I’m pretty sure everyone’s birth date is 1/1/1970

FTFY

“Won’t anyone think of the cHiLdReN?!”

Things are moving very fast right now with a lot of back end linux stuff changing rapidly to support more people and programs coming off Windows.

Please, indulge me. What exactly is it you’re talking about here?

Imo, not having access to the most recent Thunderbird or LibreOffice version doesn’t matter at all to beginners, making Debian-based systems perfectly viable.

Fedora KDE, on the other hand, may turn out to be an annoyance once they need to install proprietary drivers (as OP is due to their NVIDIA card).

Don’t worry, Arch will do that over time.

Very basically (ELI5):

• Bazzite is an immutable distro, meaning anything in the file system but your /home is read-only. That makes the OS pretty secure: from the user (who cannot break it by messing around), from software bugs (which cannot really take down the system with them) and from potential malware incursions.
• Nice… But how do we install software on such a system? Linux software does need write access to system directories (e.g. /bin, /lib, /etc and others) during installation, and now it can’t. So we need to work around that. Bazzite does that in two ways:
  • installing Flatpaks, a special way of packaging software together with all of its dependencies and running it in a kind of sandbox, separated from the rest of the system.
  • installing it inside distrobox containers (for any software that does not come as Flatpaks). These are, essentially, a separate complete Linux distro (though stripped down as much as possible) running in a sandbox. And on these we do have system level write access. If we mess up, the software messes up or it’s malware, only the distrobox will be affected, not our host machine.

You may now begin to understand why I wouldn’t recommend Bazzite to beginners: it’s a cool, but advanced concept, and you need to understand its limitations and workarounds. Otherwise, you will just be roadblocked at some point, or, like you are, hacking away on the command line without actually understanding what you’re doing. On that note, props to you for succeeding so far! But also, at the risk of sounding like a gatekeeper, it shouldn’t be that way, for two reasons:

As a beginner switching from Windows, you have enough things to familiarise yourself with: the file system structure is different (“Where’s my C:\ drive?”), software installation is different (“Wait? I don’t just download random binaries from the Internet like a caveman?”) and a lot of software is different (“Where is Paint? Where is Outlook? And where did the ribbon menu in Office go?”). You really shouldn’t have to tackle the command line to get basic functionality working.

If and when you start working on the command line, you must understand what you’re doing, because the command line assumes you do. It lets you do anything with and to your system, which makes it a very powerful tool. But powerful tools need to be handled with caution, and as you can see from your experience, Bazzite does not teach you that: it expects you to use the terminal right away, and since you can’t, you just resort to copy-pasting random commands off the internet. In Bazzite, this cannot hurt you much because of how the distro ist built. But it’s an absolutely terrible habit for new Linux users to get into. Once you switch distros and move to something else than Bazzite, just running random commands on the command line can absolutely wreck your system.

That’s hardly any time. I’d be curious for your experience >12 months.

The question is: how long have you been using it?

Sooner or later, stuff will break on an Arch-based system, and a beginner will not necessarily be able to fix it. So I wouldn’t recommend any Arch-based system to beginners.

Good advice on the Ventoy front. It makes trying out things very comfortable, if you have a large enough thumbdrive (>32GB).

Don’t push beginners towards immutable distros such as Bazzite though. Some things there can only be installed within distroboxes, and expecting beginners to fiddle with containers and images of other distros is way more than they should have to contend with.

If that seems like too much I’ve heard Linux Mint is dead simple and stable.

Yes, it does, and yes, it is.

I’ve always been quite techie (maybe not by trade, but by passion), and been decoupling from big tech solutions ever since the Snowden revelations dropped. Ditched a lot of non-free software and services first (MS Office -> LibreOffice being one of the biggest), then switched to Desktop Linux and degoogled Android. I suppose self-hosting my own services and taking control of my network was the next logical step on this journey. That, and immich. It’s so ridiculously good, it single-handedly made me want to run my first real server.

True that! I’m running plenty of those apps myself (though on a dumb display powered by a Linux machine), so I can appreciate the setup! Since you’re running Google TV: have you tried running Newpipe? Imho, it’s a no-brainer replacement for the YouTube app and blows it out of the water both with regard to the features it packs and the privacy advantages it brings.

Seeing that cable management, I know why you’d want to “cut the cord”. (Scnr! 😁)

TYSM for the link! I’ll probably switch to this.

Well, 🤬!

The handoff (if you can call it that) was extremely sketchy, including the “explanation” on the Syncthing forums. Made me switch to Nel0x’s fork of the app.

This is the correct approach, OP. Bazzite is good, but its immutability is an aspect one needs to get used to and learn to work with. Since you’re not (and I’m not saying I am ;), rather stick to something you feel comfortable supporting, because you’ll be the one they’ll come running to if they have a problem.