Different distros for different uses:

• Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
• Nobara for my main gaming PC.
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
• Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

Here’s a super short summary on those points:

1. Anarchism is about horizontal power structures, mutuality, and community.

• Horizontal power rejects the idea that a small number of people with very large amounts of power have a right/duty to rule over a much larger group of people. Systems of power, (meaning groups of people and organizations that have influence), should be distributed widely, not concentrated or centralized.
• Mutuality means that the relationships that societies form with each other, both internally and externally, ought to be roughly equal. There are no relationships that fundamentally privilege one person or group above another. The rules apply equally to everybody.
• Community means that the primary consideration to any decision or action is how it affects the group first and foremost. For instance, instead of asking whether or not a certain action would generate profit, or make some specific person happier, the community involved as a whole should get to consider how said action would affect all of them.

2. There are many examples of anarchistic societies both past and present. The Amish, Buddhist monasteries, Anabaptist communities, the Rojava autonomous region in Syria, the Zapatistas in Mexico. While none of these groups 100% adhere to fully anarchist principles, they share many of the same principles and structures. Most people wonder how a society could function with no central leadership or power. While there are many things that would have to change greatly to make that work, there isn’t anything about anarchism that inherently makes it impossible. Modern open source projects like the Fediverse we are on right now, operate in a pseudo-anarchistic way.
3. There are many ways to argue against Statism and centralized power structures, what you might find compelling will depend largely on your other ethical and moral commitments. But I will say for me, I never heard any arguments that could justify the power of the state. All arguments that seemed to justify state power ultimately could be flipped to argue for other things that obviously are bad, like mob rule. I also found it incredibly interesting that when pressed, most people actually agreed with me that there was no convincing justification for state monopoly on power, but they still rejected anarchism for pragmatic reasons. They didn’t think modern societies could operated like that effectively.

Some of the other commenters here have linked good resources, For me, understanding two key things caused me to move to my political views:

• Capitalism is inherently self-defeating and unethical, which moved me to Socialism.
• The state monopoly on power is unjustifiable, which moved me to Anarchism. The combination of those two conclusions firmly places me in the Anarcho-Socialist camp of political philosophy. The details of how that should look and operate on a practical level are still something I discuss and debate with folks, but we all agree on the general principles.

Are you looking for a general summary of the principles of anarchism? Or are you looking for a model of how it might look in real life if implemented? Or are you looking for a moral/ethical defense of anarchism vs other forms of governance?

Noob friendly? Linux Mint. It’s not the prettiest, but it looks nice enough, especially if you tweak the themes a little, which is super easy.

It’s a fantastic all-around distro, and if you use the default Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s rock stable and super easy to navigate.

It’s what I use on all my personal laptops and also what I set my parents up with when I switched them from Windows to Linux.

He claims he is a man and wants to learn and grow from his mistakes, that’s admirable honestly.

And what better way to prove it than to calmly accept his prison sentence like a mature man who understands the weight if his crimes and the consequences of his actions.

I’m starting to get the hang of it. I was using Debian, so I had to figure out the basics of venv because many of the frameworks I was trying to learn require newer versions of Python than what comes with Debian.

vscodium works really easily inside it though, so it wasn’t too bad, but I still feel like I’m treading water a little bit.

As a baby Python Dev, I’m glad it’s not just me.

Lol

10 seconds? That’s generous.

Early 2000’s

My gaming rig has been running Nobara for years now, it’s built off of Fedora by the developer who does the glorious eggroll version of Proton.

It’s got multiple desktop environment versions and is optimized for Linux gaming. It has a bunch of gaming-specific kernel patches and optimizations. Extra drivers pre-installed for controllers and Nvidia GPUs, etc.

It has a very easy update wizard, I run it once every few weeks, works awesome.

Nobara Linux

My advice: Don’t wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you’re under pressure to figure it out all at once.

Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.

Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.

Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.

It’s really solid.

KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.

Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don’t need to look sexy.

My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.

Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.

Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I’ve tried to like it for years, but I just don’t care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.

I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I’ve watched.

My current company is being absorbed into a much larger company right now, got bought out earlier this year.

I was the only IT for the smaller company, and I was using 100% Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my laptop to administrate everything in our environment, which is mostly Windows.

• Our DC with AD on it, I used Remmina to RDP into it for admin tasks.
• O365 and Azure/Entra stuff was all in the browser.
• Our ERP system is cloud-based, so browser was fine for that too.
• Our access control system was cloud-based and the RFID card reader/writer was plug-n-play on Linux.
• Our company SMB share worked fine with Linux in Plasma using my AD credentials.
• I set up my company OneDrive sync using rclone, it also worked flawlessly.
• Our Fortigate firewall VPN has a native Linux app which, although ugly as sin, works without issue.
• I used OnlyOffice for a while, then switched back to LibreOffice. Both worked basically perfect, a few very minor font bugs, (bullet lists having a slightly different style for the bullets, etc.)
• Teams, I used a wrapper flatpak for a while, which worked fine, then switched to the browser version of Teams. No major issues, I had a bunch of meetings, screen shares, webcam, presentations all on Teams in Linux, pretty seamless.
• Email, Outlook in the browser is fine. I also used Thunderbird for a bit, but didn’t like how buggy it was in the Flatpak version, and the Debian package was way too out of date for my taste.

Now that we got bought out, I am being forced off my Linux laptop and onto the new company’s Windows laptop, which really sucks. I am planning on quitting soon, as I hate using Windows and I am very underpaid at my current job as it is. Only real perk was not having to report to any IT manager/CTO, and being able to use Linux.

Your hardware is nearly identical to mine. On my gaming PC, I use Nobara.

It’s a distro created and maintained by the developer who works on the Glorious Eggroll version of Proton, so very well known in the Linux gaming community.

It’s based on Fedora, but has a ton of Linux gaming tweaks for extra performance and compatibility patched into it and pre-installed.

It’s very easy to download the ISO and install, and requires basically zero configuration out of the box to start gaming and using the PC.

The only thing I would caution you about, is the only use the built-in Nobara updater app to update your system. Don’t use Fedora commands like DNF to update stuff, it will cause conflicts.

As long as you do that though, you should be fine. I’ve been using Nobara on my gaming PC for about 2 years now, and it’s been awesome.

I love this so much. It reminds me of how AMD Threadripper came to be.

Apparently Threadripper was a skunkworks project by some of the engineers at AMD that they worked on in their spare time. They wanted to see if they could basically slap together a bunch of normal CPU dyes into on mega chip with a high speed/bandwidth interposer connecting them together.

It was almost abandoned and they had to fight to get it taken seriously. But it proved to be a viable product, and singlehandedly was responsible for decimating what was left of Intel’s place in the HEDT market so badly, that after several years of failed attempts to keep up, Intel officially announced that they wouldn’t be competing in that space anymore.

It’s such a cool thing when talented and passionate people come together without having to be subject to strict marketability and just try to create something awesome and revolutionary.

The Steam Deck kicked off an entire new market for handheld gaming devices that had real power to play modern PC games. And despite a bunch of competing and copycat products, the Steam Deck is still king.

I love mine, have close to 200 hours on it, which for me is a ton. I’ve barely gamed on my main PC in the last year, it’s just so much more comfortable to play on the couch or in my bed.

Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.

And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.

I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.

My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.

I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.

One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”

I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.

After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.

He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.

My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.

I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.

Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.

I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?

Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.