I mentioned this in my own top-level comment, but I just use different browsers for work and personal. Firefox for work, and my distro’s fork for personal. That keeps those nicely separate.

I use them instead of virtual desktops - each with a specific hotkey, and some with customized pinned apps.

I have …

General: Email, shopping, etc.

Gaming

Media

Two Work activities - a primary, and a secondary for when I need to compartmentalize different ongoing tasks

Other - for anything transitory that doesn’t fit in the others.

I realize this could largely be done with virtual desktops, though I don’t think you can have a different pinned app loadout for each?

The downside to setting things up this way is when I restart my computer, it seems to randomly decide which browser windows go in each activity. Also, with apps that I use across them (like Notion), I have to go hunting for which activity it opened in. To get around the issue of splitting Firefox across different profiles, I just use two browsers. Firefox for work, and Firedragon for personal stuff. They share the same external password manager, so it’s pretty seamless.

My reaction when I saw file explorer:

You do have to worry about some things though. I couldn’t say what those things are, but I have a hunch that temple_os users have some pretty unique worries.

I tried following some of the links to see, but the article isn’t clear as to where these tested packages are from. I’m assuming this is just the regular repos and not the AUR. I’d expect those to have a lower reproducible build rate, being that they’re kinda the wild west of packages.

I love that they specify that they’re not accepting pull requests.

This is really cool and I’m glad it exists for those stuck on Windows for certain games. That said, I’d still highly encourage anyone interested to give Linux a shot. I ran it as my daily driver for years about a decade ago, but finally switched back to Windows because I was spending too much time trying to get my games to work. I finally got fed up with Windows 11 and moved back last year. Holy hell has gaming on Linux come a long way with Proton. Everything I’ve thrown at it has worked flawlessly, and runs at least as fast as they did on Windows.

That said, I get that not everyone wants such a paradigm shift or to learn a new tech just to play their games. In the interim of not running Linux on my desktop, I still worked with Linux servers and used the Windows Linux Subsystem, so I get that I’m a little biased in how easy the switch was. You can find distros that are very beginner-friendly, however, or even specifically gaming-oriented.

But yeah, for those stuck on Windows due to games with pervasive anti-cheat or whatever, I get that AtlasOS could be a gamechanger.

Thank you for coming to me Ted Talk.