Interesting points. Piefed, the software on their instance, does have some form of karma, but supposedly it's not publicly visible. Unfortunately I don't know/recall the details of what effect that karma has in practice. Still, it makes me wonder if it might encourage karma farming by some users.

Though spend a bit more for a solid i7 and avoid SFF.

The SFF's can be great for just browsing, office use, light photo editing, etc. Obviously nothing too demanding, but they save a lot of power for their intended purpose. I picked up a USFF Lenovo ThinkCentre about the size of a Mac Mini for $100 a couple years back.

Definitely. Though the original post war with regards to some gaming. It's much much header with SFF. But their still absolutely solid for many uses.

On Reddit, Karma isn’t just more visible, but a certain amount is an explicit requirement for posting in many situations. High karma accounts are also less likely to get moderated/banned. You can see why spambots would want to amass it.

I have no idea what the incentive would be here.

To use the AUR on Cachy you simply use paru instead of pacman. It is a frontend to pacman, and lets you search / install from the AUR as if it's in the main repo.

Edit: side note, I'm really happy to see the windows power users coming over, you guys switching is what will really push adoption imo.

With a specific mix of spiteful grumpiness toward windows and a naive optimism, born of youth and abundant nerd resource at university.

That and a stoic acceptance that shit breaks, but it also broke on win 95, 98, XP and especially millennium edition. Which is the timeframe I switched in.

Going full time was fully enabled by reliable virtualization. When I could run a win XP VM and expect no issues in a work day, I was about to ditch windows as my main OS. Over time, I used fewer windows only applications, now I barely need the VM.

I’ve always had dgpu issues on Linux. Every single one. Red. Green. Don’t matter. You’ve just made me realise that since I installed my 6600xt about a year ago, I’ve not had to touch or think about it since.

I keep a win10 VM around that I fire up on the rare instance I need to do something in windows. I agree with forgetting about dual boot.

Oh, yes, I only noticed after replying to you that the OP mentioned gaming. I generally wouldn't recommend most SFF PCs for gaming either.

I don't know about spambots, but here is one explanation of the Piefed karma mechanisms I've read here:

https://lemmy.zip/post/57943283/24279809

Oh wow. That’s some weird shit piefed does.

For sure!

Agreed.

That also happens to be good advice if you want to reduce addictions that are caused by "addictive by design" platforms and parasocial media.

In a nutshell, it is like controlling smoking: Not doing it at all is often easier and costs much less energy, than controlling the extend of usage.

One reason for this is that such a decision shifts your sub-conscious fous from "Should I do this on Linux or Windows??“ to: "How do I do this in Linux - or what might I enjoy doing instead?"

Oh, and I suggest to search the Arch wiki for suggestions for Linux software that match what you want to do. The packages named there are usually available in other major distros, too!