Might it be that you didn’t re-lock your bootloader, or so? But if this was many years ago, many things may well have progressed since. I wouldn’t know details of that time, just recently switched over from Apple.

Not all Finnish banks require play services for their apps, if any. Mine works just fine on eOS. Don’t know about Mobiilivarmenne, if you’d rather use that

At least ING’s app works happily in eOS via Aurora Store.

Good for you. Doesn’t match the experience of most creatives I’ve met.

Many people’s income, especially in creative fields, simply depends on specific software. Photographers, video editors come to mind; having a certain style and efficiency to your workflow might just be the thing that keeps the cash flow positive. There’s often no time or energy to even think about an alternative, sadly. This is one of the things why I think it’s crucially important we don’t demand, even implicitly, that people switch everything at once. I just installed Spotify flatpak on a friend’s Debian. No regrets. Every little switch matters in the end.

Adobe stuff still doesn’t work reliably on Linux to my knowledge. And having to even consider any kind of virtualization is a huge deal for anyone who’s using the technology for some other purpose than technology, which is most of the users.

Dating apps mix the social circles pretty significantly so it can also easily be a case of going on dates with randoms and seeing the shift that way.

Gay and bi men are often excluded from donating due to higher HIV risk I believe.

If you have an nvidia card, which is very common and can’t always be avoided, there is significant benefit in newer drivers, for one

Right, okay. If you want to fool around as you have a stable daily driver already, sure get a more DIY distro or just try out multiple things before settling. Debian should do the trick though, it’s somewhat DIY while being very stable so the updates rarely break anything. But you might also like Arch, or NixOS, or just Mint. I think the point is it’s just not very easy to predict how each of these is gonna actually run on your actual hardware. So to really find out you’ll have to install something and acknowledge you may need to re-do it a couple times before finding something that works for you.

As you already use Pop, why change? Is there something bothering, or something does not run well? How old is this laptop?

If you don’t feel like continuing with Pop, I’d try Debian as you value stability. It may be a slight pain to set up initially, but when it’s done it should generally Just Work until eternity. The expert installer allows you to enable non-free repos for any proprietary drivers by default.

Mint has the downside of not coming with mainstream desktop environments. Otherwise a great distro, but the message it gives to newcomers is that Linux still looks like it looked 10 years ago. Still very worth for some installs, and op is not a newcomer, but anyway.

Arch defaults to pipewire I think even if you select pulseaudio in archinstall (might have changed by now ofc) If your laptop is older pulseaudio might work much better (did for me)

Vscode and gitlens for routine stuff, and then just CLI when push comes to shove and I need some more advanced feature.

Thanks!

For the record, which DE do you run on it? KDE?

Thanks!

Regarding gaming, I had big trouble trying to play some steam games on gnome. After switching to KDE stuff just works.

Also you can’t (feasibly) run Hyprland on Debian stable, nor can you (easily) run GNOME on MX Linux, etc. So there are a few points where distro choice does have an effect. But I think I got the point across enough with the question

I’d be very interested in these polls if you have some to link!