Came here to say this. The new player experience is an awesome upgrade in terms of getting people into the world and narrative, but you're still thrown into an ocean of systems and content without a map. If you're not following a guide or piecing things together from the wiki it's very easy to get totally overwhelmed.

Always nice to meet another dad.

This is 100% the way.

Pine hides their hobby-grade hardware behind in-development software. I owned both a PBP and PPP and much as I'd like to say otherwise, really can't say anything to recommend either.

Unless they're the oceangoing variety, in which case they just hide it under their sea beds.

Did FW ever solve the issue with battery drain during sleep? I owned one of the original batch and sold it because I couldn't effectively use it as a laptop. Other than that it was awesome, great build quality, loved the ethics of it and the form factor, but being unable to use it as a portable computer was a deal breaker.

I mained druid in pre, and while I enjoyed it enough, it was annoying having pretty much all of the build diversity locked behind unique rng. Similarly, while I enjoyed HotA barb, the fact that literally no other build is appealing makes that a non-starter.

So consequently I'll be going with necro for S1. Sever, spear, surge, and lance are all solid builds not locked behind uniques (though they can absolutely benefit from them), so I'm covered both from boredom and balance changes.

I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn't work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.

This is it for me, too. Back before I got into Linux I was forever tinkering with third party stuff to try to make the UI more efficient with things like Enso and Docker, and make it prettier with other stuff, but it was always a ramshackle cludged together mess. GNOME just resolves all of those issues neatly for me, runs faster, and isn't crammed full of bloatware ad crap like modern versions of Windows. And it's more secure, free, and ethically satisfying as a cooperative, trans-national project.

I've got barb and necro to 60ish too.

Barb is pretty limited imo. HotA is fun, but upheaval is weak and looks dumb, never liked ww, and bleed builds are the exact opposite of what I look for from a barb.

Necro has a ton of good options though. Sever is a fun melee monster, spear is a complete wrecking ball, blood surge will be awesome if it's ever buffed / supported... I'm not big on minions or bone spirit, but still, necro looks like a solid pick.

Druid has a ton of build variety, I just hate how so many of them are unique locked.

Just be careful with sugar alcohols (including erythritol)- tolerances vary, but if you overindulge it'll corkscrew your guts like nothing else and turn you into a walking biohazard. Most infamously, sugar free gummi bears are sweetened with this, and while the results are miserable to experience, they do lead to some fantastic reading material...

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2JGNJ5ZPJT4YC

My absolute, #1 biggest recommendation is to male separate partitions for / and /home.

What does this mean? In short, you're telling the system to treat different sections of the hard drive / ssd as entirely separate buckets. In this case, you're putting all of the operating system and programs in one bucket ( / ) and keeping all of your files and settings in another (/home).

Why does this matter? As someone learning Linux, you should tinker with things, learn what they do and how they work. Sometimes, that means breaking things, occasionally in spectacular ways. Having your files and your OS separate means that you can completely wreck your OS while you learn without losing your data in the process- you can reinstall from scratch or even distro hop (try out a new version) without having to stress over losing anything. In short, you can learn and play and blunder and explore without risking anything more than a 20 minute reinstall if you can't figure out how to fix it.

I appreciate the fact that the distro community is diverse enough to accommodate even people whose personal preferences are this objectively wrong. ;)