alt Hacker NewsLong time Linux Desktop user here. I really think Linux is a great choice as a Desktop in days of liquid glass and webviews. There are a lot of choices to make, but in the end it is working out really well (at least for me). KDE and the new COSMIC desktop environment with tiling support are tempting, but for now I keep using GNOME until I have more time to check them out.
The things I personally had problems with is BTRFS and printers. BTRFS was completely irrecoverable after a system crash, full story see here [1]. Since I've read a lot of these horror stories while doing some research after the crash, I would encourage everyone using it to be careful and backup your system on a daily basis. I switched to ZFS with ZFSBootMenu[2] and never looked back.
Printer-wise, I have a Canon network printer / scanner which seems to use a strange proprietary protocol. On Fedora everything worked fine while on Arch I did not find a way to get this thing working (I tried hard with different options like driverless, gutenprint, cupsd etc.) - printing also seems to be a bit of a security nightmare when changing firewall settings is mandatory.
Everything else is working absolutely stunning.
1: https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=13013
Replies
I've run BTRFS on my server (and external drive backups) for over 10 years without issues. I would use BTRFS on my main rig, but Steam (or perhaps Proton in particular) doesn't like it, so Ext4 there.
Quick note on #2 - there aren't really any issues with storing your encryption root passphrase in a file. If the file is owned by root, with no read permissions for any account, only root can access it. Since it's stored on an encrypted dataset, and your initramfs is as well, it's unreadable when the machine is off. Lastly, if anybody _does_ have a root shell on your machine, they can change the encryption passphrase without needing to know the current value.
In short, I'm not sure there are any real issues with having it on disk but unreadable by anybody but root.