Damn, sorry to hear that, my experience with the 480 was really good. Admittedly AMD wasn't quite caught up yet with hardware video encoding at the time that card was designed (basically a reskinned 480). Specifically, hardware video encoding has gotten drastically better since then on AMD cards.

Have you seen protondb? A pretty impressive number of games just work. Really we are at the point now where games that don't run are more the exception, and usually it is due to Anti-cheat incompatibility or some very specific issue.

I worked in a print store and brother those huge xerox machines are no joke. Tens of thousands of pages with minimal maintenance and downtime. Consumer printers are often terrible, especially inkjets, but this just seems like you've never used a nice one before. The problem is most people would rather pay 50 dollars for a really terrible printer to print with it 20 times rather than just order 20 prints from a shop or cough up a couple hundred for a really well made printer, laser or no.

ALVR works great, assuming SteamVR in general works with your DE (no Gnome support atm but KDE works for sure).

So glad you wrote this first so I didn't have to point it out lol

That display out will be hard to match with an old optiplex or laptop, but I agree, the pricing is getting less absurdly low and more just moderately low.

Not what I said at all. But when you are switching from a platform whose issues are familiar and already factored into your workflow to a new one, the new platform has to justify itself despite those new issues. I'm an avid Linux user and could not imagine going back to Windows for work, but we can't expect people to deal with new issues when they are already exhausted by old ones. The experience has to be better in basically every way to convince people who aren't actively interested to switch. I think with the dust settling in audio and video stuff and the new crop of sleek DEs we are getting close to that, but for many people Windows is a better experience despite all those problems, because everything else is still that much simpler. Control does not necessitate complexity, and Linux is still more complex.

Flatpaks have finally made most distros interchangeable for me, they're a wonderful tool. Not every single thing should be installed with them, but the current compromise of shipping core system components (including DEs in here) as native packages and user apps as flatpaks has drastically reduced the amount of troubleshooting I've had to do. When the vast majority of your tiny packages have no overhead, you can eat a few gigs for a nicer user experience. Even on my 120GB laptop that hasn't been a practical issue for me.

Death by 1000 papercuts, there's always a thing or two that won't work perfectly. Sorry to hear that man. It's really nice for those of us that don't have any issues like that. Hopefully when/if you try again in the future things go more smoothly.

Actually read this backwards the first couple times and thought to myself "Wow! That's surprisingly candid of them." Lmao.

Since you mentioned darktable I assume you already know this, but depending on the camera's raws and the presets that imagemagick has for converting these photos the results might be undesirable if not inspected or tweaked. Not disparaging any advice given here, just mentioning that generally raws are edited on a case by case basis to fix camera artifacts and color issues. Hope the solutions others have posted work out for you!

Looks cool! But the GitHub mentions needing a 40-80GB GPU? Was really hoping to test this out myself but it looks like that may be out of the cards for me.