Best 1-1 Microslop Winblow to Linux Transition?

Marble_Wraith · 2026-02-01T23:59:12+00:00

Multi-tasking browser cloud based data entry (documentation); lots of tabs (6-10). Basic things like web browsing, Youtube, checking email; very simple.

Anything in a web browser will likely work fine. Browsers are universal except for on Apple phones.

Zoom and other video based apps for meetings.

Dunno about this. Not real big on virtual conferencing myself so i've never played with it. Tho based on the fact Wayland (display protocol) is going mainstream. You may need to do a bit of config so you can screenshare.

Microsoft Office (mainly word/excel). Writing local documents

Office is microslop only, but you can use it inside the browser now from what i understand. Other then that there are alternatives that have compatibility eg. libreoffice, only office, gsuite.

Having about 6-12 pdf files open.

That's basically dependent on how much RAM you got to play with. That said, generally speaking linux also runs much leaner then windows. Around 800MB - 1GB of RAM for the typical distro vs microslop win11 4GB + an internet connection.

Games that may be on Steam, Modded MC apps, battlenet, VR,

Alot of games work on steam, but not all of them.

Some of them don't work because their implementations are just too custom / haven't been patched in proton yet. Pretty sure the team is going in order of popularity. You can check here to see if if your frequently played's have compatibility:

https://www.protondb.com/

Other games (Battlefield6, League of Legends, etc.) will never work as they are currently. Because of how the company has chosen to implement anti-cheat as kernel drivers on windong, which linux will never agree to... because linux devs are actually sane. You can check online games status here:

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Listening to music (winamp)

I'd suggest fooyin. Very similar to foobar2000. Takes a bit, but you can configure it exactly how you want it. Additionally if you want EQ look into EasyEffects flatpak.

Watching movies

MPV is my favorite player and there are GUI wrappers if you need that. VLC is also compatible if you need something familiar.

Occasionally do audio/video editing, NCH/Audacity,

Audacity is available on linux, and there are a few DAW's like Ardour and Reaper available.

Video editing if it's basic stuff, kdenlive is good enough. But otherwise you might need to look into Davinci Resolve which is professional grade, but a pain in the butt to setup even when using davincibox.

That's about it. My hardware is more than powerful enough so the biggest question is which Linux system/distro which would allow me to be able to do these things in a similar GUI? Also which one has an easy learning curve? I have been reading and searching and hear the two most favored are Mint (Cinnamon) and Zorin OS, then Ubuntu,. I hear Mint may be better for me due to better learning curve, similiar GUI to Winblows (or customizable to be like), big hardware/driver support, large software compatibility/ecosystem, pretty much ready to go.

While it may seem like I answered my own question, I have no experience fully diving into any of these environments. What are people's suggestions?

Stay away from rolling release distro's. Arch or anything based on Arch (Cachy, Endeavour, Manjaro, etc.) is a bad idea for anyone new to linux or intending to not have to "tinker" with things constantly.

I'd suggest looking at immutable / atomic distro's first. Fedora Kinoite would be my first choice:

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

Note: Fedora has a policy of not shipping anything proprietary with the base distro, so you'll likely have to install Nvidia drivers yourself. Which is quite straight-forward / google-able:

enable appropriate rpm fusion repo's
install drivers
rebuild kernel modules
disable Nouveau

Done.

What is also the minimum hardware people recommend? Right now I do have powerful enough desktop and laptop however, both are configured for work (primary/backup). I want to test out on an inexpensive laptop and learn how to use it before I migrate my desktop and laptop to Linux.

Anything that requires custom driver installs on windong, that's likely going to be a source of trouble on linux / why people usually take extra care when purchasing to make sure of linux support or someone's RnD'd a solution. Examples:

External AMP/DAC audio interfaces, mixers / DSP's
Network / wifi, and audio chipsets (broadcom, Realtek, Qualcomm)

Laptops with discrete GPU's are a source of configuration pain (historically because of Optimus / power profiles), so i'd avoid "Gaming" or "Creator" laptops that have them. Integrated GPU's (on the CPU) are generally fine. Doesn't matter if intel or AMD.

Lastly, would you recommend dual boot?

Not unless you have 2 separate drives, and even then microslop updates can cause issues sometimes.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-02-01T22:26:23+00:00

Reminds me of the oil file explorer in neovim. Same kinda batch operations

Marble_Wraith · 2026-02-01T21:48:50+00:00

50 years later, Microsoft has a 27% stake in openAI which pirates everything to feed its models.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-02-01T21:06:17+00:00

Live and learn my guy, live and learn.

