What surprised me the most, also in part due to me not really being knowledgeable about software solutions in their respective industries, was the Unreal Engine (the editor that is) and Houdini being available on Linux. Tbf, at least in the vfx department it is apparently more common as most of the high profile software in that industry does have a native Linux version available.
What I appreciated the most though was software like Reaper and Renoise providing a (very good even) Linux-native version when I looked for a new DAW to learn, seeing most software in the audio industry not being very Linux-friendly.
Yes, thank you for mentioning the Strix Halo CPUs from AMD. I had this exact same thought before as well ever since I've seen these CPUs come to market. The SoC design is much more similar to the Apple M chips that can provide absurd memory bandwidth as well. I could imagine a cut down/low power version provided by AMDs semi-custom program where Valve would get a unique design again like with the first Steam Deck. Due to the high bandwidth LPDDR5x memory they would wipe the floor with every existing handheld SoC on the market today.
+1 for OVPN. I switched to them from Mullvad for the same reason. They are also one of the more trustworthy VPNs in my book ever since they actually won a court case proving that they actually practise what they advertise.
If you can wait just a little longer I would seriously consider the Framework 12 that is going for pre-order next month and being shipped "mid-2025".
Of course, this isn't an option if you need a laptop right now. In that case the current Framework 13 offerings are the best you can get but of course are not as affordable and possibly a bit overkill for a simple browsing machine.
Currently on Firefox with Betterfox and Lepton. I might change it to Librewolf as a base for its better defaults. Ungoogled Chromium flatpak when I need a Chromium browser. Fennec on GrapheneOS for its extension support even if it might not be as secure compared to Vanadium.
You can install the Zen kernel as it has the ntsync patch merged already and which I personally prefer for a gaming (desktop) system.
But as I understand it we have to still wait for the corresponding wine patch to be merged as well for it to be usable for Windows applications and more so in case of Proton.
To clear my backlog a bit I recently played Little Kitty, Big City, Smushi Come Home and now Paper Trails. Currently more on the 'cosy train' of games.
I think Little Kitty, Big City was the first game I played on the Deck that implements the Steam Input API.
These are some very good game ideas. :)
The few hours I've spent in Wobbledogs, Shenzhen I/O and Another Crab's Treasure apparently were more significant to Steam than the few hundred hours in Satisfactory and Factorio.
It's beyond me why Valve hasn't yet deleted that page or at least updated it to make it clear that it's an obsolete version that hasn't received an update in 8 years.
Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying they 'had to completely reinstall the os' and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn't rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don't count). This is due in part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn't hurt to apply new package configs by going through pacdiff once in a while though.
KDE for its Wayland performance and features and occasionally I switch to hyprland if I need a more focused work environment.
In the past I used Cinnamon but it became ever more buggier on Arch and due to lack of Wayland support still it was a dead end anyway.
Regarding your question, you can just clone the package's git URL or download the PKGBUILD file directly, make your edit and run makepkg or makepkg -sirc as the wiki suggests to produce the package and install it.
You can also install the package tar with pacman -U <file>.
But looking at the comments it seems you are using an AUR helper that has a cache you might want to clear as the git repo for that package has an unstaged change for the license file for some reason (or you reset that file so git doesn't complain when pulling).
I created an account there an eternity ago when I first heard about them to reserve my username just in case but I will never consider a platform that cannot package their launcher/tool/software correctly and instead shoves a complex curl-to-bash script embedding binary data and a whole lot of other anti-pattern up my throat that is the least trustworthy and safest method of distributing your software.
Well, Minetest also can hardly be compared to Minecraft as Minetest is only an engine or platform for voxel based games like Minecraft. What you rather have to critique is something like Mineclonia that is apparently a more active fork of the MineClone2/VoxeLibre project that try to perfectly replicate Minecraft (without using Minecraft assets that is) on Minetest. Allegedly it's pretty good now but I haven't tried so myself. As already mentioned, the community for Minetest as a whole is pretty small and that additionally split among so many different games building on that. But it's good that viable alternatives exist in case Microsoft ever considers shutting down the Java edition.
What surprised me the most, also in part due to me not really being knowledgeable about software solutions in their respective industries, was the Unreal Engine (the editor that is) and Houdini being available on Linux. Tbf, at least in the vfx department it is apparently more common as most of the high profile software in that industry does have a native Linux version available.
What I appreciated the most though was software like Reaper and Renoise providing a (very good even) Linux-native version when I looked for a new DAW to learn, seeing most software in the audio industry not being very Linux-friendly.