Trying out COSMIC DE and future Custom Console Project?

On my main rig (Arch Linux, btw), I've switched over to the COSMIC DE (desktop environment) for now.

Honestly, GNOME just hasn't been doing it for me. I'm very familiar with it on my Thinkpad, but as a desktop environment on a desktop PC, the UI feels too spaced out and "user-friendly-ish." It just doesn't feel optimal for what I use a desktop for.

I am aware that I could customize GNOME in any way I want, but I just don't feel like spending a lot of time installing numerous extensions and themes to achieve the result I want.

I read that COSMIC actually started as a sort of fork from GNOME, but eventually was rewritten entirely as its own separate desktop environment, which I think is pretty cool. I've only tried PopOS once, I think, when I was 16 years old. I was distro-hopping for a while back then, and not daily-driving Linux whatsoever. It seems like System76 is doing some cool stuff, so I'll definitely keep track of them in the future.

PopOS is preinstalled with the new COSMIC desktop environment, which I was not aware of. I originally thought modern-day PopOS still used the old COSMIC (which is just a modified version of GNOME).

Also, I've been wanting to look into tiling window managers. COSMIC offers toggleable window tiling by default.

I fear I may start breaking actually important system components somewhat soon, with me screwing around with my install.

Yay, the AUR helper stopped working for me, so I have to fix that soon.

After I did sudo pacman -Syu, For some reason, my sudoers file reset, which made it so I couldn't execute commands using sudo, but I got that fixed with some AI help.

I should probably have a SWAP partition, even though I have 32 GB of RAM. It looks like it's just good practice to have it just in case.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that my Timeshift snapshots haven't even been saving because I didn't add enable cronie as a cron scheduler (big facepalm). Fixed it though.

Other than this stuff, things are going a-okay.

I've been watching a decent amount of videos on Linux gaming, which is pretty interesting. This one specific APU board, which is literally just a stripped PS5, is pretty inexpensive, being around 100 bucks.

The AMD BC-250 board is an inexpensive mining board that runs off a single 8 pin GPU power.

I've watched videos of people buying these boards, connecting a cheap PSU (~400w), and basically using it as a "Steam Machine", running Bazzite.

Honestly, I have mad skills in Blender, so I kinda want to design a case for this board, figuring out an optimal cooling solution, fitting in a Flex PSU, adding my own front panel IO, and then 3D print it.

I'll basically have my own custom console (probably) running Bazzite with Steam. I can make the form factor whatever I want it to be. I'm pretty confident I can make something that is extremely functional, while being decently low-cost.

The only problem (that I'm aware of) is that this board can't run Windows because there aren't graphics drivers for it. This means that any game that requires a kernel-level anticheat is completely out of the door for this build.

I'll keep brainstorming. Caio.