Norway actually does.
Source: Am norwegiam. Am parent.

In the US? Lol, no.
Source: I work with a bunch of Texans.

I’ll share with you this gem from someone who tried to cause a syntax error on purpose, but the script ran just fine: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11695110/why-is-this-program-valid-i-was-trying-to-create-a-syntax-error

I find that it’s around the same, except linux waits on updating the UI until all write buffers are flushed, whereas Windows does not.

Same. But at least UO was great.

Which distro(s) did you try?

I’ve been a linux user for 20-25 years (exclusively for 10), and I find that Linux Mint works pretty well out of the box. I’ve heard others recommend other distros for the same reason, but I’ll let someone with first hand experience recommend them, as Mint is my go-to distro for desktops and laptops.

And just a tip: Take people who go “Don’t use X distro because of Y” with a grain of salt. All distros have their own quirks (Mint’s being relatively old packages), but whatever works for you is the best distro for you, and that’s the most important part.

I recently got myself a brand spanking new and relatively high end laptop, and everything worked out of the box. The only “problem” was that I wasn’t satisfied with the wifi performance (it worked, just not as fast as it should), so I installed a different kernel module. ome to think of it, I had to select NVIDIA proprietary driver as well, due to it defaulting to an open source driver. But it’s just a few mouseclicks (yes, all GUI) to get that sorted.

Allegedly AMD has better support for linux than NVIDIA does, so I guess that’s a good omen for you.

The rest worked flawlessly, including the proprietary lenovo hotkeys that requires it’s own Lenovo program on windows - I was prepared to live without those, but I’m glad I don’t have to. Fn+Q to change power/performance/cooling balance on the fly is pretty neat.

I have no idea how to edit videos, and I’ve never touched any software for doing so, so I can’t help you there. Same goes for CAD stuff. I think it’s safe to assume that doing arduino stuff on linux is well supported, though.

You have one per installed kernel. Not sure what (if any) automagic is common for removing old kernels, I guess this varies between distros, but at least on my computers, old kernel remain. At least the previous one, maybe more. It comes in handy in case a kernel upgrade breaks something, which it actually did recently on one of my laptops - makes it easier to boot from old kernel and revert.

EDIT: I just checked. I have just one on my daily driver. It’s quite new, and I don’t think I’ve had a kernel upgrade on that one, so it makes sense.

On my work laptop (the one with borked kernel upgrade) I have two.

So what you most likely have is one or more vmlinuz-version-numbers, and then simply a symlink named just vmlinuz to the version you boot from.

Short answer to your last paragraph:
vmlinuz is the kernel. It ends with z instead of x, because it’s z-compressed to save space. (I’ve heard that it’s possible to use an uncompressed kernel for that 1ms faster boot time)
Initramfs (not intramuscular, which my autocorrect thinks is appropriate) is a small filesystem blob, “initial ram filesystem”, meant to be loaded directly into ram to allow the kernel to talk to your hardware via drivers. It also has a lot of binaries needed to perform other tasks that need to run before the root filesystem is mounted.

What happened to Tibet again?

Plural.

Can’t be arsed fixing that for you.

“It just works”

…because that is the state of a mainstream modern distro, and it’s not true of Windows anymore.

Alternatively “No nagging, no forced online account.”

cd /usr/ports/hammertothehead && make && make install

…for FreeBSD users

yum install melatonin

Factorio
War thunder
Enshrouded
Project zomboid
Warno
Rimworld

I would’ve liked to see him try mint instead. Less fluff, and hopefully that would’ve gone better for him.

My thoughts as well. Plus LLMs are trained on a lot of outdated data, so often it would recommend a walk through that does not apply.

I don’t think anyone knows how to actually use ctrl+r, though. When I try I usually give up and resort running egrep on bash_history instead.

I prefer the left road. The right one leads to a perception of being awkward AND stupid.

Confirming mind lost