Dude it’s all bottoms here!

Short answer: no

Long answer: only the most important things should even have such low-level access to the system. A fucking game is not in that category. Nooooooo

This is true. Even projects with good reputations get caught up in shit like the XZ back door in Linux.

If you haven’t read up on that fiasco, you really should look into it. It got way too far before being caught all because people suck and ruin things for others.

There is nuance here. Not every crack is malicious but you have to assume they all are because some of them are. Trusting a source is irrelevant. Many security products will falsely tag cracked software as dangerous just because it’s cracked, not because it found a specific bit of nasty code, and this feeds the idea that you can’t believe when people tell you cracked software is unsafe. But there are many truly bad cracks out there. When in doubt, don’t trust it.

And you should always doubt free shit.

SSDs can get firmware updates like anything else.

Get a picture of yourself taking a shower. Print that onto the shower curtain.

KDE really is what windows promised to become back in the XP days and just never did.

You can like Linux without committing to it 100% of the time. It’s an operating system, not your wife.

Manjaro is sort of speedrunning things. It is not a responsibly managed project. You CAN get shit done with manjaro the same way you can drive to work by just flooring the accelerator the entire way. It’s a bad idea but technically it can work.

Opposite problem. Some wireless cards have unstable low power modes that get turned on anyway.

wireless cards have their own power management settings that typically arent shown in the GUI and in linux the defaults for some of them are so aggressive they cause problems. Intels are notorious for this but some older broadcom cards had this problem too.

Unfortunately I dont have specific instructions on how to tame an angry fedora. It’s not my main so I dont have that memorized, but I do know Ubuntu likes to include some quality of life tweaks out of box that other distros like fedora can omit, including power management settings that can help tame stubborn wireless cards like these.

My family grew up with Crash Team Racing and we still break that game out every Christmas and Thanksgiving. Might be able to get them to look at this.

Does anyone remember uplink?

Okay then try Fedora and look into power management settings for the WiFi adaptor

Mint is in a weird place right now with their transition to Wayland. It’s not complete yet and in my opinion it’s not ready for daily use.

Google used to use Ubuntu on MacBooks though I’m not sure if that’s still the case. It has a reputation of being straightforward and well supported but not everyone likes what canonical is doing anymore.

Fedora is weirdly more complex and its documentation isn’t as great as it looks on the surface. It’s worth a try but honestly documentation is more important than out of box support at this point.

Arch needs a lot of handholding and it’s a bit of a handful but the wiki is amazing and frankly the best part of that particular distro. Unlike Ubuntu you would get a virgin GNOME experience more similar to fedora but it’s also easier to break things in arch than elsewhere so keep that in mind before you head down this road. Arch is an excellent education but not always a best place to live in.

Start with Ubuntu if you want to see how that hardware is supported. If it is a pain in the ass in Ubuntu, it’s likely to be a pain in the ass elsewhere too. Consider using a usb wifi nubbin and just moving in with that.

Nvidia doesn’t have stable drivers. Report for misinformation.

This is probably not the best system for bazzite. Stick with something with a longer track record like Debian/ubuntu or better documentation like arch.

Those old macs can get really pissy with Linux sometimes but it can be done. Their WiFi chips are incredibly obnoxious to deal with. Worst case scenario you can swap wifi cards in some those or even simply use a USB WiFi card instead.

I was taking apart a printer when I was a kid. I learned not to pry up the hard way.

Screwdriver right in the eye socket. Amazing I didn’t lose the eye.