I wouldn’t debian stable is no better than any other mainstream distro. Worst in some regards as it tends to have really old versions of things. If that sounds nice to you then go for it. But it is not the default choice or recommendation for most people.

There is also little reason not to try out different ones to compare if you want to. Nice to see what they are like for yourself if you have the time to.

I am not afraid of some tech journey, but even though arch seems the coolest, with Wayland, kde, hyperland customization, i am not confident enough to use it for work.

The only way you will gain confidence in it is to try it out. But also, most distros use wayland these days and it is more up to the desktop environment you use rather than the distro you use. hyperland is a wayland compositor and is in the repos of most if not all major distros. You should be able to install it on anything really. You can replace the desktop environment or install multiple ones side by side if you want to on just about any distro. The biggest difference between them is which ones they come with by default. But really if you are looking for a highly customized experience then Arch tends to be the way to do as you have less extra fluff you have to remove or work around when getting the system exactly as you want it. The hardest part of Arch is installing it the first time. Really after that it is not any harder to use or maintain. IMO it is easier to maintain as you have a much better understanding of how you set up your system as you are the one that set it up to start with.

I heard it can completely crash your system if your a noob.

You can break any distro if you mess with things. The only big difference is Arch encourages/requires more messing around at the start then other distros. And IMO is easier to fix if you do mess things up - you can always just boot a live USB and reinstall broken packages or reconfigure things without needing a full reinstall again. You can basically follow the install guides again for the bits that are broken to fix just about anything. And that is only if you break something critical in booting. In my early days I broke (requiring a full reinstall) way more ubuntu installs then I have ever broken my Arch ones later on. It is really just about how much you want to tinker with things and how much you know about what you are tinkering with as to if they will break or not rather then what base distro you use.

And you can always try the install process and play around with different distros in a VM to get a feel for them and learn what they are like. So don’t be afraid to try out various different ones and find the one you like the most. Your choice is never set in stone either. Just ensure you have good backups of everything you care about and the worst that will happen is you need to reinstall and restore your backups every once in a while.

but my main needs are not really discussed

…

So in essence i need something stable that is relatively easy to use and has great ue5 and gaming perf.

That is probably the most common set of requirements people ask for. In reality, with a few exceptions, there is really not that much difference between distros given those requirements. UE5 is newer so the biggest change there would be that you might find distros that ship newer versions of stuff might run it slightly better then distros that ship older software. In practice I think it has been out for long enough that you wont see much difference unless you want to play something new on the day of release (but these days those are all buggy messes anyway… not sure your choice of distro will make as big a difference as waiting a few weeks/months for the initial patches to rollout).

Remember, all distros are essentially based off the same software, the biggest difference being what desktop environment they ship with and what versions of software there ship (and how how long they stay on that version). By far the biggest difference you will see if what desktop environment they use and all distros essentially package the same set of desktop environments - each might come with different ones by default but they typically contain all the popular ones in their repos.

i need something stable… great gaming perf

In particular these two points. Do you know what you are asking for here? These are the most bland and wishy washy requirements. Everyone wants something stable and fast, never seen anyone ask for something that crashes all the time and is slow. But worst these tend to be on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of requirements, if you optimize for one you tend to trade off the other.

Even stability has multiple meanings. In terms of crash stability you will find all distros to be about the same. No one distro wants to ship buggy crashy software. But at times they do. And it is really just the luck of the draw as to when this might happen to you based on what software you use, how you configure your system and what hardware you have. Some combinations just don’t work for some weird reason and you wont know until you hit it. This is why you hear some people claim one distro is a buggy mess while some other one is rock solid while someone else argues the exact opposite. All main stream distros are just as good as any other in terms of this and you are just unlucky if you ever do run into that type of issue. The biggest problems in this regard tends to be when a new major version of something comes out - but like with gaming it can be beneficial to wait a few months for any issues to be patched before jumping to the latest big distro version.

The other side of stability is API stability - or the lack of things changing over time as new versions of stuff get released. There are two main types of distros in this regard, point release distros which freeze major versions of packages between their major releases so you wont get any new features during the release cycle that version of the distro. Then you have to deal with all the breaking changes from newer versions of software once every so often when a new distro version comes out. Vs rolling release distros that upgrade major versions constantly and so generally follow a lot closer to the latest versions of things than point release distros. Really the big trade off here is not if you encounter breaking changes.

