You can, if the laptop supports VLink/DP-in, such as the Minisforum V3.

Ain't really a fix for games using Proton

Wdym? It works fine for Proton games as well.

This has nothing to do with Arch or Bazzite, it's actually a bug in recent kernels. Switching to Mint only fixed it for you because Mint uses an old kernel.

The fix/workaround is to enable "above 4G decoding" and "resizable BAR" in your BIOS. If your BIOS does not have these options, you can either downgrade to an earlier kernel (or OS image if you're on Bazzite), or switch to a patched kernel like the Cachy kernel.

You cannot go back after trying it

I did! Used to have a Samsung 49" ultrawide. After using it for a couple of years, I sold it and got a 16:10 32" QHD, which I found worked better for me (+ one or two laptop screens for chat / random stuff when I'm doing serious work).

The biggest issue I had with the ultrawide is that most of the games that I played weren't optimised for it, especially in some games where things like the mini-map might be at the far end of the screen, or worse, if it was an older game then you'd have to put up with black bars, or play the game in windowed mode.

Is that all? Will that remove all the traces of arch?

There will be some other minor dot files in your /home which you might want to review, like .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile etc. These should be mostly harmless, but if you don't recall customising them, then yeah free to nuke all the dot files. Also be aware that some programs also leave their configs outside the .config folder, like Firefox might have a .mozilla folder, GTK programs might create a .themes folder, vim has .vim. So you might want to review and delete these as well, if you want a clean config.

As for the last step - just before you boot into your new distro, you might to get rid of the Arch/Endeavour entries from your ESP/UEFI. Run efibootmgr to see your current UEFI boot entries, then nuke the entries using efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b #.

And to get rid of the GRUB configs, delete your <ESP>/EFI/grub folder. I'm guessing your /boot is on your root partition? If not then you'll also need to delete /boot/grub.

Now when you install your next distro, you should get a nice and clean GRUB install.

1. No
2. You'll need to delete your ~/.config, ~/.local, ~/.cache ( and maybe ~/.var, which is your Flatpak app data/cache). Might be best to rename your .config instead of outright deleting it, just in case you need to restore some old config.
3. It's been a while since I used Nobara, but IIRC it only creates the default @ and @home subvolumes.
4,5. Nobara should have Timeshift installed by default.

Honestly though, since you said that you want something that "just works" for gaming and coding, you should just get Bazzite. Bazzite is an immutable distro and everything is set up to work out-of-the-box. You never have to worry about broken updates again due to atomic updates and image rollbacks. You can directly boot from a previous image from GRUB (no need to restore it first), pin known good images to your GRUB, and even rollback to any previous image via the web (upto 90 days) - all with just a single command. And for coding, you can easily set up a Distrobox container to install all your tools and IDEs etc, it integrates well with the host OS so you won't even notice/care that it's inside a container.

This was in fact what prompted my search - the Gnome calculator is so horribly bloated, and yeah, it should have no business making network connections, at least not by default - this should be an opt-in behaviour.

You can already run Linux apps using Termux and Termux-X11, and I'd say the performance would be better than this demo, because this is running in a virtual machine and uses it's own kernel, whereas with Termux you're running your apps directly on top of the Android Linux kernel. Also, you don't have the overhead of running ChromeOS on top of Android.

I don't play D4 anymore so I can't say if this still works, but back when I did, I used to launch it (ie the Battle.net launcher) from Steam, as a non-Steam game.

I also used the latest Proton-GE as the compatibility tool, so that's something you could try as well.

It's r/w, if you specify the filesystem type as ntfs3. I believe if you use just ntfs it'll be read-only, to mimic the behaviour of the old driver, for compatibility reasons.

Mine looks like this:

UUID=blah /media/games ntfs3 uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000,rw,user,exec,nofail,nocase,windows_names 0 0

If you're copy-pasting this, make sure your uid and gid matches of course.

But the key thing for Steam is you need to have your compatdata folder on a Linux partition, because Proton creates folders with invalid characters (like :). windows_names would prevent that of course, and thus prevents corruption, but it would cause Proton to fail since if can't create those folders/files. So you'll need to symlink that folder on your NTFS disk to point to a folder on a Linux partition.

Eg:

$ mkdir -p ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata
$ ln -s ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata /media/games/Steam/steamapps/ 

Of course, before you run the above, you'll need to delete the existing compatdata folder from the NTFS disk.

I'd like to see a simple, dependency-free, calculator app, written in Rust, using egui. All other GUI calculator apps I've seen so far are unnecessarily heavy, using bloated toolkits like GTK or Qt.

This would be handy for those run a GTK/Qt-free environment, and/or those who just want a tiny calculator app (optimised for the smallest binary size) without any external dependencies. Preferably even compiled using musl, to remove any glibc dependencies - resulting in a simple, small, portable binary that can run on any distro and doesn't even need to be installed.

Eventually, I would like to see this idea expanded to other apps - such as a simple text editor, a simple image editor, and maybe even a simple and lightweight web browser using Servo.