I recall playing the tutorial. Never went online. Dial up sucked. Interesting tidbit, if you shoot your drill instructor at the range you’re dropped into a prison cell at Fort Leavenworth. All you can do from that point is listen to somebody whistling and drag a tin cup across your cell bars.

For me it was partially Windows 10 placing suggested apps and ads in the UI. The other part was just curiosity. After some distro hopping I landed on Mint, then Fedora and finally Arch where I’ve been for about two or three years.

Windows phones were really solid, OS was very user friendly and stable. I personally didn’t feel the “app gap” that a lot of others complained about but, I use my phone for browsing, calls & text. If I recall correctly it was also ahead of the curve with PWAs, integrated them really well. And price/performance was good on some models like the Lumia 650.

I use Olauncher, pretty similar to Niagara and is FOSS. https://github.com/tanujnotes/Olauncher

I really wish, they would release a gaming oriented vertical mouse. High DPI sensor, good clicker switches, etc. Right now stuck with my Logitech lift that tops out at 4000 dpi and has mushy switches.

Just to be an absolute rebel; Solus

Chimera is the bees-knees. I’ve got my son’s computer configured with it and have had zero complaints, it just plays games and makes working roms/emulation so easy.

+1 for Nobara. All the optimizations make some significant differences in frametimes in my experience.

I’ll check it out, I do have something on hand though that I’m thinking of going with. As any self respecting “computer guy” I have waaay too many towers around the house and am right now planning to try to use an optiplex 5040 MT as a proxmox box running a pfsense VM and maybe some storage too.

EDIT: Fixed some typos/grammar

Nice, I’ve also thought of installing PFsense on it and using it as my home router. But that seems like kind of waste of its potential. It’s perfectly sized for that purpose though.