Any distro will need to deal with them at some point, the choice is how often you deal with them. You can wait years on the same version of a point release distro and only need to deal with all the breaking changes once every few years, or once every 6 months. Or you can deal with things as they come out with a rolling release distro. But while it might sound nice to only deal with it every few years it also means you need to deal with all the changes at once. Which can be much more disruptive when you do decide to. Quite often I find the slower upgrading distros are better off with just a full reinstall on the latest version than upgrading from one to the next. Personally I prefer dealing with small things frequently as they tend to be easier to fix and less disruptive over longer periods of time. When I was running kubuntu I used to end up reinstalling it ever 6 months as the upgrades never worked for me (though this was a long time ago), but my oldest arch install lasted probably probably 5-10 years or so.

And at the same time how frequently you get the latest versions of things means you get any performance optimizations and support for newer hardware or newer games as well. But also any bugs or regressions. It is a double edged sword. Which is why stability and performance tend to be a leaver you can tune between rather than two separate things to can achieve. Just like overclocking, the more performance you can get out of a system tends to result in the system becoming less stable overall. Everyone wants the most stable and fastest system, but in reality everyone has a different limit on how much or what types of stability they are willing to give up on to achieve different levels of performance.

But out the box, you will find most distros to be very much within a couple of % of each other and which is fastest will vary depending on which games you want to play and what hardware you have. But they all tend to have quite a bit of head room to optimizes for specific use cases as they all are optimizing for the general use case which is typically just trading off performance in one thing for another. But again, we are talking about tiny difference overall.

There is in this case, and why Linus did accept the patch in the end. Previous cases less so though which is why Linus is so pissed at this one.

The reason for this new feature is to help fix data loss on users systems - which is a fine line between a bug and a new feature really. There is precedent for this type on thing in RC releases from other filesystems as well. So the issue in this instance is a lot less black and white.

That doesn’t excuse previous behaviour though.

There is not really one best distro out there - or else there would only be one distro. But for someone new you will find basically any mainstream/popular distro good enough for your usecase. The best one for you will come down to personal preference and will likely - at least at the start - be centered on which desktop environment you like the most. KDE will probably feel more like Windows. Though gnome I think tends to be the default on most distros. You will find popular distros have multiple flavors with various desktop environments as well. Your best bet is to download a few and put them on a usb and try them out before installing. That will give you a better idea of what you want.Or just pick one and go for it if you don’t care that much - it will probably be good enough.

From what I can tell xbps-src are just the source packages to the main repos in Void. That is not what AUR is. We have access to the main repo sources in Arch just like Void. The main thing about AUR is anyone can contribute without any gated approvals. That is the big difference between the main source repos of either distro and AUR. Unless I have misunderstood what xbps is.

but looking at templates they can actually understand its kinda simple script and get the idea of how it works

Same exact idea with PKGBUILDs. No benefit to Void here. The way Void does things will not change people looking at or understanding the packages they install. You have the same optitunities on both systems for looking at the source of packages. So that argument for Void is void :)

Also void has runit so this mean u have to get more simple programs to run system like seatd dbus and etc.

Not really a good argument either. Systemd and runit are different but that doesn’t make runit better in terms of learning anything. If you want to learn how most Linux systems boot and operate you need to learn systemd as that is what the vast majority of distros use. Learning runit instead only means you are learning a niche way of booting a tiny fraction of systems.

Neither of these arguments are a very strong case for Void over arch.

XBPS-SRC does not look like an alternative to AUR at all. It looks like Voids alternative to https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages - where Arch maintains all its packages. Nor is comparing the number of packages in AUR to Void main repos a good idea - Arch has its own main repos that are a better equivalent. The Void templates do not look dissimilar form what a PKGBUILD file is either and you can do the same things with writing your own PKGBUILD or pulling them from repos if you really want to. I don’t see how void is any better then Arch in anything you have described here. IMO it just looks like it does more of the same things with a bit difference in syntax/commands you run. Nothing you have said here is really a solid argument for using Void or Arch at all.

The AUR is not even that great. I think most people seem to get confused between what is in the AUR and the main packages since they just use tools like yay that install from both. But most people only use a couple of packages from the AUR - it is the package selection in the main repos which is what is so nice about Arch. The AUR is just nice for more niche things that have not made it into the main repos yet.

I hope u don’t use AUR blindly and just do yay -S something without looking what pkgbuild is doing, it might be dangerous not knowing what program can do and what script that is downloading it too right?

Same goes for Void? Most people wont read the source of third party packages they install. No matter what distro they are on. AUR tooling does try to help with this but most people ignore it. Same will go for Void. It is not a distro problem - just a humans are lazy problem. Plus even if people did read them there is only a small subset of people that actually understand them enough to spot obviously malicious packages - though that can spot hidden malicious packages are vastly smaller.

252 of that 592 used memory is buffers/cache, not application memory. That is used by the kernel for kernel buffers and the filesystem cache - IE files read by something at some point. The kernel keeps them in memory in case they are needed again to speed up file reads. You can effectively ignore these vales as they will always grow to fill your ram and will be evicted when programs require memory and there is not enough free.