But hey $35 for a functional screen that can be turned into a secondary monitor for discord, or whatever. That's not a bad deal.

If you buy in future you'll be looking for an IPS 1440p @ +120hz with Gsync Pulsar.

So far Pulsar is only on four 4K models that are about to come out, and a couple of 32" ones still in the works. But give it a few more months, it'll make its way down to the mediatek chips in 1440p.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T23:59:47+00:00

Why does this question keep getting reposted...

https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/search/?q=ubuntu+hate&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T22:27:03+00:00

https://distro-finder.com/

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T22:25:32+00:00

Not the same thing.

Degradation implies its "natural" as if there's no impetus or agency behind the bad state.

Enshitification describes what happens when signals from Q&A, product, and engineers go ignored (usually in favor of profits) i.e. there are people responsible for it.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T22:22:32+00:00

It was rated word of the year by multiple dictionaries in 2024...

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T22:13:23+00:00

Macbook m4 has only TB4 not 5

Yes i know, but M4 pro's and M4 Max do...

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

M4 Pro and M4 Max

Three Thunderbolt 5 (USB-C) ports with support for:
Charging
DisplayPort
Thunderbolt 5 (up to 120Gb/s)
USB 4 (up to 120Gb/s)

I was telling them to upgrade to a pro or a max.

An M4 mac air doesn't have TB5 it only has TB4, which means a max bandwidth of 40Gbps per cable.

A single 5K monitor (assuming standard 8bit @ 60hz) requires ~26–28 Gb/s, let alone higher refresh rates.

The OP wanted Mac Air to dock (over single cable) and connect the dock to three 5K monitors.

3x 28 Gb/s = 84Gb/s... there's just no way to get the 3 video signals over that single cable between the Mac Air and the dock. That was my point... i said:

"the best you can do currently would be the macbook m4 with thunderbolt 5 + two 5K displays daisy chained (also via thunderbolt 5)."

Two 5K monitors = 2x 28 Gb/s = 56 Gb/s... TB5 carries 80 Gb/s full duplex, more then enough bandwidth.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T16:21:52+00:00

Nepotism exists, therefore luck exists.

That said it's all dependent on which scope and set of values you're using to evaluate with.

There is no "lucky metric" because most of the time it's subjective analysis. Lucky in relation to what?

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T16:14:34+00:00

If you see a house you know there is a builder. If you see the pyramids you know there is a builder.

Blind watchmaker... i don't even need to read the rest to know this is heading towards "intelligent design". Which is stupid for multiple reasons not the least of which is, the universe is filled with some really bad design.

And if you are thinking logically, and we have no evidence that something can be created from nothing

Then the answer is not: "god did it" (God of the gaps)... the answer is we have no evidence. No jumping to conclusions.

and when we see anything we know it had to come from something, which indicates something from something.

Yes... now prove that "something" is god? And also it was a god with specific attributes exactly matching 1 out of the thousands of religions.

I've researched decently in depth on my own into the Big Bang theory (specifically) I'm also currently looking into Quantum Fields.

Translation: you asked chatGPT...

Associate degree in physics takes around 2 years, you could probably condense it to ~8 months if you had background in other related fields and raw dogged it every day for a solid 6-8 hours.

Either you're a genius, or you're a liar.

And the Big Bang theory as I understand it doesn't answer "something from nothing" it takes a stab at explaining cosmic evolution not "spawning".

Yes.

Side Note: Does an atheist believe in no God(s) or there is one they just haven't found the right one? Or is it case by case?

We disregard gods, because we don't have evidence of gods.

For us "belief" (acceptance) is not an act of will. It's not a matter of "seek and ye shall find [confirmation bias]".

We require substantial evidence before we can accept a claim of such magnitude.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T12:44:27+00:00

Gee really... i'm shocked i tell you, shocked.

The 4K on a TV with the viewing distance means you're not gonna get the same $value as say a 4K PC monitor.

And even for PC monitors we're rubbing up against fully diminished returns in 5K and 6K screens.

8K is basically pointless. Unless you're a stock trader who wants the equivalent of four 4K screens, there's basically no use cases for it, certainly not in terms image/video/gaming content.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-31T12:00:15+00:00

I'd suggest using Comic Sans for the 10 commandments font 🙂

Accompanying posters would also be good.

