If you happen to remember, what DE’s/WM’s did you use back when testing with your NVidia cards (particularly the 2080 and 3070)? I’ve been trying to gauge a lot of differences in DE usability, and driver versions. In my recent testing, one user on Fedora KDE 42 with the NVidia-open drivers with a 4070 have had a nearly-flawless experience that would be pretty much on par with AMD or Intel. Meanwhile a 1080ti user genuinely had major problems with both KDE and GNOME on the same distro with the standard proprietary drivers.

As for how much the average user needs to use the terminal on modern distros, especially with some of the graphical tools available, it genuinely is very little, if any at all. I think there is more of a problem with how many guides written go for the least common denominator approach of straight terminal commands for every tweak or fix somebody might look up. It is to a point where I might start attempting to write a series of guides and/or short-form videos for a lot of the more common ‘how-to’ and frequent problems that many users might encounter, both for GNOME and KDE at least.

More or less yes, minus the copying files back if the operation was successful. You must be careful shrinking partitions as it is very easy to destroy them, and I’d have to guess the partition layout looks vaguely (EFI System Partition (/boot/efi), Boot (/boot), Root (/), …), which would require shrink and move of the partition before or after /boot. If you’re unfamiliar with shrinking a partition, a bit of reading into how it is done for your filesystem will be required. Different setups, ext4, btrfs, lvm, LUKS, etc. will have different requirements.

Checking the /boot size on my Fedora install, I partitioned out a gibibyte for the 3 kernel plus recovery kernel setup, which takes up about 338 MiB in total. Depending on out-of-tree kernel modules and bootloader modifications installed, your initramfs images could be larger. A few things to look for:

• the size of your current initramfs and vmlinuz image(s)
• any kernel modules you needed to install alongside your system (v4l2-loopback, nvidia, realtek, etc.)
• If there are other large files present in the boot partition

If everything there looks fine and/or is necessary, you might need to expand your /boot partition (either reinstall if new system or offline partition shrinking, moving after a data backup if you have personal files you care about).

The Nullobsi fork of Cantata or many other mpd-backed music players are something I can recommend seems to fit what you’re looking for. It supports being able to edit the play queue whilst running a single-track on repeat within it. It does also support fade out and crossfade. The easiest way to obtain it is via its flatpak on Flathub. Cantata can either run an integrated or connect to a system-level mpd server for its backend.