I ended up with a device that shipped with it and replace it with Yunohost for a similarly beginner friendly experience that, so far, seems a whole lot more open.

Yup, using openVPN profiles. Proton VPN has quite clear instruction on how to do this on their website. Just do a search for “proton vpn openVPN profile Linux”

That was my guess. Just wanted someone that knows more than I do to confirm.

Thank you for your explanation and info. Will be setting this up later tonight.

Depending on the game and comfort with bash scripting you can roll your own mod managers. I don’t really play Minecraft anymore, but if I did it would be heavily modded. In an effort to avoid installing a client/launcher beyond the one I already use I just keep folders for mod lists and configs, and then have bash scripts with aliases to do all the necessary file moving to swap between mod packs.

This doesn’t really work for most other games, but for things that run natively on Linux can usually do the trick.

For things running through proton it’s a bit more involved, but I also found a lot of satisfaction in figuring out how to manually install mods within the proton prefix. Used to have to do that a lot to mod Skyrim when it first came out and I got it running through wine on a school issued MacBook.

Obsidian-Syncthing user here. I agree with what someone else said about no feedback from syncthing that it is or is not done updating files. Beyond that though, it’s a great tool that handles all my notes well.

Yeah probably true. I’ve got some hopes for the work being done on running Mac apps on Linux, even tried getting an old version of preview working a while back, with absolutely zero success. The tool I was trying had incredibly limited support for graphical apps.

It’s odd because I feel like it gets mixed up, very fairly due to its name, with MacOS “QuickLook”, which is the actual file previewing tool, giving a quick peek into a file by hitting ‘space’ with the file selected. Preview is essentially an image editor, but it doubles, or maybe triples, as PDF viewer/editor and scanner importer. The names are kinda silly tbh.

Very fair, I updated the original post

I’m already running Linux. I’m looking for an application that can run on Linux that roughly matches the feature set of MacOS Preview for image and PDF viewing and basic editing.

I use Sunshine/Moonlight, OBS, Discord screen share, all on Wayland and an AMD GPU. No issues, both on my old Arch install and now NixOS. Every now and then there’s some issues in the actual updates that get pushed to these things, but those aren’t usually specific to my system. For example just recently an update was pushed to the loopback module OBS uses for virtual camera, but the OBS update that utilized it hadn’t been pushed yet, so I got a crash.

Been meaning to swap to Niri, but I’m dreading trying to “convert” my Hyprland config to it.

I realize you’ve already made your switch, but I wanted to toss in my 2 cents. I had a very similar, though shorter term experience with Arch, and I still love it dearly, but over time some jank began to creep in around the edges. The time came to make some sort of change when I finally decided to wipe the windows boot drive I had in the system. I took the opportunity to upgrade the m.2 ssd and decided on NixOS for a handful of reasons, and it’s honestly been super refreshing. I feel even more in control of the stability of my system than any OS I’ve used before. If something is going wrong, it is most likely something I did in my config, or the config isn’t even valid and the system tells me exactly what is wrong before I even get to a point where I’m trying to boot into a broken system. I ignored a lot of the online recommendations to use flakes and home manager and whatever. Just a single text file with all the details of my system in it. I find it incredibly digestible compared to tracking down issues with Arch.

Anyway, I also have a Bazzite system, and like it. Sounds like you’ve found a nice new home!

I use Finamp with my Jellyfin library for simplicity’s sake. Other things probably have better UI and such, but it’s nice to just dump all my media in my Jellyfin folders and move on.

It really just comes down to what you know. Moving from MacOS (from OS9 through like 10.12 or something) to Windows made me feel like Windows was the bent spoon. So many small things that to this day infuriate me. Just a couple that really stuck with me even after ditching both for Linux.

• if you have highlighted text to select it, and hit the right arrow, where should your cursor end up? MacOS decided the cursor will be after the last character within the highlight. Windows places the cursor after the first character outside of the highlight. Why does this matter? The reason I noticed it was trying to edit file names quickly. I would like to right click, select rename from the context menu, which selects the text in the editing field, tap the right arrow once to move my cursor to the end of the string, and begin deleting whatever amount of text I need. If I try to do this on windows I end up deleting part of the file extension unless I tap an additional time. Not a huge deal but it legitimately messed with my muscle memory in just basic typing on windows.
• the other aspect of MacOS that really is far and above anything windows has is ‘Preview’. Not QuickLook, which is a detail view of a file triggered by tapping space with it selected. I mean ‘Preview’ the graphics viewer utility. It’s one of those pieces of software that “just works”. It can import from pretty much any scanner, print to any printer, do basic image editing, open and edit PDFs. It’s really a phenomenal piece of software that feels like such a basic set of features that should exist in a default install of a flagship OS. Even the best free option of anything similar on windows doesn’t hold a candle to it.

These are two VERY cherry picked examples, but I also feel they exemplify the “what you already know is more comfortable” dichotomy. Like having to find a functional PDF tool is kind of just “normal” for windows. Few windows only users I know actively miss the inclusion of that by default, and a whole industry has formed around the need for PDF editing, and yet humble Preview still puts Adobe Acrobat to absolute shame.

I really like LocalSend as well, but it’s very inconsistent with me. I think it has to do with one device being on a VPN, but I’m not totally sure. Basically I have some “one way” connections where one device can see and send to the one connected to a VPN but not the other way around. Is there some way I can specify LocalSend connections to ignore the VPN? I’m on NixOS and installed LocalSend in my user package declarations in my Nix config.

“Let’s invent metal boxes with wheels that follow lines on the ground automatically to get you places.”

“Oh, you mean like trains.”

“Ew, no. They’re nothing like trains, these are ‘self driving cars’. They’re fool proof!”

tesla hits someone in a dense fog because it doesn’t have lidar

Queue surprised pikachu.

Yeah when I went down a terminal config rabbit hole I landed on JetBrains Mono with all the nerd font symbols. Can’t really provide a particular reason I like it over many other fonts, but I just do.

I use Sunshine with the Moonlight client for Remote Desktop. With my computer running Tailscale I can connect to it from anywhere. It’s designed for game streaming on a local network, but tweak the bandwidth settings down and it works a treat for remote work.

I use Tailscale for the virtual LAN setup