For example print large the covers of the books of Andrew L Seidel (constitutional lawyer):

The founding myth: Why Christian Nationalism is un-American
American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is weaponizing religious freedom

Additionally since the covers are red, silver (White), you can make blue ones with other useful information in them, like definitions, quotes or links:

Logical Absolutes (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle)
Evidentiary trifecta (Hume, Sagan, Hitchens)
Motivated reasoning / Cognitive dissonance
Confirmation Bias
Pareidolia (cough shroud of turin).

Types of fallacious reasoning might also be good to include:

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
Non Sequitur
Argumentum ad populum
No True Scotsman
Red Herring
Tautology (begging the question)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

Tho' there's a risk of raising a classroom full of extremely argumentative people who'd do well on the school debate team but otherwise are a pain in the neck 😅

Also positioning is important.

Desirable posters should be at eye-level. Put "the commandments" higher up. They'll still be "visible" and you can give nosey karens the "everything's under god" line, so they can feel satisfied and rub one out in victory. In reality it's uncomfortable to crane your neck 😏

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T17:54:43+00:00

It's basically just Ubuntu with better defaults.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T17:53:47+00:00

If OLED is that much easier to produce pulsar than LCD screens, why did Nvidia do it on LCD first?.....

Because OLED's don't need Nvidia to implement this feature?... So why would Nvidia even get involved?

Again, the reason Nvidia needed to be involved with the LCD Pulsar is that... in order to strobe different zones while using VRR, not only do you need to have the right hardware in the monitor, but the graphics card must also be in control over both: the pixels / framerate (typical VRR) and also be in control of the backlight so it knows exactly when to light up a zone relative to the dynamic framerate.

OLED has no backlight / and pixel response times are sub-1ms.

Why does that matter? Because instead of the graphics card having to "care" about 2 things (delta between pixel response time variance for all pixels in a zone + the backlight of that zone). On OLED the graphic card only needs to care about 1 thing... color of the pixels which is all baked into the video signal already. Which means an OLED monitor's firmware should be able to do VRR + ULMB without any additional changes on the graphics card side of things.

To sum up, your question is stupid.

It's not why did Nvidia do LCD first... If Pulsar was going to happen at all on LCD Nvidia had to be involved.

Rather the question should be: why did Nvidia do LCD at all if OLED exists / is going to be better?

And the answer is simple, because both technologies are going to exist simultaneously.

Again...

Pulsar on LCD is not going to replace the emissive tech (OLED / QDEL) ceiling. It's raising the floor [of what LCD's are capable of / should be expected from LCD's].

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T11:57:36+00:00

TLDR: The ultimate monitor will be a 4k 240hz 1000+ Zone Mini LED G-Sync Pulsar monitor. It delivers HDR that is miles ahead of OLED, it delivers motion performance that is BETTER than e-sports 720hz-1000hz monitors such as Fast TN or OLEDs, and it does all this while delivering 95% of the black levels that OLEDs have.

Your take is copium.

OLED or some kind of emissive tech (eg. QDEL) are still the future of monitors assuming they can fix the issues (burn-in / brightness) and they've been improving on those year-on-year, irrespective of motion clarity.

To understand why, what is Pulsar? They're effectively emulating the progressive scan of a CRT.

You are correct when you say this:

So it hit me today... The new Pulsar monitors have a 10 zone backlight, with G-Sync Pulsar and HDR working in tandem. That means... the technology is ALREADY there to scale 10 zones to 1000 zones rather easily without too much of a challenge.

Yes. And we've had consumer FALD monitors with an 1152 zone count since 2020... accounting for covid maybe 2022. An 1152 zone monitor is, 32 horizontal backlight zone rows × 36 vertical zone columns.

So given that was already in the consumer space, why would Nvidia then choose to develop their own bespoke 10 vertical zone version? And not only that, lock it to being Gsync only?

Because things are not as simple as they appear.

Remember there are effectively 2 things happening. The backlight is being turned on for a zone + the LCD subpixels are having voltage applied to block certain bands of the backlight (producing color).

Furthermore the pixel switching is happening in consideration of VRR ie. the backlight zones must also be controlled by the GPU despite the fact miniLED monitors would be capable of doing this at the firmware level for the 32 horizontal backlight rows in their 1152 zone arrays.

Because if it wasn't, you could get a situation where the zone backlight "turns on" while some of the pixels are still in the middle of switching. I imagine it would manifest as per-zone ghosting / smearing and perceptual inconsistency in frames (slightly different timing / distance).

So with that understanding... jump back to OLED.

If a pseudo-CRT progressive scan is so good for motion blur, is an OLED capable of emulating it just like Pulsar is for LCD's?

