And that's a good thing, according to my MSc. in Electronics colleague. We replaced EAGLE with KiCad a few years ago because it's just a better product ever since CERN essentially took over development.
I like how the majority of the list is "stuff that doesn't exists on Linux can't be properly used on Linux". Yeah, no fucking shit, Sherlock.
I also like how it's supposed to be about the "average user" and then lists a ton of stuff that's only used in niche applications when put in relation to the entire desktop market.
Additionally:
People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
A good amount of old games won't run properly on Windows anymore, either.
I can't see any of the downvotes that DerisionConsulting mentioned, possibly because I'm on kbin, but I can absolutely understand why people would downvote this completely braindead article that doesn't mention a lot of the actual issues (i.e. hardware compatibility on laptops, friction from the slow transition from X to Wayland, inconsistent user interfaces, updates breaking stuff on some distros, ...).
This is generally good advice. Would you run the program without a sandbox? No? Then you probably shouldn't run it inside a sandbox either.
You can never be sure that the program isn't using a flaw in the sandbox to break out or is just piggybacking onto a whitelisted action that is required for the program's basic functionality.
And if some program requires r/w for your entire home directory and network access then you might as well not use a sandbox in the first place because it can already do everything useful that it needs to do.
If you're using Snapper does that mean that you're using btrfs? If so, you can use btrfs send and btrfs receive to respectively save or restore a snapshot to/from a file. Well copied from zfs ;-)
Or at the very least partition ~ as btrfs/zfs and do regular snapshots. The downside is, of course, that a rollback won't just roll back the dotfiles. But I guess if the scenario is "nuking [the] home directory" then that's probably not an issue.
If you have mouse acceleration on KDE when selecting the "flat" profile then
you're accidentally running Plasma as an X11 session and suffer from a libinput issue, or
your mouse has an internal acceleration profile that can be disabled using the manufacturer's Windows-only software (or some enthusiast project on Github), Logitech mice often have this feature
In that case just use qpwgraph and wire the outputs to both the stereo and s/pdif outputs.
If either of the outputs is not available then the driver doesn't support them, which is not uncommon for Creative devices, to put it mildly.
If you keep in mind that it won't 100 % behave like a "proper" installation when things go weird it's fine.
Do different distributions work better or worse on VMs?
VirtualBox comes with some pre-made profile for some distributions but I've never been able to tell what those actually do, other than by default selecting virtual hardware that is supported.
Are there any major differences when using linux in a VM compared to a bare metal installation?
VM "hardware" is well supported, but anything requiring proper hardware acceleration (of any kind) will either perform terribly or fall back to a software-based backend. I.e. desktop compositing or hardware video decoding may or may not work as well as a native installation. Video games likely won't work in a usable way at all, unless it's Solitaire. Also the hard disks are decoupled from the VM to the host system and you need to manually forward USB devices to the VM or the system might not be able to detect them.
Is there any [dis]advantage to “Linux VM on Windows” VS “Windows VM on Linux”?
That entirely depends on what you want to use both systems for. If you already have Windows installed then I'd like to suggest the following path:
run some live USB to figure out whether your hardware is supported (graphics, sound, network, printers - especially the latter two)
if so, install Linux in a VM first (install multiple desktops and try them out, because why not)
figure out what programs are available that do the things that you usually do on Windows - keep in mind that just because $PROGRAM is written by GNOME/KDE/LXQT/... people that doesn't mean that it won't run perfectly fine on other desktops. Also: distributions may not ship all software, don't forget to check Flatpak/Flathub if your distribution is missing some software.
try them out in the VM to see if they meet your basic requirements
install the Windows version of those programs on Windows
over time, replace the Windows programs that you used to use for the ones that are also available on Linux
if after a few months there are no non-Linux programs left: Congrats, back up your data and just use Linux
otherwise: figure out whether the programs that you need will run well enough with Wine or in a Windows-VM
If it turns out that there's just too much Windows-only software that you can't part with then you can just delete the VM and that's it. On the flip side you can find software that may just happen to be better than what you used previously. Also trying out various distributions is much, much easier this way - installing the tenth distribution on bare metal because you weren't happy with the previous nine isn't particularly fun.
What settings app? hp-toolbox is the program to use (which might in your applications menu as "HP Device Manager"), alternatively hp-setup to set it up from the CLI.
You're supposed to use hplip for HP printers. There's a Debian package for it in the main repositories.
edit: You can look up the printers and supported features with hpliphere. Looks like your printer is perfectly supported (as long as you let hplip's tray program install their proprietary driver plugin).
I use a Rode NT1 with a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 3rd (!) gen. It's not quite "just works", you need to set up parameters for the USB sound kernel module to get the Scarlett working. Otherwise it "just works".
Be careful with Focusrite products in general and read the Linux kernel project's instructions very carefully on supported products, in case you're interested in such a device (e.g. it's common that 3rd gen works, 2nd or earlier doesn't).
And that's a good thing, according to my MSc. in Electronics colleague. We replaced EAGLE with KiCad a few years ago because it's just a better product ever since CERN essentially took over development.