It’s Debian. Let us know when you have your first real issues with it, probably some time in 2037.

Never question the customers’ reasons for buying.

If you’re wanting to use software that’s most easily available on different distros, why not just use Distrobox? If you are just wanting to change the UI, why not just switch DEs? If you really need to be able to randomly switch away from/to system level differences, what are you doing? What would necessitate that?

Then I can’t get in, much less sit at a table.

I’m staying out. At that size, many of those are just terrifying, even if they are cool when much smaller than me.

‘I’ve been alive for like five minutes. WTF?’

He’s gotta be tired after spending all night running around not-killing-just-initiating-medical-bankruptcy-ing people.

If the big consideration is really sound, doing whatever is necessary to use larger, but slower (wide, high CFM per dB/RPM) and higher quality (fluid dynamic bearings) fans might serve the purpose regardless of other hardware. Some of them are rated to be <20dB, quieter than a whisper, and fluid bearings are supposed to be mostly impervious to the noise added by aging that hits a lot of fans.

Ubuntu’s not bad, though watch for out of date info when you look things up. It’s been around a long time.

One of the most useful things I’ve heard is that while there are a lot of little niche distros, it comes mostly down to three main types: Debian based, Fedora based, and Arch based. This crosses with the most popular desktop environments: KDE Plasma, LXQt, GNOME, XFCE. There are other options but it’s easier to not have to learn two things at once.

The desktop environment is the front end ‘look’n’feel’ of the system. Look at some screenshots to get the look. Some are more easily customizable/prettier (KDE more windows-y, GNOME more Mac-y) and some are lighter on resources if that’s a worry. (XFCE/LXQt)

The three main swaths of distros are more about the back end. Debian tends to be more stable, but not bleeding edge, so it might not handle hardware that just came out but is a bit less likely to break. Arch tends to be on the bleeding edge, with a lot of capabilities, but can give you some ‘learning experiences’ you might not be looking for. Fedora is in the middle.

Almost anything you can do on one, you can do on the others, so don’t worry too much about exclusives. It’s more about what comes as pre-installed conveniences/bloatware. (e.g. steam and lutris on gaming distros, networking tools as on Kaisen or Kali, or a kernel tweaked for lower latency audio in Ubuntu Studio meant for music production)

And the best part is you can try a whole bunch of them very easily if you have a spare good-sized thumb drive laying around. Ventoy is a tool for booting multiple systems from a single USB. Most major distros offer a ‘live usb’ file. Set up a ventoy USB drive. Download the ISOs for any distros that look cool, and then boot from the USB to try out any that interest you without even needing to do anything to your existing windows install.

because other places aren’t hiring at a similar salary and benefits just putting out ghost listings to scare their employees into accepting the crap they’re dealt

True, though having something to start with, even something wrong but that tells you where to start looking, is better than nothing.

Ubuntu, broadly, is usually a good first distro. Lots of info available, Canonical support if that’s your style, etc. Studio has some bits that are useful for the music side, but not some that are good for the gaming side. Others would be the opposite. Don’t worry too much. Pretty much anything you can do on one distro you can do on another. It’s mostly picking what comes pre-installed versus what you have to install.

Long term, don’t worry about picking and sticking. Just try a few and see what feels best to you and your hardware. If you have a spare USB drive you can empty, put ventoy on it and a handful of live ISOs. You can get a quick poke at each and see whether one feels right.

Switched over someone I know just recently. No headaches. Video card worked without issue from the jump and they’ve been playing Fallout 76 on it with more stability than they ever had with Windows. I put it on my own machine a few months back, and it was the same. Smooth. Either I got double lucky or you got unlucky.

Bazzite. It was the absolute smoothest spin-up I have had in my distro hopping, and has been nice and stable the whole time. KDE gives lots of pretty options. Gaming stuff and Nvidia stuff is ready to go out of the box. Unless you need to be bleeding edge, which it seems you don’t, you’ll be just fine.

Resplendent resplendens.

I literally just started trying out Ardour the other day. I’d say give it a try. All it’ll cost you is a little time.

Fucking knew it, Cassandra!

1 Dumbass = 299 792 458 m/s

Thanks, God. We’ll spend the next 3000 years obsessing over that.

I did not know rats were… aficionados of the struggle-snuggle.

Isn’t it snails where ‘male’ and ‘female’ is decided by who wins the slow-motion penis-knife fight?