These tools are not lieing to you, just telling you something other then what you are reading into them. Tracking and reporting on what is using memory is a complex topic and here used is just what is physically allocate. It doesn’t mean much over all as it always tends to be full of your system has been running for a decent amount of time. Available is typically the more useful one to look at as it is an estimate about how much the kernel can reclaim now if an application request it without needing to swap things out.

Can you share the output of free? There are multiple values to read from that.

If you want to be safe backup anything you care about before hand. Assume that you might end up needing to wipe the system and reinstall everything. Encrypting the Linux partitions should not affect windows but there are so many other steps that could go wrong when partitioning and installing a system it is better to backup everything you care about just incase.

Any service you use passkeys with instead of passwords won’t put you in another leaked password database. The public key just needs to be invalidated and you can move on with your life.

Does it though? Is there anything wrong with your public key being, um public? All they can do with it is verify who you are, (or technically encrypt things that only you can read - not that pass keys are used in this way?).

Passwords can be secure when the end user picks a strong one. But that is the biggest problem with them, the end user. They don’t pick good passwords and decades have shown us the general public are bad at passwords.

Passkeys are not biometrics. They are much simpler. In a very simple way you can think of them as a secure long random password that is stored on you device, generated per device, and not sent over the wire to the other side (so more like public/private key cryptography I believe).

The passkey on your device can be stored in an encrypted vault or even secure hardware that requires a pin/password or key to unlock.

They are not getting rid of multifactor codes and can be used with them. But by protecting them locally you can still have 2 factors to access them - the hardware/vault that contains them and the pin/password/biometric that unlocks the vault. And that is in addition to server side multifactor systems.

But even without all that you still gain massive benefits over passwords as it stops cross site comprises when one sites gets their password database leaked. Or brute forcing access to systems by guessing weak passwords that most people use.

You should have a live USB of the distro you want to use and ensure you have backups of all the data you care about. Then the easiest/quickest/least error prone way is to just wipe the whole drive and reinstall the distro from the live USB. They typically have an option to wipe and install things from an empty drive. Then just restore your data from your backups.

You could also, after creating backups, from a live USB environment delete the windows partitions and resize the linux ones - being careful not to delete the EFI partition as that is where the boot loader lives. You can optionally delete the windows boot loader from the EFI partition as well. If done right you should still be able to boot into your linux system afterwards though when missing with partitions like this, especially when you don’t know what you are doing, it can be easy to break the boot systems. These can be fixed from a live environment and there are many guides out there on how to do that.

You can always just reinstall the system again if you mess things up and cannot figure out how to fix them - so always prep for that case by backing up everything you care about first.

Probably also forgot to pay the bribe.

Helix IMO has one huge benifit over Kakoune - inbuilt LSP and treesitter support and sane defaults. It takes the best bits of kakoune and neovim and improves on them both. This gives me an editor with enough IDE like support that I can use it for just about anything. All with only a few lines of config and zero plugins.

This means I don’t need to spend ages trying to configure my editor to work with various languages or working around its archaic defaults. I can just install it, optionally tweak some minor settings (like the theme and turning off auto bracers), install the LSP servers for the languages I need and I can get to coding.

And after years of fiddling with neovim/vim to get it to it behave in a reasonable, but not perfect, manor helix is a breath of free air. I did try kakoune for a very short time after getting pissed off with neovims configuration and plugins, but gave up on it quickly when I had to dive into getting more plugins configured for even basic things like LSP support (though this was years ago, back when helix was not in a daily usable state either).

Yeah, it would be nice to have plugins in helix (and they will come one day), but IMO the saner defaults and unbuilt support for most of what I used plugins for before is far nicer than getting support for the few bits that might be missing.

Kakoune promotes the idea that you should visually see the text you’re operating on before running the command.

This is what helix does as well, and it shares kakounes keybindings and input system. So it is more similar to kakoune in that regard than vim with different keybindings. Really it is more of a kakoune clone, with inbuilt support for LSP and treesitter like neovim.

For example, instead of it having a built-in sort command, you use the unix sort command to sort your lines.

You can do this in vim and helix as well. Both can run external commands, pipe your open file to external commands or just your current selection to them. I use the unix sort in helix to sort lines all the time.

As with everything - it depends. Sometimes the FOSS versions are not very good, sometimes they are better than the official. Sometimes they are better for privacy, sometimes they make no real difference at all, sometimes the web version is better. Sometimes there is no FOSS version, sometimes the official one does not support Linux.

You are going to need to go on a case by case bases and decide each time.