Mozilla was not controlled by Google.

Not sure if this is meant here, but shockingly many people believe that “funding” something equals to “controlling” it.

But make backups…

You have to think in terms of bottleneck. If you have a really heavy desktop environment or operating system, then it can (and will) slow down older and weak computers. For those, it makes sense to install some special prepared environments, so it does not slow them down. If you have a modern and fast computer with plenty of resources, then it won’t make a difference which you install.

In example, you have 16gb RAM, but your system uses only 4gb. Switching to a system that uses only 2gb won’t get you any benefit, you have plenty of room that is unused. And for all other daily operations in the Window environment, lets say opening and closing windows with some effects and transparency, would lets say for fun require 1ghz of CPU to calculate without slowing the operation down. If you have a modern multicore CPU with 5ghz, then you don’t win anything by installing a desktop environment or operating system that makes use of only 0.5ghz.

No doubt about ntsync being superior and better than the hacky solutions of current implementation. My point is only about the performance gains, which can be misleading to some people if they do not pay attention. I’m not saying anyone was “false advertising” here, just making clear its compared against the base WINE version and not Proton.

I’m still curious and want to see how much of a performance difference in a real Steam environment will be.

The big boost for gaming is only relevant if you do not use Proton. While there might be some boost for selected games, in general the new Kernel 6.14 shouldn’t make much of a difference for Steam gamers using Proton. Because Proton already got some alternative to NTSync mechanism, which improved some titles already.

The benchmarks presented with huge %-boosts and improvements are compared to previous WINE version, which do not have some of the alternative optimizations from Proton. Therefore I would be a bit cautious, if you already play on Steam using Proton.

Install the fish shell, it makes using the terminal waaay easier, out of the box.

Not a good idea if the goal is to learn more about Linux. Fish is not compatible to and is different to Bash in some ways, that it would be hard once not using Fish. Also getting help or sharing scripts with others will be problematic, when having a problem and researching it. For someone coming in to Linux and wanting to learn about it, I highly recommend to learn about Bash first and use it at least for months before even thinking about a custom shell. I used Fish too (and I miss some features), so its not like I wouldn’t know what it is.

Install Alpaca flatpak, and use tinyllama or bigger LLM models.

Alpaca is nice. GPT4All is also another one (and one that I prefer). Either way, both are good. But again like previous point, I do not recommend to install and use Ai modesl (LLMs) to learn about Linux and to get used to it. Especially the smaller models often hallucinate and lie with false claims. If you don’t know it better and are currently learning, this could be a problem. I highly discourage from installing and learning with an Ai model alongside when you are new to a topic like Linux. Its also not like there wouldn’t be enough good material out there anyway.

That linked reply doesn’t explain anything. It just says “bro trust him”. Just because you and the AUR maintainer says its trustful, does not make it clear whats behind the binary blobs. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, if we can’t verify. In my opinion, its absurd calling others absurd for not trusting the word of others.

I used Ventoy (its still on my USB stick). Its actually a pretty cool concept. Normally without Ventoy, you would flash your Linux distribution on the USB stick. And then you can boot from it, right?

Ventoy instead allows you to have a folder where you put an ISO without flashing it, and then you can boot from it by selecting in the menu. You just need to flash Ventoy once, as the base system, then you can put as many ISO files into that directory. I tested it and have 7 different Linux distributions (ranging from 1 GB to 4 GB variants) on the same USB stick, and I can boot any of them without flashing again. Replacing ISO is extremely easy, just delete it and copy a new one. Filenames does not matter, anything can be found.