The home/family PC and gaming mix - what to do?

[pierrot]

Hijacking this thread a little bit since it's mostly related to my earlier post.
The latest update to Windows 11 pushed me into full readiness to move everything over to Linux (while still just keeping Windows 11 as a backup boot partition on my laptop for the odd case where I might actually need it).

Getting a bunch of installations ready on a five-pack of flash drives I picked up last month; Both live boot and installer. I've decided to finally put Fedora on my main machine. That one's easy. The main thing I have the laptop for is work related mobility, so I was looking into Scientific Linux a little bit, only to find out that it seems like Fedora has some alternate distributions for Science, Robotics, and Astronomy (which I guess makes sense when I remember we had Red Hat on a bunch of computers in my program's computer labs at my university). The Fedora Science distro sounds like it has a Matlab compatible high level language with it that I'm not familiar with. I generally use Julia for design/development verification when I don't have access to a Matlab license. I'm sure I could use Julia still, but I'm kind of curious about the pre-installed tool and how much it does or does not function like Matlab.

The Fedora Robotics distro is interesting to me, just because I've done some robotics and controls designs in the past (mainly for coursework), but it kind of sounds like it's targeted more toward specific robot arm types of applications. I've also always loved Astronomy (more so Astrophysics and Cosmology) so the Fedora Astronomy distro is really interesting to me, but I imagine it's more intended for data recording and analysis with actual observatory telescopes. I'm probably going to see about making some live boot USBs for those two to try them out, but it'll likely be either Scientific Linux or Fedora Science that ends up on my laptop as my primary OS there, going forward.

I'm also intending to make a Kali and a Tails live boot USB for getting more familiar with pen-testing and some insurance, respectively. At some point before too long, I was also looking at picking up a Google Pixel and throwing GrapheneOS on it.

I'm not paranoid, you're paranoid--

EDIT: Also, as an aside, it is like nails on a chalkboard every time I hear people pronounce "GNU" or "GNOME" without making the 'G' silent. It's even worse to me than hearing ".gif" pronounced in a way that doesn't evoke the thought of peanut butter.

EDIT: I realized not long after posting this that Scientific Linux is actually just a Red Hat distro with the proprietary bits pulled out of it. So that sounds interesting. I guess if Fedora Science has SELinux by defautl (which I think it does), I probably may as well just go with that, but Scientific Linux is supposedly damn close to enterprise Linux. Anyway, it seems like I'm ultimately just splitting hairs, and pretty much looking at changing everything to Red Hat based distros.

[o.pwuaioc]

Welcome to the Fedora club! After spending years in alternative distributions, I returned to Fedora around 2016 and never looked elsewhere afterwards.

Getting a bunch of installations ready on a five-pack of flash drives I picked up last month; Both live boot and installer. I've decided to finally put Fedora on my main machine. That one's easy. The main thing I have the laptop for is work related mobility, so I was looking into Scientific Linux a little bit, only to find out that it seems like Fedora has some alternate distributions for Science, Robotics, and Astronomy (which I guess makes sense when I remember we had Red Hat on a bunch of computers in my program's computer labs at my university). The Fedora Science distro sounds like it has a Matlab compatible high level language with it that I'm not familiar with. I generally use Julia for design/development verification when I don't have access to a Matlab license. I'm sure I could use Julia still, but I'm kind of curious about the pre-installed tool and how much it does or does not function like Matlab.

Why not just install default Fedora and only then install the extra tools that you need? Besides a couple oddities with some dev packages, it's usually pretty straightforward, and I've had virtually no problems with installing packages that come default in other spins.

EDIT: Also, as an aside, it is like nails on a chalkboard every time I hear people pronounce "GNU" or "GNOME" without making the 'G' silent. It's even worse to me than hearing ".gif" pronounced in a way that doesn't evoke the thought of peanut butter.

The key is only reading docs, posts, etc., and avoiding videos where people actually (ugh) speak.

[o.pwuaioc]

Knowing you Maru, if you try a Linux distro you're going to run into just enough things that annoy you that you'll regret it.

Imagine thinking Linux is still a difficult or annoying thing in 2025...

[Ziggy]

The latest update to Windows 11 pushed me into full readiness to move everything over to Linux

Why, what was in that update? Are you talking about the one that screenshots your computer to the cloud every few minutes? Because that one super irks me. I wonder how that flies for a computer in a medical environment, that might have sensitive info on the screen protected by federal law. Is the cloud HIPAA compliant?

Imagine thinking Linux is still a difficult or annoying thing in 2025...

I'm deliberating what I should do for my parents. They very much like using a desktop computer. Their current one has Windows 10 and the hardware doesn't officially support 11. I'm wondering if I should mess with 11, or move them to Linux. They really only use a web browser, so it would make no difference. I know that there's good support for Brother printers (which is what they have). But I'd have to double check that their new Epson scanner would work, which they use on the rare occasion.

[marurun]

Knowing you Maru, if you try a Linux distro you're going to run into just enough things that annoy you that you'll regret it.

Imagine thinking Linux is still a difficult or annoying thing in 2025...

