Gnome is a bit like CosmicDE. They all have their pros and cons. Best part about FOSS.

Glad it didn't turn out to be a hardware thing. At least you have some peace of mind now. I think Fedora is a good move. You can always give pop-os a try after CosmicDE gets finished sometime down the road. I've got a buddy on Fedora and it's been rock solid for him for a few years now. If I was having problems or wanted a change, I think I would jump over to Fedora as well and see how the water is there. I think Fedora already packages CosmicDE, so whenever CosmicDE is finally finished, you wont have to go far to try it out again if you were favoring Cosmic over Gnome or Plasma.

The amount of ram you have doesn't matter. If it is an issue with specific addresses in your RAM, and the kernel allocates pages of memory for use with a program you are rimmomg that contains those bad addresses, then you will have issues. It's not such a common issue these days as much as it used to be twenty or thirty years ago but, it can still be an issue and is worth checking. I mean, most distro's put memtest+ on their live boot installers for a that very reason. Since you are on pop-os CosmicDE, you should be running very stable. Definitely something is wrong, maybe hardware, maybe not. Your expectations should be that the OS is running rock solid. I definitely understand the frustrations.

If it is a hardware issue, you definitely want to find out right away, as it may be corrupting your OS or worse your files. Create a live boot thumbdrive of Pop-Os or Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever you choose, you tell your UEFI to boot from your thumbdrive and you have an install option, a boot to a live desktop option, and a memtest86 option. If memtest+ passes 100%, than go for the live desktop option. If everything is working great with a live desktop, than I would say your ram should be good. Double check SMART check is enabled on your harddrive if you have it and if that's good than I think your hardware is probably okay still. Hardware failure is not so common these days, but it does happen and it's worth checking it out before it corrupts your personal files, for peace of mind. Plus, if you've reached the point of feeling like you need to distro hop, I think that says a lot about your current situation. Something is wildly out of place. You should be running solid and stable.

That's doesn't sound good. I have been running pop-os24.04, updating all the time and haven't run into any issues. I switched over from Ubuntu when CosmicDE beta released. Are you running on the the newer pop-os 24.04 w/ CosmicDE or the older pop-os22.04 with GnomeShell? I can't speak for the older GnomeShell version but, if you are running the newer CosmicDE Epoch1.11 than I would say you should expect everything to be running very stable even if some features are not complete yet. If you are running the CosmicDE Epoch1.11 and having these issues you describe, I would suspect some sort of hardware issue like memory. Most distro install images come with a memtest option on their usb live boot installer. Since you are on the brink of distro hopping, might be worth creating a live boot usb thumbdrive and running the memtest or just booting into the live desktop and exercising that. Either would be a good way to see if there is some sort of hardware issue or if it's your currently installed OS. Hope this helps.

yep, you got to love all the, Arch BTW or Linux Mint FYI.

Works great for me. Not everything is fully implemented though. Worth checking,

https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/projects/27/views/1 https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/projects/28/views/1

Everything that I use is stable even though you might find some rough edges. I haven't been able to use my Wacom tablet since I switched form Ubuntu. I mean, maybe there is a way to configure it's use in CosmicDE without the settings feature. Scrap paper and pen work fine during the interim. Definitely worth a test drive to see if things are complete enough for you.

100% relatable. There is a huge difference between, "It broke and I can fix it or that's annoying but not worth me spending time to learn how to change it (but I could if I was really really bothered by it)" and "It broke again and Windows forced another update and it's broke and now I have to fix it or that's annoying and it bothers the shit out of me and and there is nothing I can do to change it."

Things just feel way better, even when it's all going wrong, when the problems are within your control. I left Windows a long as time ago because of this very thing.

Nice, Blizzard has always had unofficial support for wine. I used to play WoW back in vanilla on Linux using Crossover (or whatever it was called back then.) Occasionally the battle.net launcher will get an update that borks it, but Blizzard has always been very quick to fix it. I play WoW, Diablo4, HOTS, and Hearthstone from Linux. With the recent influx of Linux adoption, maybe Blizzard will release a native Linux launcher. Have to see where things are in the next 5 years.

Naa, tar handles archives, it should know how to archive and unarchive really well. It shouldn't know how to compress or un compress or sort it's output by human readable file sizes. If you add the -z or -j, for example, to your tar command, tar will filter your archive through gunzip or bunzip prior to doing it's job of un archiving all your files. If you use the -f flag, tar will spit out a list of files that were operated on. Adding a sort -h feature to tar would violate the unix philosophy.

Statcounter measures pageviews, not users or machines.

30 years of vendor lock'n will do that.

I looked at the article, same as the reddit thread, probably written by the same person. ZSWAP is just not necessary. ZRAM works and doesn't require disk space w/ 3:1 compression. If I was running out of swap, then yes, I would take a look at ZSWAP to improve my swap situation. It's just not a thing with ZRAM, not for many years.

I.E. for my use cases, ZSWAP is irrelevant.