SunRed

What surprised me the most, also in part due to me not really being knowledgeable about software solutions in their respective industries, was the Unreal Engine (the editor that is) and Houdini being available on Linux. Tbf, at least in the vfx department it is apparently more common as most of the high profile software in that industry does have a native Linux version available.

What I appreciated the most though was software like Reaper and Renoise providing a (very good even) Linux-native version when I looked for a new DAW to learn, seeing most software in the audio industry not being very Linux-friendly.

+1 for OVPN. I switched to them from Mullvad for the same reason. They are also one of the more trustworthy VPNs in my book ever since they actually won a court case proving that they actually practise what they advertise.

If you can wait just a little longer I would seriously consider the Framework 12 that is going for pre-order next month and being shipped “mid-2025”.
Of course, this isn’t an option if you need a laptop right now. In that case the current Framework 13 offerings are the best you can get but of course are not as affordable and possibly a bit overkill for a simple browsing machine.

Currently on Firefox with Betterfox and Lepton. I might change it to Librewolf as a base for its better defaults. Ungoogled Chromium flatpak when I need a Chromium browser. Fennec on GrapheneOS for its extension support even if it might not be as secure compared to Vanadium.

Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying they ‘had to completely reinstall the os’ and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn’t rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don’t count). This is due in part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn’t hurt to apply new package configs by going through pacdiff once in a while though.

Edit: Typo

I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its ‘obscurity’ though. It’s definitely a standout among distros.

KDE for its Wayland performance and features and occasionally I switch to hyprland if I need a more focused work environment.
In the past I used Cinnamon but it became ever more buggier on Arch and due to lack of Wayland support still it was a dead end anyway.

I now just use EurKey (Qwerty) with a very nice Alice (Arisu) keyboard. If that was all I was using I would probably try the eurkey variant of Colemak(-DH) at some point.