me so it’s not something I would recommend to someone without the ability to repair their OS from a terminal.

Mint was my first thought as well. Haven’t used it myself but in the past I’ve heard that it’s supposed to be very user friendly and stable, though I’m not really up to date on Linux distros so I wanted to check if this was still was true (which is seems to be) and if there were any new options.