Linux isn’t difficult any more. But I can still be annoying. Mostly in hardware support for peripherals at the edges and in adjusting old habits steeped in the two major desktop players.

[pierrot]

Welcome to the Fedora club! After spending years in alternative distributions, I returned to Fedora around 2016 and never looked elsewhere afterwards.

Why not just install default Fedora and only then install the extra tools that you need? Besides a couple oddities with some dev packages, it's usually pretty straightforward, and I've had virtually no problems with installing packages that come default in other spins.

The key is only reading docs, posts, etc., and avoiding videos where people actually (ugh) speak.

- Nice! Fedoras for everyone!

- So-- true. lol Partly it's out of curiosity. I'm kind of just wondering what level of gimmick the Fedora ones are on a scale from unique/useful to Hannah Montana Linux. For Scientific Linux, it's a little bit more that it sounds like it might be even closer to Enterprise Linux than Fedora, which might be kind of nice for something I use more in a work capacity. That and being implemented by CERN for a number of field applications make me feel like it would be the most stable Linux outside of Enterprise, but I probably need to do some more research. It also kind of sounded like it might have somewhat better virtualization tools built in.

Anyway, you're right. Probably no matter what, I would be installing Julia, LTSpice, KiCad, ArduinoIDE, and maybe a couple other specialty IDEs and tools without much need for preconfigured tools. I still just want to check them out, anyway, which is why with the Fedoras I was planning to make live USBs to start with.

- lol, good point. Now I sort of have the issue of sometimes reading them without the silent 'g' from hearing it that way too much, though.

Imagine thinking Linux is still a difficult or annoying thing in 2025...

I was seeing that even Arch Linux is streamlined to the point of just needing to go through a quick list of configuration options, and blamo. Part of me was kind of thinking of preconfiguring with Arch Linux before installing Fedora (which I thought it sounded like people do, but I'm not really sure how exactly to go about doing it yet).

Why, what was in that update? Are you talking about the one that screenshots your computer to the cloud every few minutes? Because that one super irks me. I wonder how that flies for a computer in a medical environment, that might have sensitive info on the screen protected by federal law. Is the cloud HIPAA compliant?

Wow, I don't use the cloud, but that would super piss me off if I did. No, I just started getting even more worthless notification popups from the kernel. I have copilot turned off, and whatever, but I've never really liked the Windows environment to begin with, and Windows 11 just makes my skin crawl.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, I forget what it was called, but it broke recently in news feeds (don't know if it's new or what). It screenshots your computer every 5 minutes or something like that, "so you can remember what you were doing." But in terms of upgrading to 11 when support for 10 ends, it made me go from "ugh, alright" to "I'm gonna think about this some more."

[Limewater]

I'm sure I could use Julia still, but I'm kind of curious about the pre-installed tool and how much it does or does not function like Matlab.

Super late on this, but I'm pretty sure you're talking about Octave.

I haven't used it in more than fifteen years, but it worked okay then. The real problem is that the main power of Matlab is the toolboxes that you pay for, and Octave at the time didn't really have a ton of replacements.

But the real answer is to move to Python. I did that years ago. Lots of great, free modules out there. The learning curve is very gentle. It's slow, but so is Matlab.

I use Python in my professional career every day now and don't really miss Matlab.

[pierrot]

Super late on this, but I'm pretty sure you're talking about Octave.

Actually kind of relevant for me, because although I never looked into Octave at all, I've been doing some study of the Julia documentation lately to really get a deeper understanding of using as a programming platform, instead of just as the makeshift calculator I learned to use MATLAB as. Very true about the toolboxes; I don't think there are really any substitutes for the DSP or controls toolboxes I've used in MATLAB, but good to know that Python can replicate a lot of it.

I've parsed some Python scripts in the past for code reuse and stuff, and I know 3blue1brown uses it for his math visualization workflow, but I've just not gotten around to really learning it past a couple of the really basic syntax bulletpoints.

One goal I kind of have for myself this year is to really add a lot of software skills with getting more deeply familiar with the Julia codebase, brushing up on C in conjunction with some algorithms and data structures certification, and I would also like to learn Rust. If I could get Python on the pile too, that would be cool, but the others are my priority for now.

[pierrot]

Updated response to the actual OP:

Did you end up settling on something for a Mac Mini/Laptop configuration, maru?

The other day Valve finally released their modern iteration of SteamOS for regular use outside of Steamdeck. Some of the update notes include improvements to the desktop mode, and one improvement was the addition of an 80% charge limit for overcharge protection (there seemed to already be some minor form of hardware implementation for this, but now there's some additional software support). That one in particular was making me think about the steam deck dock. It's not something I would ever use, because I have a desktop with better specs than the deck, but if I were starting from a place of nothing for computers, the Deck is actually a perfectly usable desktop computer once docked, on top of a portable gaming device, for anyone who's all right with mixing gaming with other regular personal computing.

The general release of SteamOS now means that it can be installed on other higher spec handheld devices, too. So there's a lot more options, and some pretty good flexibility with having potentially portable gaming systems that can double as personal computers.