It would be the OS (in this context) that you use most often on a daily basis. When the OP logs onto their computer, they would be using Linux as opposed to Windows.
I think it’s a bleedover from car culture - you keep your fun car in the garage and have a second car that you’re okay with driving daily. Especially so during winter.
Tiling addons. I like having a full DE, but I also want tiling, so Pop!_Shell on GNOME and Polonium on KDE are invaluable (and yes, COSMIC looks really promising).
I really like compositor/wm/DE which allow for keyboard driven movement of windows between workspaces and workspaces between monitors. Especially the latter requirement is only met by a few wms, e.g. sway/i3, hyprland.
I can’t stand it if switching to the next workspace all workspaces on all monitors change. This makes it annoying to use with a second monitor that mostly display the same windows (e.g. messaging, video, docs).
That’s true, most WMs have a simplistic workspace geometry, where they spread a workspace across all monitors (regardless of their placement). I suspect that, since the workspace abstraction comes above monitors it may not even be possible for them to have a workspace split between monitors.
Another vote for Arch. Manual Arch install was an interesting, and positive, experience. I did it multiple times so I could better understand what was actually being done. It helped me understand the boot and EFI partitions because I wanted to dual boot Windows.
For Arch itself, I’ve had a way snappier experience with pacman than apt and the AUR is a really convenient resource. So many packages there that you would otherwise have to build from source.
Bleeding edge packages can cause problems, but there are ways to recover. downgrade from the AUR makes downgrading packages really easy. The latest Nvidia drivers caused a bunch of problems with games for me on Wayland so I downgraded them and the Linux kernel and added them to pacman’s package ignore list.
I agree with what other people have said about using the command line more and the gui less, that will make you have to learn about utils like find, grep, sed, and maybe awk.
Try learning vim (or emacs). Use some command like tools for stuff you’d do in the gui. Try some basic scripting for common tasks. Maybe write some short python/ruby scripts if you need them. I’ve found that writing code has given me a need for learning more about how the command line works, and other “power user” features.
Preferably for some kind of esoteric hardware that you own but no-one else has, but it’d also be a valuable experience to do it for some commonly used piece of hardware for which good Linux drivers already exist.
For any moderately talented programmer this should be a reasonably difficult exercise, which will teach you very valuable lessons about Linux (and be quite fun at the same time).
Debugging a kernel panic is not what most people consider “fun”. Especially with a non-zero chance of bricking your machine on bare metal if you mess up somewhere. I’ve done driver development for both Windows and Linux in both hobbyist and professional capacities and it’s not a fun experience to say the least.
A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That’s what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.
I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same “drive mappings” to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.
I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I’ve written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their … issues but both work pretty well.
Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.
Not really. Dnf is slower and Fedora prompts to reboot to install updates.
There also is a slight different system setup with a different kernel and different automatic mounts. It won’t make any difference unless you are tweaking your system at a fairly low level.
“I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve.”
I use Arch and so does my wife (she has no idea). The wiki is legendary because it is well used (I’ve written a few bits myself). I’ve used Gentoo for quite a while too but you will find compilation times a bit of a bore.
I own an IT company - I am the MD. I use Arch actually! (and so does my wife)
I really do recommend doing a Gentoo install at some point, because I think you would learn a lot from it. It’s a really nice experience and a well put together distro. The compiling is potentially not as bad as you think, but there are a couple of packages that are notoriously painful to compile (there are prebuilt binaries available for some of the painful ones if desired too). You’d probably get a decent amount out of an Arch install too. Arch isn’t my cup of tea, but lots of people like it and it’d be quicker to get started than Gentoo. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for you at this stage but eventually you should check out NixOS too! You can even try the package manager out on any distro you want. NixOS is really interesting, but it does things a bit different from other distros, and if you’ve done an Arch / Gentoo install it’ll be interesting to see what NixOS does in contrast.
Other things to mess with… You mention partitioning, so make sure to check out LVM, and also consider reading a bit about filesystems. Maybe give btrfs a go :).
I wouldn’t worry about daily driving either Gentoo or Arch. Once you have them set up you’ll probably be fine.
I don’t think it’s that clear cut to be honest. More code doesn’t mean the package benefits more from optimizations at all, and even if that were true you might care more about the performance of the kernel or various small libraries that are used by a lot of programs as opposed to how fast some random application that depends on qt-WebKit is:
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