Linux Mint is great for beginners. Have you ever installed windows? Installing Linux Mint is as easy as that. The day to day use is not much different compared to windows. Don’t be afraid to try it out, you can always go back to windows if it does not work out for you

I found two other things that might do the trick:

https://github.com/jgeumlek/MoltenGamepad

this looks like highly sophisticated gamepad emulation. IDK if you can map mouse and keys to your virtual gamepads easily, but the readme suggest that you definitly can. Looks like some work though.

https://github.com/iosonofabio/virtual_gamepad

this one is a fairly simple python script. I don’t know if you’re into programming, if it works you only need to change it so it registers mouse input and map that to the virtual controllers stick

Hugo is quite nice and has lots of themes

a minimal, configurable (file based for git) tiling window manager

I like i3, it ticks all your boxes. Made my own config in 2020 and it still works. Keep in mind that you have to design your whole desktop enviroment when you go the window manager route. bspwm might be an option as well

terminal based package management as easy as brew (maybe Nix?)

Every linux distro has it, I’m an Arch person, many people like Archs package manager pacman, so you could go with EndevourOS or if you’re adventorous with vsnilla Arch.

as much terminal emulator based as possible (i honestly mostly only need a browser and the terminal, most other apps have a TUI that i can use with the keyboard, see the above requirement)

Well, what kind of software you’ll run is up to you. Linux has all the TUI stuff. If you haven’t already, check out vim, emacs and nnn. Don’t forget to customize your shell (and choose it first, i would recommend zsh or fish).

General advice: Look into r/unixporn, most posts there have dotfiles, look for something you like an try it (with a fresh user that you can delete afterwarda maybe?)

Iirc AntiMicroX can do this.

You can basically connect any local port to any remote port normal or reversed. Reversed is -R, normal with -L. In this setting, correct me if im worng, you want to connect the open port on the airplane to one already prepared on a vps which allows you to do what you want e.g. proxy websites.

I can recommend linkding..

So in europe unlimited plans are totally normal except for mobile. I pay 40€ for 250 Mbit with no data caps.

Instead of doubting, just look it up: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/valve-pc-controller-usage-statistics,37853.html

Many noname controller disguise themselves as x360 and the main way to get any controller working when a x360 is required is x360ce which disguises any controller as x360. You can even use your keyboard as x360. Plus this is 5 years old plus this is steam only.

Are any of those attempting wireless connections via a 2.4 GHz dongle? Really that’s the only reason you need a driver in the first place. All controllers are otherwise compatible with xinput.

The steam controller has it’s own dongle, with a driver in the kernel, which modern xbox controller could have.

Nah, mate, you don’t got to do anything but hit the windows update button. Proprietary versions ship with Windows which will automatically update with Windows. Windows will also tell you directly in device manager, as I’ve said.

Haven’t used windows 11 yet but in 10 i had to manually install gfx drivers

Okay, now I am talking to a wall. Like seriously, you’ve never had a driver you needed to specifically update? I am surprised. I’ve had to revert AMD and Nvidia drivers. I also just recently had to uninstall xow and install xone.

As I repeatedly said, most drivers are already in the kernel. I have a non-class compliant, 15 yo usb audio interface which is EOL according to the manufacturer and for which the latest 64-bit driver vor windows is for windows 7. It has a driver in the linux kernel and it works. Mainboard soundchip? Driver in the kernel! Network adapter? Driver in the kernel! Firewire pci card? Driver in the kernel! Good wifi/bt chipset? Driver in the kernel! 99% of your hardware require no install of a driver. NVIDIAs driver used to be spotty, but I heard it is better now. With AMD i personally never had any problem. Only drivers I had to manually install in like ever have been for shitty realtek wifi chips and a ffb-wheel (which would have worked but without ffb).

I don’t care, my opinion differs. Linux is supposed to be the OS of choice and customization.

And you’re free to go the slow and time consuming way with gui. Just accept that because of choice and customisation not every fringe detail about your pc will be avaible in a gui unless you choose your custom solution for displaying them.

Rescuetime has linux packages: https://www.rescuetime.com/download_linux

activitywatch and rescuetime are the two options i know of.

Especially when PlayStation controllers work just fine on Windows.

