Russia is one of the key destinations for piracy because of lenient laws and even more lenient police practice regarding it.

I’m 128, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s high enough or not.

Generally, I am successful in my studies and pursue career in science. I am not a high earner, and doing mental work still drains me heavily. I take a few hours of dumb physical work every week to reset. I am more or less satisfied with my life, I do have a romantic partner and generally find it easy to navigate social situations, but I’m introverted and need to recharge. So, you can say I have a high burst productivity all-round, but I’m not good at a long game.

This is just me though, and one thing to remember is that there is no objective metric for intelligence, and it can be divided in many different ways. Some people are great at solving math problems, but are dead stupid in social situations. Some go vice versa. Some have a gift for certain areas of knowledge or skills where they are way above average, while having underwhelming performance with the rest.

For example, I excel at disciplines that require me to connect many diverse data points (my area of interest is microbiology), but I’m not that good at following logic through many layers of calculations and linking it back to source (as in physics/math; I’m still able to carry out calculations I need for my work, but it’s exhausting). I acquire language skills quite readily, and have good auditory perception overall, but have high reaction time and struggle driving or doing competitive sports/gaming (no, higher intelligence doesn’t mean faster reaction).

Overall, I’m just a normal human, fairly smart, fairly capable, but nothing supernatural and sometimes straight up underwhelming.

Strong disagree on my part.

Immutable distros work differently from traditional ones, for which most guides and manuals were written. This is somewhat painful even for those coming from other distros, and it’s gonna be a nightmare for those coming from another OS. They didn’t even familiarize themselves with Linux yet, and people want them to run flatpaks, distroboxes and work with rpm-ostree or its alternatives. It’s like learning to fly a plane by saving a Boeing-737 on a crash course.

Immutable options are not for newbie users, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Having tried NixOS, I gotta say the ability to quickly restore everything from a single config (its main premise) is overrated when it comes to home systems. Invaluable for production environments, though.

The rest can be done on any other Linux, and it would probably be preferred by most.

This is always a tradeoff.

KDE tries to be universal and useful for everyone. No matter what you plan to do with your system, KDE has convenient tools for that. But, no matter how they try to make the system less busy, full set of easily available functions always stands in the way of minimalism.

Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it’s not for everybody.

More pleasant to look at

Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it’s certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.

User-friendly

Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to…

Customizable

Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you’re used to it, want something not offered, or can’t imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.

Stable

As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can’t be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.

In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.

Honestly, on my Fedora I have to fix things more rarely than in Windows 11. Granted, Linux troubleshooting is sometimes more time-consuming, but I haven’t met a single issue that would take hours to resolve in a long while. Ironically, my partner wasted about 6 hours recently getting Windows 11 to work with audio devices on a remote desktop client.

Still, we have to admit fixing some stuff in Linux is outside the scope of regular everyday user.

Some apps and front ends support showing your post and comment “karma”. Eternity, for example

OnlyOffice crashed for me repeatedly on Debian, LibreOffice did not.

But otherwise yes, I prefer OnlyOffice as well for a much friendlier interface.

LibreOffice just commonly puts mundane parameters God knows where.

Same for Dell; moreover, KDE actually features the respective indicators, so the laptop feels completely Linux-native

Underrated comment

Can’t say for TeamSpeak, but will say for Linux: setting everything up and figuring out your steps in edge cases is the hardest part. Once you figure it out, it gets so much easier.

Good to know!

Currently I run a secondhand Dell Latitude, it was well cared for and is in a great condition, even the battery capacity sits at 94%. Runs Linux like a charm. Couldn’t be happier about it and hope it lasts me a while.

It’s not hard, but the more laptop lasts, the longer it will take before you buy a new one.

Yep, seen those for a while now

You guys hate GUI, don’t you?

One point thirty two

Still insane to me that one woman literally saves the world of science from all this corruption

As a third party, I feel I have to contend this.

“Nobody owes you accepting you as equal” is also a form of dangerous elitism. Linux is built on the foundation of cooperation and mutual aid, and I don’t think it’s the right place to figure out who is more or less “valuable”.

Someone who lacks some of the technical know-how of Linux might be useful to the community as a Linux advocate, or as someone with good ideas on user-friendly design, or something else entirely that can still be useful.

Besides, if we ever hope for “the year of Linux desktop” to be a real thing, we have to be inviting. Yes, most PC users are not technical specialists. Yes, they will have dumb and silly questions. Yes, many of such quesrions have already been answered before, and yes, they could have searched better.

But such is life. Maybe we have time and will for this, but most people don’t. If we want for all our favorite programs and games to finally become Linux native, if we want to ensure Linux experience becomes smooth, if we don’t want to be seen as a community of red-eyed nerds, we need all those people in. And there’s no detriment to this greater than constant infighting and elitism, than forcing people to bury down the wikis instead of providing useful support, and so on. People will just…leave back for Windows, and that’s it. Poof, one less potential supporter in an uphill battle to make Linux mainstream.

Now, I know how frustrating it may be to answer same questions again and again, in your free time, getting nothing for it. I understand it. But we shouldn’t let frustration break the bonds that make it all work. If you don’t feel like answering that same question, just…don’t. That will be enough. Someone else will get them up to speed.

Not sure if it’s available in Lemmy. Devs and admins can probably say more