Max-P

Good thing you don’t need to watch his videos to use his tools. Not a huge fan either, but the tool works and gets the job done. I wouldn’t use linutil because it’s kind of a mess, and I imagine winutil ain’t that much better, but I don’t know how to do all those tweaks myself so I welcome them anyway. If it’s useful to at least one person then it has some value.

I we cared that much about the people behind the software rather than the software on its own merits, we’d be rushing to eliminate GNU from our systems because RMS is known for some pretty disgusting takes. The guy behind Hyprland is also fairly toxic, but Hyprland is still nice.

I love Linux but I don’t think it’s for you yet, at least not with a lot of sacrifices and compromises. If 3 and 6 and possibly 8 are non-negotiable then they’re dealbreakers. Some of it can be somewhat handled with things like virtual machines and GPU passthrough but that will absolutely be a bunch of terminal stuff to get running well, and possibly extra hardware.

I should also mention that I’m a goal oriented person. I just want to use it, I don’t want to tinker with it. That goes for pretty much any tool. I consider the OS a tool.

Sometimes, achieving goals require upgrading your skills and taking the time to learn them properly, and for Linux the terminal is the most powerful tool you could have. We don’t use it because we have to, we use it because it’s a powerful tool that can get just about anything done.

In your case, using tools to debloat Windows might be the best bet. I’ve been using winutil for my Windows VMs, works great and removes most of the crap: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

IMO a lot of what makes nice self-hostable software is clean and sane software in general. A lot of stuff tend to end up trying to be too easy and you can’t scale up, or stuff so unbelievably complicated you can’t scale it down. Don’t make me install an email server and API keys to services needed by features I won’t even use.

I don’t particularly mind needing a database and Redis and the likes, but if you need MySQL and PostgreSQL and Redis and memcached and an ElasticSearch cluster and some of it is Go, some of it is Ruby and some of it is Java with a sprinkle of someone’s erlang phase, … no, just no, screw that.

What really sucks is when Docker is used as a bandaid to hide all that insanity under the guise of easy self-hosting. It works but it’s still a pain to maintain and debug, and it often uses way more resources than it really need. Well written software is flexible and sane.

My stuff at work runs equally fine locally in under a gig of RAM and barely any CPU at idle, and yet spans dozens of servers and microservices in production. That’s sane software.

~Not really. All the features of that tool are basic functions we’ve had before LibreOffice was still OpenOffice.~

~Since this converts to Markdown, it’s inherently a very lossy conversion. What’s hard to pull off is preserve the full formatting when converting to an odt or something.~

Someone pointed out it doesn’t just convert word documents to Markdown, it can also transcribe and OCR, so I guess it does have some usefulness!

Bazzite drive me nuts. It’s pretty good out of the box but I had to do some crazy shit to make stuff work for my friend that’s just starting on Linux.

I measured it, I was able to install like 2GB worth of Arch updates in the time it took to rpm-ostree kargs --append. Waiting 5 minutes to install a tiny <1MB utility package gets annoying fast. It’s nice to be able to just tell my friend to boot the last generation though. Tradeoffs.

It runs great otherwise though, I see the appeal especially for new users and fixed hardware like the handhelds. Just works.

Fedora is usually pretty good at being up to date while still user friendly and still operate like a classic distro. The immutable ones are also pretty nice if you’re into that. Otherwise you could consider Arch or Endeavour. If you’ve been using Linux since 2012, an Arch distro’s probably easier than you think.

I switched to Arch in 2011 after being on Ubuntu since 7.04 and the Unity disaster… and I’m still running that install to this day. I’m typing this from it!

In practice I’ve found Arch’s always up to date packages to be less of a hassle than dealing with dependency hell of carefully pulling newer dependencies when you inevitably need a newer feature of a package. Worst case there’s containers for the few stubborn “only works on this exact version of Ubuntu” cases but it’s pretty rare.