Nowadays a package manager is a must-to-have in any OS. It manages dependencies among program components (program and library versions etc, ie. to avoid the "DLL hell" of Windows ). Debian and Ubuntu Linux have now for more than 20 years a really powerful package manager (called apt). Not even Micro$oft has managed to create such an important component yet. It requires a high intellect... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager " Ian Murdock had commented that package management is "the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry", that it blurs the boundaries between operating system and applications, and that it makes it "easier to push new innovations [...] into the marketplace and [...] evolve the OS".[21] "
@Sekiyo of course meant the package manager of Arch Linux, called pacman, and not the game Pac Man Arch Linux is of course for people who want to have full control about anything making up the OS; it's a source code distribution: you have to compile everything yourself. That's too much work for me, I'm happy with Debian with its precompiled binaries.
Also Meta Trader 5 works on Ubuntu Linux, as long as you have Wine installed. I have used MT5 and IB's Gateway for a couple of months at the same time. Both were fully operational from Sunday evening until the following Saturday morning (i.e. the entire trading week). After a while though I decided to stop the automated trading via MT5 and use only Gateway.
Use BTRFS with Timeshift, instant backups. I'd never use a Linux system with a proper backup system, updates can and sometimes will brick a system. They can usually be undone but the time and knowledge required is vast, for me I rather roll back.
No, you don't have to compile everything for Arch, most packages are pre-compiled. Arch is too difficult for beginners, you can use Manjaro and other alternative instead.
I am a linux lover, and now as an android developer i am obliged to use a mac silicone arm, and i gotta say do not regret this choice, you have the power of a real unix system optimized on a wonderful machine. Still I run some virtual machine and in the week end i love to see an already seen movie and at the same time doing a linux installation. Everyone should install arch(not manjaro) and preferably slackware on a virtual machine, is such a fantastic learning path. Then once one feel ready should have some fantastic fun with LFS(Linux From Scratch). The nice thing with Paralles(VM) is that I can indeed freeze the images when i want and/or use images from others, just i regret i have macos pro m1 with 16GB, I would rather buy something with 64GB to have much more virtual fun. Anyway Manjaro remains a great operative system Mario, actually is my favorite distro, i put i3 on top, regardless of Linux or Mac i strongly suggest Emacs doom, on top it adds a lot to my trading plans using org mode. Sorry to go out of topic, but is such a nice one
I wouldn't even consider using anything else besides KDE at this point. If you haven't tried it yet, for sure go into Settings/Workspace Behavior/Desktop Effects and then turn everything off besides Translucency. KDE is so fast with animations turned off. I always change the Global Theme to breeze dark and change to the Application Menu. The real killer app for trading though is virtual desktops. I use two desktops with them linked to CTRL + right arrow and CTRL + left arrow. Once you get use to virtual desktops linked to a keyboard shortcut, you can't go back. My two monitors then are basically 4 monitors. If I ever need more space I will map the down arrow and then it will be like having 6 monitors. For sure try out the widgets too. I love the CPU widget in the task bar and you can see how hard your cpu is working. It looks super cool too. The user switcher widget is great too. I basically use one user for serious work and one user for browsing the web and can instantly switch between the two on the desktop. Kubuntu with 22.04 has been absolute rock solid for me. I like VSCode as opposed to VIM or Emacs. I can just never get into either of those.
That's good to know. I use a very simple and lightweight desktop called LXDE (or LXQt). It lacks such a user switching feature, but I wrote my own solution many years ago. I too have assigned multiple dummy users to some of the security critical applications like web browsers (3, each used with a different user ), email pgm, terminal shell, and some more, so that no user can access the data (ie. the home dir) of the other users. It's a security measure against online data theft, as well for limiting the access for this user to just this one application... This method is not that secure compared to running a virtual machine for each such application, but is easier to do and eats much less resources (disk space, memory etc.)
Last time I used windows it was a win7. I liked it but it couldn't compete with a debian based distro. Specially if you are a software developer. Things are way easier on Linux if you know what you are doing.