Not OP, but can only speak from my experience: Installing a second WM/DE usually messes up my install, as quite some stuff is just from one GUI framework, so I don’t have to have to much stuff installed.
Also getting rid of it afterwards always wasn’t as easily possible.

I completely get trying out a WM y firing up a VM. You could even just boot the live USB stick to check it out.
But changing my working install just to try something (and then have to clean it up again) wasn’t working out for me in the past

Happens to everyone

Just having a multitude of terminals open with a mix of test environment and (just for comparison) an open connection to the production servers…

We were at a fair/exhibition once and on the first day people working on an actual customer project asked us, if they could compare with our code.
Obviously they flashed the wrong PLC and we were stuck dead at the first hours of the exhibition.
I still think that this place was cursed, as we also had to do multiple re-soldering of some connections of our robot and the sherry on top was the system flash dying - where I had fucked up, because I just finished everything late at night and didn’t made a complete backup of everything.
But it seems, if luck runs out, you lose on all fronts.

At least I was able to restore everything in 20mins. Which must be some kind of record.
But I was shaking so much from the stress, that I couldn’t efficiently type anymore and was lucky to have a colleague to just calmly enter what I told him to and with that we’re able to get the show case up and running again.

Well, at least the beer afterwards tasted like the liquid of the gods

Never touch a running system
Until you have a inviting hole in your system

Nevertheless, I’m panicking every time I update my sever infrastructure…

Utter bullshit…

Because of all the nice feedback about OpenSUSE:
SUSE was my first (bought) Linux distribution, at a time when I would have spent days downloading an ISO, SUSE was available with a manual in store. That was nice.

But then I had an AVM Fritz! ISDN card and it was a complete shit show to get this working. Especially as YAST(2?) didn’t support the configuration I needed, but every time you opened it, it would overwrite your manual changes in some configuration files.
(Edit: I’ll probably need to add, that this was like 25 years ago. So besides “fuck, I’m old”, my perspective in SUSE is very probably not up-to-date)

After that I hopped through a few distros and mostly stayed with basic Debian.

Nowadays I’m mostly using Manjaro (or just Arch itself, if I don’t need X), because I like the Arch package system and actually also the whole system architecture… Don’t exactly know what it is, but I feel much more at home.
With apt I sometimes found myself in situations, where a fresh install will resolve things faster than trying to restore/save the system. With Arch I always was somehow able to restore everything.

Can someone tell me how Tumbleweed differs/excels?
Thanks in advance!
Currently waiting for my new laptop (Framework 16 :-D) and that would be a nice opportunity to try something new.
But as I need my device for work, it’s important to me, that I really have it under my control and am not depending on some half-baked configuration utility like YAST was.

Edit: I’m also playing with the thought of moving to something immutable. NixOS looked nice in concept, but the more I read about it, the more I see that it’s more suitable for more server than my laptop - but maybe I’m wrong here, as I don’t have any hands-on experience

Quite some time that I’ve seen something so stupid

It’s even absolutely not true, that Linux is last. They just don’t know about the less used OS’ on desktop

What a braindead take…

Some industry hardware stuff sadly …

Datalogic DL.Code, Siemens TIA, etc.

If someone has a solution I’m all up for it.
Was some time ago, that I tried with wine, so maybe something has changed

Did you answer the wrong guy?

Yeah, I absolutely do get that and didn’t say anything against it

I just never saw them anywhere in Europe and would be interested where and how that recycling works.

Still there is the issue, that recycling plants seem to pollute their surroundings with microplastics by just washing the plastic

Obviously recycling is good, but with plastic it seems we’re not in a place to handle it reasonable in any way…

I don’t have different plastic recycling bins, but only one.
Where in Europe do you have different ones?
Never have encountered those, at least I didn’t realize it (in Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland - although with some countries I’m maybe not completely up to date)

Yeah, but then I’ve a web exposed service and I want keep a low profile as possible with what I’m exposing. So I guess as long as there aren’t many users to manage, wireguard (or a tailscale configuration) could work out for OP

I’ve setup wireguard, because it’s only me and an employee using the services. But with that, externally I don’t even seem to have a port open. But wireguard is so fast to be online, that I’m just always connected as soon as I’m online - using a domain and an IP update script

Well, the Laptop is still not released. Not sure what I can say more about it :⁠-⁠\

Anyone have some experience with StarLabs?

Ordered a StarFighter like more than half a year ago and am losing confidence in the company…

Not even about user data, this is just the side dish. You have complete control over the system and spy on, and probably even can do, whatever

Mint is a solid choice as a first Linux distribution, as it’s very user friendly and with cinnamon as Desktop Environment (GUI) build to be easily understood as windows user

A gaming focused distribution is not really necessary. Just pick a modern distribution you like and jump in. Wine, Steam, Proton can be installed on pretty much any modern distribution directly from the repository.

For a first try choose a distribution with good documentation and maybe a forum to ask (distribution specific) questions.

Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu are all good choices.

Personally I like Arch systems, but out of convenience I’m currently using Manjaro on my workstation - can’t really recommend this to a gaming focused first time user, although the Arch documentation/wiki is pretty great.

It depends a bit on how much time you want to invest to also learn about the Linux operating system or you just want to have something to game on and do some work with it.

I’m using borg with vorta as a front-end, which seems to work quite well, with different possible backup targets

Was meant with tongue in cheek - at least that was meant with the smiley

But still, could very much think of some hungry background processes. I’m just guessing, as I don’t run Win11 anywhere

Yeah, that’s usually called optimization ;⁠-⁠)

Also don’t know how much stuff runs in the background on W11, maybe there is now more stuff needing memory and CPU time

Just wait for the next stage as a libertarian socialist, without a leading communist party, because we can take care of us ourselves - it’s usually called anarchy (which doesn’t mean no social norms, just self-organisation without leadership)