My NAS is a Raspberry Pi4 with a single consumer-level SSD. My backups sometimes complete.

I think this happens only when your firefox upgraded while you were using it. In Linux, that usually happens when you manually run an upgrade.

• No More Forced Restarts: This is a huge relief for many!. Firefox on Linux no longer requires a forced restart after your package manager applies an update. This means smoother, uninterrupted browsing, even during system updates.
• Reduced Memory Usage: ForkServer leads to a significant reduction in memory consumption for content processes. The base resident memory for a content process is now around 50% lower. This helps Firefox run more efficiently, especially if you have many tabs open.
• Faster Process Startup: You’ll notice that content process startup times are reduced by approximately 35%. This translates to snappier new tab openings and overall improved responsiveness.

op is a secret owl

Like others suggested here, the problem is probably nouveau and you might want to try a gaming-oriented distro which usually configure these things correctly out-of-the-box. My favourite is Nobara and Fedora (which didn’t work for you but works for me because I have different hardware). People suggest Bazzite, but I cannot recommend it because it’s based on Fedora Atomic, and I don’t get along with Fedora Atomic.

As a general admittedly non-helpful suggestion, don’t get Nvidia hardware if you want to use Linux.

are there people who made it work? sure.

For some historical context, Nvidia has had premium Linux support since 2006. For the longest time it was the only option for any kind of hardware accelerated 3D graphics on Linux and it generally worked pretty well.

Thankfully, AMD made the open-source side of graphics on Linux work also recently. At least for two years, AMD GPUs have been entirely trouble-free on Linux. To my knowledge, Nouveau is not quite there yet.

I’ve no idea if Arch actually has newer drivers than Debian / Fedora

Kinda, since Arch has nvidia’s own drivers in their extra repo, whereas in Fedora you’ll have to do some stuff to get them.

What’s Plex’s use case? Why not just mpv locally?

Fedora has always used their own. Dpkg was released in 1994, RPM in 1997.

My comment was about Windows and MacOS kinda catching up in 2020s.

I’ve been using Linux (also Arch, several years, happily!) since 1996 and for a long time I’ve wondered why every software I run gets access to every file I have.

Flatpak is one way to fix that.

is available as a package or in the AUR

Oh okay, I see. You don’t perhaps care about programs reading the files of other programs. Well, that’s fine, everybody has their own threat models.

Perhaps the message is changing now, after they have kind of caught up finally. How long did it take, 20 years?