As a general rule :

• Never doing stuff that will take care of itself. Since the dishes want to dry themselves, it'd be really rude to prevent them from doing so by manually wiping them.
• Minimising the time spent in pointless effort for things that will need to be undone. So never making my bed, only folding clothes that really need folding and that I won't use soon, etc.

Random stuff :

• When cooking, making food for several meals at a time.
• Using a rice cooker (or other appliances that cook food for you and that you don't need to watch).
• Using several laundry bags, one for each type of laundry program or liquid, so that it's already pre-sorted and I can see easily if there's enough in one bag for a wash. It avoids going through everything only to find there's not enough black clothes/white clothes/delicate clothes/towels/bedsheets/whatever for a laundry.
• Never using laundry clips. They take too long to put and remove. Instead I use hangers and S hooks, and for the small items that can't be hung on hooks and won't stay on hangers like gloves and socks, I just dump them on a shelf made of metal bars (there's folding ones you can put on a radiator).
• After doing laundry, leaving clothes I will probably wear soon where they hang instead of folding them and putting them in their place only to have to take them out later.
• Having a "to put in bathroom" and "to put in kitchen" basket where I put stuff I need to put back in the bathroom and kitchen, so I don't have to walk there for every item.
• Not putting a duvet in a cover because it's very tiring and I really hate doing it. Instead I sandwich it between two larger bedsheets.

On my computer :

• Keybinding every frequent apps and actions, rofi almost everything else (apps, ssh, file browser in some cases, calculator, unit converter). Saves a lot of time, pain and aggravation by not clicking so much all the time.
• Using 'vim -y' for simple text editing cause I don't have months to spare learning regular vim, or years reconfiguring emacs' shorcuts, just to take some notes or make an ASCII drawing. And nano's shortcuts make my brain hurt almost as much as emacs make my hands hurt. (To be fair, I probably would save more time in the long run by just learning vim but my brain starts going "NOOOPE I'm on strike" whenever I consider doing it ^_")
• I'm considering trying NixOS because I keep wasting time forgetting if I already configured something, how I did it, what settings I used, etc, and having a declarative config file instead with everything listed in it seems much more practical.

« Ad funded » ? Don't they mean « Google funded » ?

NOOOOOO please you're reawakening 20+ years of accumulated Windows trauma 😭 😭 😭

That was so confusing and stressful I don't know how I --or anyone-- survived the mental strain of regularly troubleshooting Windows

Oh I had no idea that was possible, thanks :D

Definitely Nobara, it's a distro optimized for making games actually work. On other distros I always had some games that wouldn't run, but never on Nobara. Zero hassle.

Wait you can run programs that aren't installed just like that on Nix ? °o°

Why is it that every time I hear of Nix it's to learn about another thing that completely floors me...

Great rice btw :)

Well, it depends on what you want from your OS.

If you want games to work with as little bother as possible then a gaming distro might be a better option. The only distro I tried where games JUST WORK on their own is Nobara. They have lots of patches to make games actually work. If you want to play Windows games on steam then be sure to install It's made by the same guy that makes ProtonGE, which you should definitely install if you want to play Windows games on steam, whatever your distro (if it's not Nobara, you can use ProtonUp-Qt to avoid having to install it manually).

Some games just won't run on any of the distros I tried except Nobara. I'm sure you could get them working fine on Arch or any other distro with some work... but that's work. When it comes to gaming I don't want to go in computer wizard mode, I just want to ride dinosaurs. (Yes I realize the irony of saying that after ditching Nobara on my gaming pc because I would rather have Arch with some games not working than Nobara with everything working)

Other than gaming I'd say it depends if you like being forced to do things yourself.

I'm a very lazy woman who switched from Windows 10 less than one year ago and tried several distro before ending up with Arch, and it is absolute heaven compared to Windows.

Lots of stuff don't don't work on my computer, but not because Arch is broken, I just haven't got around to configuring them (lazy + adhd) or I tried but failed because I have no clue what I am doing (four months on Arch for a grand total of eight on linux, so that's to be expected). But I prefer it that way. When I really need a feature it forces me to learn how stuff work, and that was the point of installing Arch instead of a distro that would do everything for me. I've learned a dozen times more in four months on Arch than in the same time on other distros. Or in 25+ years on Windows... I've still got a long way to go and there are lot of stuff that I can't get working yet (looking at you Wayland portals >_<) but I really like it and I don't think I'll switch (though I'm very tempted to try Nix...).

It you do decide on Arch, please don't listen to people who insist that you shouldn't use the archinstall script because the only "right" way to install Arch is to do a manual install. They're morons. The script is a great way to have a working Arch install quickly and easily, so you can actually use Arch and see if you like it. There's a lot to be learned by doing a manual install, yes. But it's ridiculous to ask people who really want to use Arch to keep using other distros for however long it takes them to learn enough to do a manual Arch install, when they could just use the script and do the same learning while using Arch. If you want to do a manual install go for it, but pressuring people into it is just stupid.

