M$ loves locking users into their totally bulls*it ecosystem with deliberately broken “standards.” LibreOffice, on the other hand, actually respects open formats like ODF and doesn’t treat interoperability as a threat. Word still can’t properly open documents it didn’t create, unless you pay the vendor tax and pray the formatting survives…

If a program insists on Windows, it is instantly deemed incompatible with my operating parameters and fails my system requirements…

When I switched from Windows to Linux back in 2002, I never looked back. I missed absolutely nothing. Linux offered everything I needed and more, with unmatched freedom and flexibility. In late 2008, I bought a unibody MacBook, and while macOS wasn’t bad per se, it just didn’t feel like home. I missed Linux too much, so I wiped the MacBook and installed Debian. From that moment on, I’ve never switched again—Linux has always been home. I’m currently rocking Arch (btw) on my main desktop & Debian on my laptop…

While I appreciate the utility of snaps and flatpaks for providing sandboxed, cross-platform apps, I’ve often found them slower than traditional packages. Their tendency to take up more disk space also feels inefficient, especially when system resources are sometimes precious. For these reasons, I generally prefer using apps installed directly through the system’s default package manager, which tend to offer better performance and use space more efficiently…

I never said anything about “tiptoeing around”, but what you said here is correct…

Any distro will “just work” if used correctly…

I honestly don’t care about dethroning windows or anything related to it. All that matters to me is that my Linux system works the way I need it to…

xfce4-terminal has always been my go-to terminal. It may not be the lightest or the best, but it does have some neat built-in features like opening a drop-down window…

I’ve only ever had two problems with Arch based systems…

1. Nvidia drivers…
2. Installing poorly create aur packages…

There are some slim battery operated cooling stands listed on Amazon. Not sure how well they’d work, but they are always an option…

The operating system in use shouldn’t be a factor. Consider opening your laptop to perform a thorough cleaning, and also consider replacing the thermal paste as well. If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, taking it to a repair shop is a viable option. Investing in a cooling stand for the laptop would also be beneficial…

Thanks for the tip, will have to look into using it…

Most recently I updated nvidia drivers on Arch & failed to read the output printed to the terminal. Next time I turned on the computer I was left with the dreaded blinking cursor due to a driver issue. My graphics card had just switched from the main nvidia driver to 470xx & I had failed to notice. Installing the correct driver fixed the problem & I was once again able to boot. Previously way back in like 2002’ish I got a second monitor for my setup & tried manually configuring it. Had a number of unsuccessful boots, before I finally got it working…

I ditched all top programs on my system, because I have no use for any of them…