rotopenguin

You cut off the enumeration bit, but SMI01 USB DISK01 doesn't look like any brand I recognize. Flash sticks are cheap and pretty amazing, but one thing they are not is "terribly reliable". Better luck with the next stick, I mildly recommend making it a Samsung or Sandisk.

Also do "dmesg | grep -i firmware" to see what firmware loads the kernel squirted into the various device controllers.

I would recommend against installing ppas in general.

I think that Kubuntu/ubuntu Noble is on a pretty recent stable kernel as is. There would be something even fresher in the HWE track, dunno if that exists for noble yet. The DXVK version is up to Proton (so Proton-GE would be slightly fresher).

The Mesa version, I'm not sure where that comes from. You have an OS installed copy, you have a flatpak/snap version, but aiui Steam Runtime and/or Proton also likes to bring its own version.

Better gpu crash handling is a todo on Linux.

https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-Per-Ring-Resets

If the distro just boots into a live session, you can get a pretty good idea there. They're all working off of roughly the same kernel and driver and firmware sets, give or take some distros being a year out of date. The slower distros have something like "backports" or "enablement kernels" to still give you the option of pulling in newer stuff.

The graphics situation (compositor and mesa and kernel drivers and userland driver libraries) is more complicated. Especially with Nvidia. Your distro choice makes a much bigger impact there.

Ubuntu has its ups and downs when you're actually living with it, but they have a fantastic installer experience. I have had my fair share of bizarre dead ends with other distro installers, like Bazzite telling me "you need -860GB more space". Ubuntu puts you in a solid live-iso OS where the installer is just an app that you can drag to one side and run other tools before continuing. It tends to do sensible things if I go off the beaten path with a more advanced install.

Nowadays, I am happy with debootstrapping or btrfs send'ing an existing Debian install to set up a new system for myself. I still think that Ubuntu is reasonably likely to be a good experience for a newcomer.

The main thing that a bad actor would gain is "being kicked off of the steam store". The bigger threat would be if Gabe figures out which is the bad actor's main account. Losing all their games would be pretty big blowback for such an attacker.

The problem is that SteamOS doesn't have a whole lot of boot options besides "start up directly into Game Mode successfully". If Steam chokes while ingesting any of its config or any metadata in your library, that's the end of it. You can hold a button to wipe everything (the Playstation solution), or you can figure out how to boot a live-iso and fix "the problem". Not everybody has the skills to fix stuff in Linux, heck not everybody has the ability to "boot up from a usb stick and have a working keyboard, using only one USB hole".

When you change your nvidia driver version, you also need to do a "flatpak update" so that you have the matching nvidia library version.

Seeing a mountain biker and an equestrianeer both go down so hard that they took an involuntary nappy makes me feel a lot better about not going outside. Yes, I should play more video games.

Is "the bandwidth of a single nvme drive" actually a bottleneck for your application?

I'm so old that I remember when the Olympics was on more than one channel. If one channel had bad chatter, you would just bend the aerial and turn the dial to get something better.