With old hardware, beggars can’t be choosers. I get the appeal of the nouveau driver, but if your goal is to save a machine from the landfill, it’s probably the better compromise to use the proprietary driver and keep it actually competitive for as long as possible. Those 900/1000 series cards are still plenty powerful today, even if they can’t quite do AAA gaming anymore.
Bazzite. Every other recommendation is wrong.
Bazzite is “immutable”. What that basically means is that you won’t be able to break it even if you try. And if it does break somehow (for example, because of a bad update), you can fix it by doing a rollback, which is literally a one-line command: sudo rpm-ostree rollback
Sure, there are other immutable distros out there, but Bazzite is probably the most popular right now, and it ships with Nvidia drivers so it’s ready to go for 99% of people with no changes necessary.
being inserted automatically.
Aka the entire point of RAII
This non-sarcastically. The operating system is better at cleaning up memory than you, and it’s completely pointless to free all your allocations if you’re about to exit the program. For certain workloads, it can lead to cleaner, less buggy code to not free anything.
It’s important to know the difference between a “memory leak” and unfreed memory. A leak refers to memory that cannot be freed because you lost track of the address to it. Leaks are only really a problem if the amount of leaked memory is unbounded or huge. Every scenario is different.
Of course, that’s not an excuse to be sloppy with memory management. You should only ever fail to free memory intentionally.
Software. It’s a phone that can’t make phone calls, with a camera that can’t take pictures. It doesn’t matter if some coding genius manages to port Crysis to it, if the phone can’t phone, it’s DOA.
Another reason to use Linux is to spare yourself the Windows CMD prompt syntax