Ps-controllers also work great on Linux! Have to running in Batocera, absolutely no problem plug&play (well, connect and play).

Xbox controllers are the most common controller used.

Are they? I doubt that. I don’t know how good or bad they work on Linux, but PS, Steam-Controller, noname-Controllers from AliExpress, Logitech… all working without cli. So maybe Microsoft is the problem here?

But tell me, how do you know what driver is currently being used? (or even what one to install, which Windows will tell you, some distros will tell you what graphics card drivers to install but nothing else.)

Windows will tell you? If you have a dedicated gpu and want to actually use it you have to go to the website of the chipset vendor, search for the driver, look for the doenload, download it, open the downloaded file, allow changes to the system, click next an obscene amount of times while unchecking all the bloat that is bundled with the driver, wait, click again, and then you’re good to go. Maybe you are asked to log into your geforce experience account, and then you’re good to go. Having some program always running in the background, collecting data, hugging ressources. On Linux you have the choice to install the proprietary or the open source driver. And it just works (at least for AMD since 2019 for me)

Clearly, drivers need to be updated or even rolled back. There have been updates to the open-source drivers.

In Linux most drivers are kernel modules and you generally don’t interact with them at all. Everything just works. Exceptions are gfx cards and shitty wireless chipsets. Maybe FFB driving wheels. Besides that, every driver update is tested and happens automatically when your package manager installs updates (which can be done via GUI).

No driver is perfect so they do break things and need to get reverted.

That is just objectively wrong. Simple drivers for simple devices can be implemented perfectly and so can more complicated ones, which they sometimes even are. Tell me which driver you had to “revert”. Was it for a NVIDIA GPU?

I just want to have my computer work so I can get back to writing code, playing games, and watching shows. Anything that gets in the way is not really worth the time.

Same here, so i prefer one line in the terminal over opening a window, navigating with the mouse, searching in lists, clicking all these buttons, navigsting through a file picker… not worth my time (see, it is about speed!)

I had to drop down to the terminal just to get my Xbox controllers to work properly

So you’re trying to connect a device to your PC which is literally made by Linux’ biggest opponent in the OS market who does not provide drivers for other platforms so that the driver has to be reverse engineered and then complain that this is a bit hacky?

I also had to drop to the terminal to see what video card driver I had installed and to install the actual one I wanted.

Package management (including gfx drivers) can be done in YaST with GUI.

Device Manager can tell you everything about any device you have connected and allow you to update, uninstall, and rollback device drivers. I know no GUI on Linux has that.

Luckily, linux drivers are provided as kernel modules and there should be no need to update, uninstall or rollback device drivers besides when the manufacturers don’t comply to open standards.

Despite all that, terminal is incredibly useful and can get tasks done orders of magnitude faster than the best GUI ever could.

Linux has gotten to that point, in OpenSuse you can do almost everything with a gui (you can’t do everything without a console in Windows and Mac either).

Because she will expierence sexual abuse there.

I have no expierence with the steam deck, so dunno what’s up with that. Never expierenced something like that on my PCs tho.

Yes, the flags can be unintuitive for beginners, S stands for sync, which will sync the package(s) specified thereafter with the remote repositories. If the packages aren"t installed it means installing them, if they are already installed it means updating them to the version that is the latest version in the remote repository. Full system update is done by pacman -Syu, where y tells pacman to synchronize the package lists first and u selects all packages that are older than the ones in these package lists for the S.

You can easily learn all that by using fish (or zsh with a sufficient config) instead of bash. Then, you can enter pacman - and hit TAB to get a list of allowed flags and a brief description. Choose one, hit TAB again and get a list of flags that go with the one you selected before, again with a description right out of the man-page. BTW, that works with a lot of command line programs and is imo almost necessary to get in touch with the shell.

My Futro S740 with an J4105 CPU consumes up to 14 Watts according to this article. It is faster than a rpi 4b plus i bought it refurbished for 40€. I think a system with an I5 6500t will need even more power under load.

Yeah, thin clients are the way to go, but tgey will draw more than 5-7 Watt under load.

And which piece of consumer hardware offers more computing power (relevant for minecraft server) for the same amount of electrical power than a rpi4?

You can’t have more calculation power for the same electrical power consumption. A thin clirnt with an i3 or i5 maybe.