My English teacher used to do variations on this joke.

Sounds like you should run for office.

It’s going to have to start at the local level. They’re usually the ones that have less budget and less influence to sell, anyway.

They could, and if I was an EU government entity, I would do my homework on what they were offering, even if they were acting 100% in good faith.

However, helping governments get away from the clutches of the likes of Apple and Microsoft seems like a noble goal, and if this idea spurs that change regardless of the adoption of this distro, I think it will have been a net positive.

From the subheading on the ReadMe.

Community-led Proof-of-Concept for a free Operating System for the EU public sector 🇪🇺

So it’s made by the EU in the sense that the maintainers are likely citizens of the EU, I guess.

An aunt used to make these lamb cakes for Easter. They always looked fantastic with the frosting and coconut, but they were surprisingly dense, and they tasted like they were made with lamb fat or something instead of butter.

I am food adventurous and will eat just about anything, but inedible doesn’t begin to describe these cakes, and she had no clue they were terrible, so she kept making them for years.

I don’t know what any of that means, either. I think real world increases in performance are something like 10% for general computing, but it’s negligible for gaming.

The only thing that’s distinctly different from EndeavorOS is they have their own repos for optimized packages and their own helper interface for changing kernels, adding common packages, getting drivers, etc.

I do want SOME customizability, in the sense that I don’t want some hard work tweak I’ve implemented being nuked by an update.

Bazzite can do that. Unlike SteamOS, you cannot edit the system files, so there’s no customizations to wipe out. That said, user customizations generally live in /var and /etc, and those are left intact during updates. They’re also the only directories that are mutable on purpose (/var/home/youruser is found there). You can also layer RPM files or dnf packages using rpm-ostree install. It’s a longer install process than traditional package managers, but it ensures you always have a restore point.

As a sidenote, I do recommend also checking out distrobox, as it’s a useful tool anywhere but especially on atomic systems.

CachyOS sounds cool, but arch scares me.

Don’t be. Arch isn’t a big deal. The only reason people tend to like it is because vanilla Arch is a blank slate. That means the user gets to decide what goes into their system, but distros like CachyOS take all of that choice and decide what to include for you, in advance. So you get the same update schedule as the rest of Arch users, but you don’t have to think so hard about whether you want to use zfs or btrfs (for example).

If you want a great installation experience and mature community, I should also mention EndeavorOS. It’s Arch, but boy do they have the installation and onboarding down really well. If you’re nervous about CachyOS or Arch at all, check out this one.

CosmicOS I might avoid just because I don’t need beta instability right now.

Fair, and it’s not even in beta, it’s Alpha. I just mention it, because it’s going to be a big deal when it’s finished. Keep an eye on it.

Spin up some VMs and give em all a try!

Mint is a great first choice, and you should be able to do lots with it, but there’s others you might want to at least be aware of, if gaming is important.

If you don’t care about customization at all, Bazzite (Fedora). While you can update typical things like panels, icon styles, window decorations, etc., making changes to things like SDDM requires a little bit more creativity.

That’s because it’s atomic (mostly immutable). You don’t have to worry about a bad update breaking your system, since you can just rpm-ostree rollbackand get back to it. The downside is that atomic distros have a different way they’re designed, so learning how to work with them has a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s worth learning, imo.

CachyOS (Arch). Kinda the hot thing right now. It’s Arch but oriented towards gaming, content creation, and optimized computing. You’ll have full customization abilities like a traditional distro, access to the AUR, and some really nice kernel and scheduler tweaking tools.

Pop!_OS Cosmic (Ubuntu). Pop!_OS has been a longtime popular choice, but they’re currently throwing all their effort into their brand new Cosmic desktop environment, so I’d wait until everything is at least in Beta. It looks great, though, and I think it’s going to set some new standards for user experiences.

Oh, how I wish spoilers worked in my Lemmy app…