I know you didn’t ask, but you don’t need a weird fork of emacs to run a Clojure REPL, that just works in regular emacs

While that all may be true, it doesn’t change the fact that Hulk Hogan is a fuckin scab

This is me. Software developer by day, endless diyer and hobby starter by night (at least on nights when I’m not dissociating on the couch)

we struggle getting wifi to work

No we don’t

in a way that you can’t see what is going to be installed.

You can look at the Dockerfile and see every single step that goes into building a particular image.

It is also double resource heater.

That’s patently false.

And it has many frequent vulnerabilities

Dawg have you ever actually used docker?

No shit that’s a different experience, who in this thread is suggesting running fucking Arch on their server farm? Lmao

One particular pain for me in VSCode is that it puts a .vscode folder in my repo, which I have to specifically exclude from git every single time.

That’s pretty standard behavior for IDEs. Like Jetbrains IDEs store their config in a .idea folder in the root of the workspace, Visual Studio has a config directory in the root of the workspace, xcode probably does the same thing… It’s standard practice, and a simple thing to account for - as you said, just add it to your .gitignore and you’re golden. That allows people to use whatever IDE they want and configure it however they like.

Sleep isn’t even that useful these days anyways. If you have your OS installed on an SSD or an M.2, you’ll start up in about 10 - 15 seconds from fully powered off anyways.

Lots of terminal commands come with tab-completion out of the box (start typing a command, hit tab to autocomplete, hit tab twice to bring up a list of available options), or have tab completion scripts you can install after the fact.

Lacking tab completion, any worthwhile terminal commands will at least support a -h/--help flag that will print out a help menu summarizing the different options, or you can open up the man pages to see even more detailed documentation with man [whatever terminal command]. If the terminal command doesn’t have either of those, I’d recommend against using it.

Is it mandatory to use the terminal for everything?

No. Most distros have a GUI that you can use to install stuff without touching the terminal, and most distros have a GUI for configuring your system (think Control Panel in Windows).

It’s not necessary to use the terminal, but I do recommend eventually learning how to use the terminal, for a couple reasons:

1. It’s more ubiquitous - like you said, a lot of places online give terminal instructions, not GUI instructions for things, so knowing your way around the terminal is helpful in those situations. Plus, it makes things a little more distro-agnostic - if I’m trying to install some program, I know I can probably run apt install regardless of whether I’m running Mint, Ubuntu, PopOS, or any other Debian-based distro that uses the apt package manager.

2. It’s usually faster. Opening a terminal window and typing in a few dozen characters is usually going to take less time than digging through a couple layers of menus.

3. It’s more flexible. A lot of times, GUIs are just fronts for a terminal based application, and sometimes they only partially implement the features the terminal app exposes. By using the terminal app directly, you aren’t limited by whatever options happen to be made available in the GUI.

Again though, it’s not necessary to use the terminal. It’s definitely helpful, especially if you want to do gaming, or if you’re used to being a power user (which it seems like you are in Windows), but certainly not a requirement these days.

Windows would be coffee from a national chain, but when you take the lid off, there’s an ad under it, there’s an ad on the side of the cup, and at the very bottom of the cup there’s an ad that you don’t see until you’ve drank all the coffee. Oh and it comes with cream and sugar by default, even if you prefer it black. It also comes with ads for a subscription to a cream and sugar delivery service.

What games do you play? If you’re playing through steam, you can search protondb.com for your games to see how playable they are on Linux.