My journey went Ubuntu (2012) -> Kubuntu (2018) -> Manjaro (2020) -> Fedora KDE (2022)
Most computers I had were used and low-end so Linux was always my preferred OS, but I always dualbooted with the version of Windows or MacOS the machine came with when I could.
My current computers have been Linux only for a couple years now, thanks to Windows being a headache and MacOS being inflexible.
It says in the article that triple buffering only activates if your GPU struggles to render the desktop. That means old and weak iGPUs are getting this. For your desktop card nothing should change.
I’ve been using Linux off and on again for the past decade.
The original reason I used Linux was because as a kid I got stuck with whatever old laptop was laying around, so my dad would install Ubuntu to make it usable.
When I built my first computer a couple years ago and started using Windows 10, that’s when Windows stopped working for me. Nothing made me want to switch more than when the major Windows 10 updates broke my software every 6 months.
There was this one from a couple years ago that was about self-driving cars and also sponsored by Waymo. Tom Nicholas made a video which IMO does a good job of covering the problems with that video, and the broader implications of this kind of content on YouTube.
Its almost certainly a VirtualBox issue. I would suggest changing the graphics controller to one of the other options. I have my Linux VMs set to VMSVGA as that has had the fewest bugs.
If it makes you feel any better, VirtualBox 7 has had quite a few regressions specifically with the graphics stack and has caused problems with all of my VMs. My Windows 11 VM only rendered a black screen until 7.0.10 and all my other VMs are still using old versions of Guest Additions because of the instability with the newer versions.
From the research I did a couple years ago, Office 2010 is the newest version that works out-of-the-box on Wine and the later versions have problems related to Windows Update functionality. Codeweaver’s CrossOver seems like it can run Office 2012 and later, but its paid software with their own patches to Wine.
For me, I’ve had a copy of Office 2007 on my system since 2021 and it seems to have all the important features of modern MS Office, so I wouldn’t stress about running the latest version if you have an older version on hand, unless it is older than Office 2007, because those only support the older Office file formats.
The TLDR summary is that AVIF was going to be the next generation standard for image formats but when JPEG-XL released with a near identical feature-set, better quality compression, and backwards compatibility with JPEG, the tech world put its support behind JPEG-XL.
Naturally, Google as one of AVIF’s creators was unhappy that the standard they control looks like it will lose the format war and so they decided to use their web monopoly to kill JPEG-XL in the cradle by killing support for it in Chrome around a few months ago.
While this has slowed JPEG-XL’s momentum by a lot, even the other co-creators of AVIF like Apple, Meta, and Microsoft are still putting their support behind JPEG-XL and it seems like they would rather force JPEG-XL adoption themselves than go back to AVIF.
In my experience, gaming distros primary benefit is being preconfigured with apps and patches you’d install on a normal distro.
For normal distros, this difference isn’t big enough to impact your distro choice in most cases. The reason these get recommended is due to their post-install setup being easier than the distro its based on, hence being friendlier to new Linux users.
However, for immutable distros this is a big factor as it reduces the need for layering. Layering makes updating much slower, so less is always better.