Just a thumb of rule to make sense of it: A column in AWK is by default any space separated part. You can change the column separator to any other character too with -F ":" in example would be a double colon. There is also a way to print all columns, but with certain exceptions. In example print all, but the third and fourth columns: ls -l | awk '{$3=""; $4=""; print $0}' . Admittely I forget this syntax often and have to look for it again.

A perfect example when to use AWK.

It depends, there are no hard rules. I have a preference for the native package manager with pacman and repository of my distribution. I also would like to use AUR more often, but it depends who is maintaining that package. It also depends if there is a Flatpak available. Some AppImages have an auto update for itself, so I download it only once and use the applications own update functionality manually.

The good thing about AppImages are that they usually don’t require super user privileges to install (in other words use) them and I can also archive them very easily.

But make backups…

The big boost for gaming is only relevant if you do not use Proton. While there might be some boost for selected games, in general the new Kernel 6.14 shouldn’t make much of a difference for Steam gamers using Proton. Because Proton already got some alternative to NTSync mechanism, which improved some titles already.

The benchmarks presented with huge %-boosts and improvements are compared to previous WINE version, which do not have some of the alternative optimizations from Proton. Therefore I would be a bit cautious, if you already play on Steam using Proton.