I think Nobara is coded with some kind of black magic spells that probably required sacrifices of infants. It makes games actually work 😱

Arch. It's the only one I really liked out of all the distro I've tried, the others went from meh/not-my-thing to awful (really bad manjaro experince x_x). Except Nobara, it's amazing for gaming EVERYTHING JUST WORKS. And I still ditched it after trying Arch... I should probably see a therapist. My ADHD: Nope, you need to try NixOS and sink even further into the madness (I've been resisting for nearly two months but it's wearing me down, plz send help :/ )

More properly, GNU/Richard Stallman, or GNU + Richard Stallman

It was Windows 10 for me but it was not my first attempt.

The first time I failed to install linux was when I was a teenager in 2003. I don't remember which Windows version I had then, maybe 98, but I was hating it with a burning passion which hasn't improved with the next versions. It seems every new Windows version was specifically made to piss me off even more and make the experience of using my computer worse. I tried installing linux as soon as my parents bought a new computer and gave me the old one, chose Red Hat (not RHEL) because it had an installation guide that was marginally more understandable than what I found concerning debian, but it was still pretty lacking and I failed :(

Then last year I finally tried again after accidentally letting through a Windows 10 update ("accidentally" because I had a firewall blocking everything, especially Windows services). That was the update with fucking EdgeView, which broke all my work flow by breaking the CTRL+Arrow keys+Space to select multiple files and requiring to release and re-press the CTRL key each time. This came six months after I had to wipe my entire drive and reinstall Windows after getting infected, probably by cryptomining malware, by running a random exe from github to remove the Edge browser, which I only did out of desperation after all the other solutions to remove it failed (command line, powershell, registry, etc). To be fair to the malware though, it did remove Edge, and I can respect malware developers with professional ethics. I'm much less mad at the malware than I am at Windows for stressing me so much to resort to running randoms exes. Besides, there were so many times where random exes from the internet saved my sanity from Windows induced breakdowns...

As for the why :

• I don't want my OS deciding how I should use my computer.
• I don't want it to serve me piss and tell me that I should like it.
• I don't want it deciding what configuration I should be allowed to do, what needs to be hidden to make it as inconvenient as possible to change, and what it won't let me do at all unless I try third party apps to basically hack my system.
• I don't want it to stress me so much with the lack of control, transparency and understanding that I am often left in a burnout state, too mentally exhausted to attempt to change anything with my setup, all from the strain of constantly having to find very convoluted hacks for simple things while having no clue as to how or why anything works or doesn't work.
• I don't want it to prevent me from doing what I want to do. Even if what I want to do is incredibly stupid, let me do it and learn why it is stupid.
• I want to be able to actually understand how it works, at least somewhat.
• I don't want pre-installed apps, if I want something I am perfectly capable of installing it myself thank you very much.
• I don't want to have to spend 1-2 weeks debloating at each new reinstall.
• I don't want updates running automatically and installing random stuff, reactivating features I had disabled or resetting stuff I had configured, all without ever telling me what it's doing. I don't want to get so stressed by updates that I set my firewall to block the updater, and security be damned.
• I want to be able to choose how I interact with my computer and not be forced into one way decided for me.
• GIMME BACK MS-DOS ! Or any non graphical session. I don't care if I can do the same thing more easily and efficiently in a GUI, I want the option not to use one if only because it makes me happy. When I was a child and I thought computers were like magic, my parents showed me the magic spells to type in the DOS to run games from floppy disks or to launch Windows 3.11 and I felt like a computer wizard. I even read the MS-DOS manual that came with the computer, in secret because I wasn't supposed to actually use the DOS except to launch games or Windows, but it was just too fascinating to resist. Then Windows 95 came along and since then I've felt like a child being constantly condescended to.
• I don't want it to be a RAM blackhole.
• I don't want it to collect information on me.
• I don't want it to require an internet connection or an account that is not local.
• I don't want it to be controlled by a corporation.
• I want to be able to play video games (that's mostly what kept me from trying again to install linux for 20 years).

Since switching to linux and distro-hopping a lot I have added the following, which I hadn't even know were even possible before :

• I don't want anything at all preinstalled or preconfigured. Just give me a tty and let me waste my time building my system from there and learn how it works, maybe I'm crazy but it's fun (yes I ended up on arch btw).
• If I ever again have to use a desktop cluttered with shortcuts or a start menu I'm going to scream. I used to Windows+R most of my apps because I can't take the time wasted by endlessly clicking everywhere, but even that was a pain (rofi is great, rofi is awesome, rofi is god)
• I'm NEVER going back to floating windows. You'll take my tiler from my cold dead hands.

Definitely not going back =D