All of them are beautiful, but I like the middle-left one the most

I would donate if they accepted Monero

2023, the year of Big Tech companies restricting their users in every single possible way. But why is 2023 not the year of users finally waking up and switching away from this proprietary garbage?

Yeah, why not?

KDE Plasma 6

Well, based Terry absolutely makes me want to move to TempleOS

On a separate note, I still don’t understand how trackpoints on HP laptops work. There’s no scroll button, how the fuck am I supposed to use this piece of shit if I can’t scroll??? The thing that is meant to replace the mouse/trackpad for ease of use and ergonomics literally forces me to use a mouse or a trackpad. This doesn’t make any fucking sense!!!

Exactly

What caused you to get into it

The year was 2002. I was told about Gentoo Linux by a college. I saw it as a new, shiny toy and immediately wanted to try it out. I realized that it was better than Windows, so I stuck with it. (Not with Gentoo, but with Linux. I still use Gentoo sometimes today, but I also tried out many many other distros throughout the time and I don’t use Gentoo exclusively nowadays.)

are you an evangel

Yes, I believe that Linux is far superior to Windows and I tell people about it

are you obsessed?

Absolutely

Exactly

That’s nothing new. These war criminals have been doing this since the very beginning of their existance.

They are war criminals that deserve to be punished

That’s nothing new. The Israeli government solely consists of war criminals and it was all planned by them.

My desktop is running a nearly 10 year old install.

Oh wow! That’s truly impressive.

Another thing that helped me: Get comfortable in the Terminal. Obviously you have to learn some commands and how they work, but just configure your shell and commonly used CLI tools. It makes the experience so much more pleasant. Install a nice shell prompt, set up some aliases for frequently used commands, learn the basics of shell scripting and write your own useful little scripts for things you often have to do, maybe start using Vim and configure it the way you like it. Also explore other shells. Bash is the default shell, but there are better options like zsh or fish. You can watch this video to get some inspiration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KKxhf50FIPI. This is actually pretty close to my shell setup. If you want to start customizing bash, check this out: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3W7Ky_aaaY.

To continue learning, maybe subscribe to some Linux-oriented YouTube channels. DistroTube makes great videos about Linux, tiling window managers, how to use various commands, how to configure your shell environment, etc. He also reviews many Linux distros or explains why free software is important. If you search any Linux-related topic on YouTube, chances are that DT already made a great video about it.

openSUSE is rather small, not everything is packaged for it. Arch is the best in terms of software availability, thanks to the AUR.

The only distro that even comes close is NixOS, but I really wouldn’t recommend it for beginners. You can explore it in a VM though or maybe at some point actually try it out. It’s very very different than other distros though.

I thought a more advanced distro, that is still stable, would be good overall. However, not getting new software for a long time sounds quite annoying.

Arch is actually not as bad as many say. It’s pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues. It gives you the benefits that you can basically find any package in the AUR and everything is up-to-date. Try it out, if you don’t like it, you can still switch to something else.

I’m wanting to challenge myself to get much better with Linux, partitioning, CLI, CLI tools

The best way to learn the CLI is to use it. Try not to use your graphical file manager for a while and only interact with the file system through the terminal, that teaches you a lot.

I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general?

Yes.

I always hear good things about the Arch Wiki.

It is truly fantastic.

Is there any other tips someone can give me, to sharpen my Linux skills?

Use the system, don’t be shy, try different things out. If you are scared that you might break something, try it out in a VM. Break your VM and try to fix it. That teaches you a lot.

I was even considering trying out Gentoo on my X220, but the compiling times sound painful.

I would not recommend that, updating packages will take ages, it’s not a great experience.

I’d rather avoid a Linux distro that’s implementing something like ads or telemetry…if that’s even a thing that’s happening?

Fedora has some telemetry, but as far as I know, you can turn it off during the installation. Some desktop environments like KDE Plasma also have options for telemetry but it’s disabled by default. If you want it, you manually have to enable it in the settings.

Should I avoid OpenSUSE

Some software might not be available on openSUSE

or KDE Plasma

Not really, Plasma has a shitload of features and customization options, if many options tend to overwhelm you, you might be better of with a different desktop environment, if you are fine with customization options, Plasma is great for you.

Are there any ‘10 things to do first when installing Linux for the first time’ recommendations?

Since you said that you want to install openSUSE, I recommend this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ajVqJ1nl9bM

Mission Control looks pretty nice, it tries to resemble the Windows Task Manager really closely so it’s great if you are switching from Windows

What init system do you use on your Linux distro?