Yeah. I think you can’t go wrong with either Debian or Fedora with Gnome. I would pick whichever I’m most comfortable with. The grandparents will probably never notice.

I love to give Gnome crap for being a large install, but I’ve lost count of the number of machines that I’ve put Gnome on and had it just work. And I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve searched for a fancy command line way to fix an anoyance in Gnome, and discovered there’s just a simple toggle in settings for what I want.

Yeah. It made me question why I even bought an iPhone.

Of the approaches you are considering, I’ll share what I’ve tried and how I feel it went. And I’ll throw in a bonus idea:

a) focus on accruing FOSS experience.

I now have substantial contribution history to a variety of projects on GitHub.

And an interesting thing happened - people stopped asking me to write FizzBuzz during interviews. Technical questions stopped pretty much entirely. Interviewers now tend to jump directly to team culture and fit questions.

I don’t know if my open source commits alone are responsible, but it certainly feels like it helped me.

b) develop a big project.

I tried this before “a)”, above.

While I learned a lot, I don’t think it particularly helped other than what I learned along the way.

I can’t recall being asked about any of my “big” projects on my GitHub, during interviews.

I’ve also archived pretty much all of my big projects. Big effort weekend projects don’t age gracefully, for me.

c) Pivot to IT

I’m still a programmer, but I’ve taken on Cybersecurity and Management responsibilities, to get promoted. I’ve also made myself a DevOps expert, because otherwise I constantly feel like I’m dying on the “works on my machine” hill.

I’ve had more and less code-centric roles. I have had teams add coding to my responsibilities as soon as they learned I can code.

As a manager, I frequently pave the way for folks without coding in their job description to be allowed to code. Organizations are so much better off when subject matter experts participate in automation. But I have seen plenty of resistance to coding outside of the development team.

c-2) I have made myself a DevOps expert.

I’ve taken and given plenty of “developer” interviews that could have been called “DevOps”.

Everybody needs DevOps. DevOps experience is always valuable.

d) write and share

I’ve kept up a technical blog for decades. I don’t currently (or usually) feel like it is paying dividends for the effort.

A decade ago, I saw decent traffic on relevant topics. Today, I’m not convinced that any human being ever finds my site.

Search and social media feel, to me, like they are in a very bad state, right now. I figure it can only get better, but I’m not holding my breath.

It’s possible that my website full of technical articles (linked from my resume) plays some part in my not getting asked FizzBuzz anymore.

One more that you didnt mention:

e) giving technical talks

I’ve learned that conferences are often desperate for speakers. Once I had a little evidence on my website that I won’t break down on stage, I started to have talk proposals get accepted.

It’s scary as hell, but I’m not sure anything has the same professional networking impact.

Windows 11

Uh…“from scratch”? No thanks. I’m a big fan of GCC, and don’t intend to learn to code without it.

Lol. I assumed they were shopping around for a burned out hard drinking senior developmer - one ready to walk away from computers entirely.

Is there a reliable alternative, perhaps, that actually just works?

To my knowledge, JellyFin is the reliable alternative (relatively speaking).

Holy shit. This is weirder than I realized.

I’m just realizing that the person submitting the change was demanding that their lost feature be re-added, and the repo owner decided to YOLO the change into master. Lol.

Nice.

Holds hat over heart, and salutes.

In fairness, the NASA Engineer can’t get NPM to behave either. That’s why we don’t send JavaScript to space. (Edit: Lol. I guess we totally do send JavaScript into space.)

Or do we? Now I desperately want to know what the first piece of JacaScript to run in space was/will be? It did/will mark the exact moment that we stopped taking space seriously.

The real clue here is the cropped top line “refactor…”

“Here’s a huge mostly unnecessary format change that incidentally loses some functionality I don’t care about”.

Followed by “why won’t anyone accept my contributions?!”

Oh, I didn’t realize but I’ve also had a Jade laptop. I was just holding it upside down.

This collection is fantastic.

Mildly related - Ryan North’s recent contributions to Marvel Comics are full of delight. (Ryan North helped organize Machine Of Death).

Your token might be used by someone else, though

Yeah. I feel like that cool bad influence not-actually-my-uncle is gonna publish their porn access token everywhere.

If I really had to, I would require everyone to whip out whatever assets of sexual maturity they happen to have, and let the computer analyze it and decide a maturity level.

I would also keep copies for blackmail purposes, because the world is a better place if we all mistrust this solution and anything remotely like it. It’ll be in the legal fine print, which I’m confident no one will read.

Every answer (other than “trust the user to self identify”) is at least remotely like mine, but I’m proposing we cut out the half-measures on the way.

To avoid personal consequences, the system I architect will probably wait on a dead-man-switch for me to die or be incarcerated.

Then it will publish everything it has ever seen, along with AI generated commentary. I’m confident that some of it will be hilarious, and I am hopeful that it will piss everyone off enough that we stop doing this kind of thing.

True rational self interest would involve creating cooperative structures that give a safety net if anything goes wrong just like how it’s rational to get home insurance even if you don’t expect to burn your house down.

This is the part that drives me nuts. Plenty of today’s decision makers only survive later thanks to social nets. But they’re so sure that they won’t be, they’re willing to cut back social benefits to make a quick buck.

Focus steal prevention is the feature I miss desperately when I’m forced to interact with a non-Linux window manager.

I feel the rage of Walter from the Big Kebowski each time an app randomly pulls focus because it fucking feels like it.

It’s just bassic civilized behavior to leave my cursor where I put it.

I miss the Sync software for my Palm Pilot. I also miss my Palm Pilot, anyway, as well, though.

Are you aware of the dedicated Surface Linux Kernel?

I haven’t encountered any Bluetooth issues on my Surface, but I also barely ever use Bluetooth, so I may have simply not noticed.

You meant to also include The SEGA Activator, right?!

Edit: Of these three, I have only ever tried the SEGA Activator. So I can pretty confidently cast my vote in favor of: either of the others, just anything but the Activator.