Ubuntu has started going off the deep end. They’ve been heading in that direction for a while, but they recently (I guess like 5 years-ish ago) hit this corporatey, money-grabbing, mentality that’s so completely opposite of what made Linux great.

The feel I get about it is 10 years ago, tutorials were written using Ubuntu because it was an easy distro to use and was a great platform for beginners, so people used that as their platform to teach. Now it feels like tutorials are written using Ubuntu because they’re being sponsored to. A lot of how-tos I come accros have the same vibe as watching a video animation tutorial that uses adobe and oh gosh, it’s also sponsored by adobe. Or a networking tutorial sponsored by Cisco. I’ve actually started just looking to see if another distro is acknowledged before I actually see what they have to say.

There’s a very different feel if you’re trying to set something up and a website has “if you’re in this family of linux, here’s what you do, or if you’re in this one, do this” versus “so you want to set up x in linux? Here’s how you do it in Ubuntu”. It’s as if no other distro exists.

Anyway, ignoring that rant. Linux is super stable these days, you can take pretty much any distro and you’ll be fine. I tend to gravitate toward the base distros, like fedora, opensuse, and Debian over Rocky, mint, etc. I haven’t come across one in the past five years that gave me any trouble, except when it came to updated nvidia drivers and wayland. In which case some distros were behind a month or two on getting those updated.

I want <device 1> to interact with <device 2> as if it was native

“KDE connect can probably do it”

I have many multiple tb drives to sell them. As many as they want.

Drivers are on the computer, firmware is in the component. Firmware can be updated in both windows and Linux and will affect both systems. Drivers live solely on the OS, so fedora drivers will not be affecting windows. There’s an incredibly small chance that your firmware was updated and caused this, but I don’t recall a firmware update ever occurring automatically on Linux, I’ve always had to do it manually.