Its main purpose is to prevent malware from booting. In my experience its main purpose seems to be preventing me from booting things I want like ventoy flash drives, nvidia drivers, and Linux distros that don’t support it. Same goes for tpm module. Its main purpose seemed to be the switch keeping win 10 from upgrading. I turned them both off and haven’t felt the strong need to turn them back on yet.

That said, and my bad computing habits aside, you probably should turn them ON. I’m not sure they will do all that much realistically speaking, but if it isn’t getting in your way (and it shouldn’t), then ON isn’t a bad default state to be in.

It used to be a pain. Multiple versions that didn’t all work. Today it’s pretty painless. A lot of installers will actually do it for you now.

In arch (at least the last time I did it), it was just a matter of picking the right package and installing it with pacman

EndeavorOS’s installer will do it for you

I use Fedora these days. It didn’t do it automatically the last time I loaded from scratch (not an upgrade), but the rpm fusion team/repository made it simple. I just followed the crystal clear instructions on their website.

I think mint does it automatically with the installer…

Honestly I really don’t even think about nvidia drivers anymore.

Hard

94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.

But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.

Yup. Go ahead and try turning that cell phone radio thing off. Why do you need an app for remote start? Why can’t it be on the keyfob anymore? But again, nothing to see here - just the continued enshittification of everything.

I’ve been telling people since this dna testing started that sooner or later that data will be for sale, an insurance company will buy it, and then get used against people to increase their health insurance rates or deny claims.

But I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist according to everyone ;)

Same reason I don’t want to buy a new car anymore…

I will try it! Never heard of it. I also hate the markdown nonsense.

It’s super easy on the steam deck. You don’t need to know Linux. You boot into desktop mode, open Firefox, install emudeck by clicking on a link. Then you configure in there a bit and download roms - all pretty straightforward and easy. A noob can do it in a couple of hours.

Now that said - the steam deck is hit or miss emulating switch games. Most games work awesome. But not every game. It’s not clear to me if the hardware is a little too slow for emulation overhead, or if it’s more an issue between the emulator and the game. My take is it’s a bit of both.

Someone else will have to comment on modding the switch as I haven’t done that, but I bet once modded, it plays every game 100% fine.

Assuming my prior paragraph is true: if the ONLY thing you want to do is switch games - then I’d skip the steam deck. If you want to do OTHER things as well (snes, nes, all other older consoles, actual pc games that play on steam deck) then ya, steam deck all the way. Make sense?

When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)

Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.

Love mine and daily drive it. Not janky, zero issues. Everything works on Linux. Not sure what you’re referring to.

Can you get more bang for your buck? Yes, to start. But let’s compare after a couple of upgrades on mine vs whole laptop replacements with other brands.