Hum, not my experience. I run it on an old pc as a podman container, for me and my wife, exactly for the same use case of OP: auto uploading the pictures/videos on our phones. Upload is almost instantaneous. Browsing files is fine, but I usually use a separate software to index/search the photos on the upload directory. For all kind of files (documents etc) is good.

Systemd 😈

Free where I live. Biggest cost was the uber ride home

In corporate managed fleet of PCs updates are pushed by the company internal management systems. Some companies give you a 24hours option, some others (ahem, power tripping sysadmins, I know, I was one) say “fuck you and your work, you install when I say so”. It’s not strictly a Windows thing, it’s a company policy.

Some days I’m a dumpster fire

I know bluebin, I know. We are all bluebin some days

Just as a test, can you try ubuntu? It looks like you tried “enterprise” distros, may be worth with a more generic one, maybe they have a different set drivers.

Also, can you try running lspci command, maybe it shows any devices it doesn’t recognize (so you can investigate those specifically). Pretty sure there is also a gui app about drivers, but I’m not familiar with kde.

I’ve installed ROCM before reading that my AMD GPU does not support it

She’d be perfect as incredygirl!

I knew there was going to be someone as childish funny as me in here!

Dropped my martini on thinkpad. Dried it out with a cloth the best I could. Nothing happened apart that every time it warmed up it started smelling of Martini

I was sitting on the ground doing a puzzle with my kid the other week. Ended up with back pain for two days. I don’t “feel” old until my body reminds me.

if you don’t mind having to install updates every day it’s nice. I use Cinnamon and there was a small issue at the beginning (dbus-something IIRC) so some apps (calculator, firefox, libreoffice) were taking a long time to start (waiting on a timemeout on something). But that’s the only issue I had in the past 6 months. I installed lutris and play steam and Epic games. I have docker (not the desktop version) installed. System is lean and snappy. Do I see a massive change from when I was using Linux Mint? Not really. I changed because I borked my LM installation and needed to reinstall anyway. Installed EndeavourOS on a spare SSD to try it out and ended as my daily driver. I still have LM on the other SSD, but I only went back once to transfer my documents/stuff. TBH I tried it out because I saw everyone banging on about Arch, but couldn’t be bothered to install from scratch. I’d only used RedHat or Debian derivative (I’m old, Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian in my mind because I remember how it started out) distros in the past 20+ years (well, and gentoo for some time when it first came out. Also Mandrake, but can’t remember what package manager it had), so I wanted to try something new. I’m happy with it, but I don’t make the distro I use a matter or religion. It works, it’s stable, I learn something new, job done.

Welcome aboard! There is no need to be a programmer to work on Linux. I’m no programmer either and have been enjoying Linux for many years.

About the distro, it’s a conversation ad old as the first fork lol. It depends in part what you want to do with it. I’ve used many in 20+ years. I’ve settled eith endeavourOS for my desktop (after a few years of Linux Mint) and debian on the servers. I play and work on it without any problems (although I have a radeon rx580 card).

I’ve never used popOS, but all major distros have a fairly simple install process, especially if you use the whole hd and don’t need fancy config. Or you can start relatively hard and use gentoo. It will take a while (and thanks the fact that stage1 is not the default anymore) but you’ll learn a lot of how linux works.

Feel free to ask if you want to know more.

Plus1 for dockge. Started using yesterday (with podman), moving from portainer (with docker). And I have around 50 stacks, so not just a few *arr. It’s really good, and the option to work directly via CLI or the web interface is really nice!

I don’t use ebook readers, just a tablet or my phone, so it was better for my use case.

Yep, hosted via docker, for epub, mobi and pdf. Works great with the librera reader as well.

Or forgetting to enable the third button/wheel in the kernel

Gather around kids, I’ll tell you a story of the olden days. Back when it first came out I installed gentoo, and at the time the recommended process was to start from stage1. And of course I was a true believer and spent a lot of time optimizing cflags. I could get the base system running in maybe half a day, on the third try on average (I was distro hopping a lot). I used gnome at the time, and it wasn’t that bad to bring it up. Less than 24 hours. But if you wanted openoffice (there was no libreoffice at the time), oh boy, you could say goodbye to your system for a good day and then some. Assuming that it didn’t fail and then you had to change cflags, recompile half the system and try again. But man, when it finished the system would fly sooo smooth.

I’ve blocked outgoing port 53 udp/tcp for all subnet except pi-hole. If I can’t trust a device to use the DNS I configured I can’t trust it to go on the internet, and it goes on my list of devices to replace.