Private Internet Access is just a VPN?

I’ve had no issues installing the flatpak for ProtonVPN and using it.

There are a few improvements in Aurora over Silverblue that you might like.

It ships with homebrew which is perfect for CLI tools.

It ships with distrobox instead of toolbx which is much better. You can install any distro while toolbx is just a Fedora. For example I’m using Arch in toolbox because of the number of packages and the fact that they’re usually up to date (no need to wait for a major release).

So far I never had to use rpm-ostree, and for VSCode I use distrobox precisely because of the permissions.

For me atomic distributions are the way to go.

You get a rock solid base system that get updated automatically, and every single user has the same image so you can’t get into a bug that’s only reproduced on your system because of your combination of system packages. If for any reason you have a problem with an image update, you can always boot on the previous image from grub.

Then user apps come on top of that, and can’t break the base system.

I know you tried Kinoite and got stuck, but there is always a way to unblock yourself and install what you want. If it’s not in flatpak there is homebrew (for CLI), and if it’s in neither there is distrobox. You can also do a rpm-ostree for native packages if all the others fail.

You can also check universal blue, Aurora in particular if you want KDE. It’s based on Fedora Silverblue but with an improved out-of-the-box experience.

https://universal-blue.org/

If I have a new PC with a blank hard drive, what should be the install order?

Windows, then rEFInd, then Linux?

FILEID.DIZ

I too prefer big distros, but niche distros are usually big distros with small tweaks in the default config or installed packages. It’s Debian/Fedora/Arch slightly tweaked.

Windows have always been trash. Windows 9x were the worse.

Windows NT was better, Windows XP was trash at release then got better with updates (the service packs).

Windows Vista was a shitshow, then 7 was better. Windows 8 was horrible, the 10 was a bit better.

Windows always oscillates between trash and acceptable. There is not much to “ruin” to be honest.

Most places deploy to Linux, and for those knowing Linux helps a lot. Also a lot of places will give MacBook pro, expect you to know the CLI so a lot of Linux knowledge will be useful there.

Don’t forget the Ubuntu restaurant.

https://www.ubuntula.com/

Just be careful with the silverware, they can Snap if you’re too rough.

I really enjoyed the diversity of WM/DE back then, and the innovation when new ones like Enlightenment were released!

There is no emergency that can’t be handled by the adults of the school.

I can understand needing a phone for the commute, but at school it should stay in the bag turned off.

I don’t hate Windows, I don’t care about it. I don’t use it.

I have to say, as a Linux fan in the 90’s it was very cool to see Linux eating the whole server space, replacing older Unix while Microsoft tried desperately to grow Windows on the server market.

Unfortunately boring distributions don’t get recommended because users of boring distributions don’t bother commenting on distribution discussions.

And it’s really unfortunate that obscure distributions have more vocal fans, because boring distributions are much better for beginners.

Don’t try zsh, because you won’t be able to go back to bash after that 😉

Nothing in particular, for the past few years I didn’t like the direction Ubuntu was taking but I stayed because I was too lazy to switch and it didn’t feel that bad.

So I’m not sure exactly what was the last straw, maybe part of it was me getting a Steam Deck, discovering flatpak and understanding how bad snap was compared to it.

It just works, just like Ubuntu before they started pushing snap down everyone’s throat (which is what made me switch eventually.)

I had a bad image of RedHat/Fedora’s package management from the time deb was much superior, but no they caught up and are on the same level (I know, it’s probably been a while).

I also like how they mostly package upstream without too many changes. When Ubuntu started upstream was a bit lacking so making changes was necessary to get something that looks like a consistent OS rather than a patchwork of packages, but now it’s no longer needed. Ubuntu is no longer the only distribution with that level of polish.

• In the 90’s: Slackware, then RedHat, then Debian, then Progeny (Debian based), then shortly Mandrake (RedHat based)

• Early 2000’s: RedHat Japanese edition, TurboLinux (because I was in Japan and Japanese IME was almost impossible to get working on non-Japanese distributions)

• Then I had fun with Gentoo looking at my terminal compiling stuff everyday and fixing broken package because I followed advices to activate crazy compilation flags

• 2004: Ubuntu, that I used for nearly 20 years

• Last year: switched to Fedora

For a desktop yes. You can dock it and forget that it’s not a regular Linux desktop. Especially if it means Python and JS, you don’t need much power for that.

For a laptop not so much, because you’ll need to bring screen+keyboard+mouse and everything to plug them so the portability aspect seriously suffers.

I’m not sure what “the Linux community” really means but I would bet that pure open source Android based on AOSP are more popular than the non-Android Linux mobile OS combined.