I think Gen X went from “invisible” to “the enemy” in a lot of folks’ minds when exit polling showed that they broke for Trump in 2024 by a greater margin than any other age group. Before that point most millennials just knew them as their cool older cousins, whose childhood was shrouded in a warm haze of half-remembered, half-imagined 80s nostalgia.

Madison’s thread detailing the whole thing is available here if you want to refresh your memory, but the TLDR is that, at least as of 2-3 years ago, LTT maintained a sweatshop production pace, was a hostile workplace in several dimensions, and executed a rugpull on Madison in terms of permitting and supporting her independent efforts in a way that created a practically textbook claim of promissory estoppel.

In the wake of the blowup, Linus and LTT more generally did make a lot of appropriately sorrowful noises and promised to do better, and I suppose it’s possible that they have done so, but I don’t really consume their content and TBH haven’t bothered to check.

Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.

I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.

I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.