People have made distro recomendations already, so I want to talk a bit about what makes a distro a distro: application repositories and management, update cadence, and what’s installed by default. That’s pretty much it. Anything else can likely be transplanted from distro to distro.

Out of the default applications by far the most important is the desktop environment. Have a look at Gnome, KDE (and others, cinnamon, etc.). Pick something you like the look of. Gnome is known to be closer to Mac styling and sentiments, including the our-way-or-the-highway philosophy, limited customisability in the name of consistency, etc… KDE is the ‘we heard you like customisation so we put customisations on your customisations’ kind of environment.

Update cadence really boils down to one of two things - do you want a new OS version every few months where the distro maintainers manually release a bunch of software all tested together (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), or do you want each application released individually after it’s been tested to work with everything else (Arch)? Note that the former are sometimes called ‘stable’ releases but not because they are less likely to crash, but because there are simply fewer updates. The latter are called ‘rolling’ releases.

The application management philosophies are a lot harder to nail down, especially as a newbie. You will probably just have to accept that the first distro you try will likely not be the one you settle on. For instance I started with Ubuntu until I got fed up how difficult it was to install anything not found in the main repository (a surprising amount of software): In Debian-based distros (like Ubuntu) unofficial software is fragmented across thousands of ‘personal’ repositories that you must manually add URLs and signing keys for, it feels very clunky. Because they are personal respositories it’s easy for the owner to abandon it or just not push updates and you won’t even notice until it breaks after a system update. Once I had some Linux experience under my belt I found the Arch repository style much easier to work with: One central official repository, and one ‘unofficial’ repository. I’ve heard Fedora has a similar system.

But the single most important piece of advice - just pick something. The great thing about Linux is it makes hopping distros easy: A package manager makes it trivial to export a list of installed programs so you can reinstall them on your next distro. You won’t be enslaved to a distro once you decide, so just pick something and use it for a bit. Learn what you like and what you don’t. Use that to decide on your next pick.

As people have said already this is a somewhat common failure mode, especially when swapping nozzles. This happened to me twice between three nozzle swaps. The first time was a major leak like yours, the other time it was only slight (which I then made worse in my attempt to fix…). I was obviously doing something wrong, but I came fully prepared the second time with video guides for my specific machine and everything but still couldn’t get it perfect.

If you never want to think about this failure mode again (like me) then consider swapping your hotend for a Revo. A Revo nozzle is also the heatbreak, so there’s no possibility of a bad connection between them. The ‘nozzles’ are more expensive but they can be hotswapped (coldswapped, even) by hand with no special tools. Before I did everything in my power to avoid nozzle swaps, so I ended up settling for a jack-of-all-trades (but master of none) nozzle that I would never have to swap. Since moving to Revo however I find myself swapping nozzles way more now that it’s easy and with no chance of destroying my hotend. For instance I have a high-flow 1mm nozzle for quickly doing big structural prints, they print in like one third of the time and are way stronger than equivalent prints on a smaller nozzle. I also have a 0.25mm nozzle for miniature model prints with a better resolution than I could ever get before. I’m still waiting for a high-flow abrasion-resistant Revo nozzle, though.

Selective enforcement is one of those concepts that isn’t talked about much outside of legal ethics circles unfortunately, but I think it’s an important concept to be aware of and the potential issues with it. I first heard about it from The Dictators Handbook, which explores many behaviours of politicians and those in power, including how and why corrupt nations often employ selective enforcement. It’s an interesting read, would recommend. It definitely changed how I looked at the world.

I have no strong feelings on which particular weapons should be legal to carry, even if it’s just pepper spray or brass knuckles or something. The main thing is that it should be legal to carry something.

Also, selectively enforced laws are a terrible, HORRIBLE concept and should be avoided at all costs. It gives police and those in power the ability to selectively punish (or pardon) whomever they choose, often at the whims of their personal biases. Passing and exploiting selectively enforced laws is a common tactic used by corrupt nations and can be used to silence political opponents, target selected groups, promote agendas and so forth. The law should not rely on cops ‘being nice’ and choosing not to arrest you.

For a start it shouldn’t be a crime to merely carry something for self-defense. The current laws say that carrying anything for the express purpose of self-defense is illegal. There’s a bizarre cat and mouse game where the law says ‘its fine to defend yourself’ while simultaneously expressly forbidding you from carrying anything that you might be able to use for self-defense. It puts anyone actually in a life threatening situation at a supreme disadvantage: An attacker is already breaking the law so they’ll be armed to some extent, but under the law the victim is designed to be defenseless. If they do decide to arm themselves against the law and use it to defend themselves they can be prosecuted for carrying a weapon after the fact.

I never said anything about changing gun laws.

New Zealand. Gun laws are pretty strict, though we have lots of farmers who have guns for defending livestock. You can own guns with a valid reason (e.g. recreational shooting, not self defense) but essentially the only two places they can be is in a locked safe or (being transported to) a gun range.

In addition any and all tools and weapons are illegal to carry for the purpose of self defense (knives, pepper spray, tazers, clubs, screwdrivers, etc.). There’s a crime epidemic here at the moment, corner stores being robbed by people with machetes, jewelry stores ram raided with trucks, but if you dare even carry pepper spray to defend yourself you can be jailed. Don’t bother calling the cops either, they won’t be there until at least half an hour later. Cops don’t care about robberies. We literally once had the dispatcher tell us that no police would be coming. It’s ridiculous.

I wish self defense laws were less crazy here, if someone enters your home or property armed with a weapon you should be able to respond appropriately without fear of going to jail yourself.

How has nobody recommended Supreme Commander (Forged Alliance)? It’s the inspiration for other games in this thread like Planetary Annihilation and Beyond All Reason. It’s so good that when the official servers shut down the community banded together and formed their own server and dev team to continue regular balancing and updates. It’s on steam and works on Linux with minimal tinkering. You can either play the campaign on the Steam version or head straight over to Forged Alliance Forever, the community-hosted server, to access the campaign (with added multiplayer support!), all the new patches and mods, and play some multiplayer games too.