You would buy a smart watch or something and it would require running some weird Windows only app to set it up.

Unfortunately still the case for most BIOS updaters, RGB/cooling setups, and proprietary HID stuff. You need Windows for anything beyond the basics.

So what would “Would you recommend Nix for a newbie?” reveal?

Appreciated! I’ve always hated that nonsensical format

Nice! CachyOS and Nix are on my bucket list but I’m content with fedora atm. Used to run the CachyOS kernel on fedora before though. I think it’s an interesting choice to enable LTO for the entire kernel, and the performance was top notch! Too bad it broke my kernel headers package which broke the nvidia drivers so I had to cut my losses and purge everything back then.

What distro, and how do you like it compared to windows so far? (And I’m assuming you’re not using Arch since you didn’t say anything)

I just put “[Object object]” in one of the survey fields when I don’t like the company.

Does Debian have HWE kernels like Ubuntu? They were called backports I think

RTFDS is the equivalent for electric engineering enthusiasts. It’s supposed to be tedious af, but I honestly enjoy reading data sheets for some god forsaken reason.