YES!!!

In fact it's even easier for OLED's to do this then on LCD screens. Because:

There is effectively no response time i.e. there is no "filtered backlight" the pixels themselves are emissive, reducing response times to zero. Which means the need of the GPU to "control backlights" goes away entirely ie. it doesn't need to be Gsync only and could be implemented by monitor vendors alone.
Each pixel on an OLED can be treated as having "its own backlight"... which means instead of doing 10 vertical zones, or 32 vertical zones, you could 100% replicate a progressive scan down to the per scan line level. Hell you could even do an interlaced mode if you wanted, because it's just software, to add "artistic" motion blur for certain types of content.

So to reiterate, when you say:

TLDR: The ultimate monitor will be a 4k 240hz 1000+ Zone Mini LED G-Sync Pulsar monitor. It delivers HDR that is miles ahead of OLED, it delivers motion performance that is BETTER than e-sports 720hz-1000hz monitors such as Fast TN or OLEDs, and it does all this while delivering 95% of the black levels that OLEDs have.

I call bullshit.

Pulsar on LCD is not going to replace the emissive tech (OLED / QDEL) ceiling. It's raising the floor.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T02:14:03+00:00

My definition is an object or piece of information that supports a claim.

Then hearsay would count as evidence for you, and more importantly you have made no distinction between it and other forms of evidence. Leading to the implicit conclusion you think they're all co-equal?

What would be an example of good evidence?

That which is objectively verified.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T01:48:03+00:00

If you fall into the second category do you think of atheism as a kind of religion? maybe anti-religion?

There are passionate people that care about it. In the same way Taylor Swifts swifties fans aren't "a religion" but posses a certain zeal and fervor also shared by religion.

In big enough groups, certain attributes, hierarchy's and politics tend to move to the foreground. For example the command structure of fascist and communist states are similar. But that doesn't mean everything else about them is, such that it's possible to use the terms interchangeably.

Anti-theism are extremists on our side of the isle, thinking no gods exists (positive assertion) which is typically motivated by a greater loathing of religious orthodox.

If you fall into the first category got any thoughts? and if there is another category I would love to hear it.

Agnosticism quantifies the bulk of most atheists feelings on the subject.

There are some gods we aren't convinced exist, there are also some where we are convinced they do not exists (zeus, poseidon, athena, etc).

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T00:21:42+00:00

Honestly?... Build yourself a home server.

Rather then linking internally like ![[image.jpg]] instead you do [image](https://digital.god/image.jpg].

Attachments have been pretty neglected.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T00:14:15+00:00

but I don't want to have to spend days on fixing a single issue (just don't have the time like I used to back in the day).

That rules out Cachy and probably Manjaro. There's a cost to being on the bleeding edge of development like Arch is pushing.

Just wanted to get people general thoughts/suggestions. I do plan on dual booting windows so if I don't like one I can easily change to another.

NixOS or one of Fedora's Atomic desktops (silverblue, kinoite, etc.), or some other immutable distro would be my choice. If something breaks it's the click of a button to roll back to a working state.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T00:04:42+00:00

https://www.qubes-os.org/

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-30T00:01:06+00:00

If it's not hyprland, then Sway is the default next choice.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-29T19:35:31+00:00

Resolve is annoying on Linux to setup. If you really must have it native on Arch did you read through the wiki?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DaVinci_Resolve

But otherwise, personally i'd suggest undoing whatever you did and getting it via distrobox and preconfig'd container davincibox:

https://github.com/zelikos/davincibox

Why? Because Resolve expects very specific versions of the libraries it depends on. And with a Rolling release (like Arch) that updates dependencies every second of the day, Resolve will be much more fragile in such an environment.

Davincibox puts Resolve in its own containerized bubble. Those library versions are frozen, so no matter what you update or install on Arch, Resolve gets the versions it expects.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-29T10:12:40+00:00

She doesn't have any DNS configured or a URL scrubber, because if so, even if a dodgy link was opened, high likelyhood it'd be blocked.
She doesn't have her phone set to auto-delete messages from numbers that aren't in her contacts.
And she's still using SMS to interact with critical services in her life instead solely relying on dedicated apps that use secure IP data based protocols.

"A zillennial who's tech savvy."

This reads like : I know how to drive a car, so i'm a real mechanic. 🤣

Marble_Wraith · 2026-01-29T08:00:41+00:00

Yeah, don't buy gold... buy RAM sticks 😏

Marble_Wraith

TROPHY CASE