not really a fan of them either, I checked out their desk builds as I was looking for inspiration for my home office desk I was making, but that fat dude is actually pretty trash and linus himself smoked him in a pc tech support challenge thing they did recently IIRC. Dude didn't even realize the computer was setup in raid 0 and lost all the data while complaining that they were sabotaging him because he couldn't get the same benchmarks on his crystaldiskmark. he spent like an hour and half cable managing and before he finished linus had already fixed and benchmarked the same exact system. say what you want about him but he knows a little something
You should be find with the default kernel the system comes with. I assume most of them come with a 5.15 kernel now in todays since that's where all the good juice is now. I can be more assistance on arch based distro since that's what I use but I'm willing to try. What distro are you planning to use anyway?
For gaming, most people tend to swear by the Zen kernel. Arch and its derivatives will normally have this in their package repos, but the site there provides binaries for Debian et al.
There is no "true Linuxfag", there are many different classes. If you want to be a Linux(tm)fag, learn C and start kernel hacking. Start building your own packages. Make code modifications to the programs you're using. Set up a new distro. And these are just a few ideas off the top of my head.
It's better for people interested in software or who like to configure and tinker with their OS, as a Linux distro normally doesn't hide any aspect of the system from you and promotes interoperability between programs. People who work to live and only view the PC as a silent workhorse that needs to Just Werk
are unlikely to give a shit about the wonders of Linux.
Ok ok I can't read. In my defense I've been doing a bunch of college homework even though it's the first 3 weeks.
Get into scripting and light programming. Learn what individual parts (from kernel options to parts of your desktop enviroment) make your Linux environment and how it all plays together. Learn how to automate things inside it. Start breathing the concept of pipes and the unix philosophy of one simple program doing one thing well. Try to do more with less by utilizing your newfound knowledge. You'll notice you get there when you see some popular python-based github project causing noise with the /r/linux poseurs and soyboys and you catch yourself saying "man, that 200 mb software package does something I could string together with sed in ten minutes".
