Glad to hear it. Good luck with your computer!

Oh, and make sure that when you're running opensuse's installer that you tell it to NOT format your "universal" home partition. And just to be safe, backup your data somewhere else before doing anything!

You can share your /home partition directly, but you'll likely find problems with things like theming and other configurations when you do. This is because you're not only sharing the stuff you want, like ~/Documents and such, but also all of the hidden configuration directories like ~/.local as well. While most every distro uses the same visible directories, they are less likely to store their config files in the same places as others.

To get around this, I mount my "universal" home directory somewhere other than /home, e.g. /mnt/home instead. Then I symlink the folders that I care about to each distro's /home directory, e.g ln -s /mnt/home/<username>/Music ~/ . It works across all Linux distros as well as other Unices (as long as they can read the filesystem that you put your universal /home on...ZFS is great for this). I've used this successfully to share my ~/* directories between Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS installs at one time or another. But it still lets each distro or OS have its own configurations without interfering with the other stuff you're multibooting with it.

The fricking hamburger menu on desktop applications. I don't care if there's an option to use it or even if it's the default option as long as there's a way to get a traditional menu bar. But when it's the only option the designers can fuck right off. Monopoly and privacy aside, I'll never use Chrome just because I have to use a stupid hamburger menu.

I completely understand why it's used on mobile devices, and thus I get why it's used for non-mobile devices. People who are used to it from mobile want it on the desktop. Or maybe your vertical screen space is limited and it lets you get back a line of space for other stuff. But it's really just poorly re-creating the menu bar while requiring (at least) an additional click. When there's no good reason for it, it just sucks. Give me an option to use it or not!

Because Chromium and its derivatives suck. Is it really too much to ask for a traditional menu bar rather than a stupid hamburger menu?

Mixxx is the only Linux-native DJ software that I know of, but it's still amazing. If it's missing featutes compared with Serato or Recordbox I'm not good enough to miss them yet, and the features it doea have are damn impressive.

Likewise, Inkscape and Gimp are both great. I know that Gimp takes a lot of heat for not being as "good" as Photoshop, but it's just different. The few times I've tried Photoshop were as painful to me as Gimp seems to be for others. And since I don't need the CMYK functionality that Gimp is missing, I'm happy with Gimp.

LaTeX has a steep learning curve, but using anything else for documents is like stone knives and bearskins in comparison.

First off, I take issue with the idea that hobbies are pointless. If doing something makes you happy, that's worth a lot in my book: whether that hobby is playing golf or collecting stamps or using a non-mainstream distro.

To the point: for me, Gentoo has a purpose in that it's the easiest distro for me to maintain. Yeah, I had to negotiate the learning curve, but now that I have I know how to keep my install running and fix things when they break. Before my last computer died I was running the same install for 9 years straight, and my current install on my "new" computer is five years old. I never got that feeling of "system mastery" with Ubuntu or Fedora.

So there's your purpose: it works better for some people than other distros. Everybody has their own preferences and values, and Gentoo matches those for some. It may not be your cup of tea, but that doesn't mean that everybody should just use what you consider to be a "useful" distro.

Try all three. It's not like it costs anything, and they're all just a click or one-liner away. Try them all and see what works best for you.

That said, I'll go with Mate any day of the week.

Screaming Trees is criminally underrated. They're one of the earliest grunge bands, and it's a crying shame that they were never able to reach the success that the more well-known Seattle bands did.

I bought a laptop just as Windows Vista came out that could barely run it despite being labeled as "made for Vista". Once I installed Ubuntu on (Gutsy Gibbon) on it everything worked much more smoothly...even World of Warcraft through Wine, which was why I wanted a new laptop in the first place. I haven't played WoW for years, but I never wanted to go back to Windows.

If epic English poetry doesn't scare you, Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene is great. It's like Arthurian legend on acid. Check out the version with the Walter Crane illustrations, which are also excellent.

Most of the roads in Ireland, at least for my 'Murrican sensibilities. My wife and I took our honeymoon in Ireland and rented a car to get around. Aside from driving on the opposite side of the road, we were unprepared for how narrow all but the main highways were. The typical road there is comparable to a small country road here, is often lined with hedges right up to the edges, and often lacks a center line. The sheer terror of going past a large truck going the opposite way on one of those for the first time was very, very memorable. We eventually got used to it, but that first day or two of driving was definitely white-knuckled.

Kilmister.