Not just themed Chrome but with Microsoft’s anti-features (data gathering) and unwanted integrations added on top. Or instead of Google’s. Not sure. Anyway, if you don’t want to freely give away even more of your browsing data to either Microsoft or Google you shouldn’t use any of those.

If you want a Chromium-based browser for the desktop, try Brave but be wary that you need to change lots of settings to make it behave well (but it’s still the least bad Chromium-based browser, when not counting Vanadium for GrapheneOS/Android).

If not, try Librewolf, which already behaves well out of the box and reigns among the top Firefox-based desktop browsers.

Yes. Unfortunately, propaganda, intimidation and many lies and illegal actions from authoritarian regimes do work. The ones in power also don’t need to care if they’re still being supported by the population or not. After they’re in power, they don’t need supporters in the general population anymore, they just need people to be inactive and suck it all up so that they can continue staying in power. As long as there’s no revolt or upcoming election which actually gets rid of the regime and its background helpers, people are simply letting it happen right before their eyes. And so it will happen. And it will get even worse.

His attitude towards humans in general (including Americans) is a disgrace. He only exists to accumulate money and power. Nothing else is of interest to him. The only people who are gladly supporting him are 1) companies and individuals who want more money/power themselves and 2) right-wing extremists who are gullible by definition (pro-authoritarian, want to follow a Führer blindly, hate outsiders of their own group). Hence the strategy to convert conservatives to right-wing extremists via manipulation and propaganda.

Arch on Desktops&Notebooks, Debian on Servers.

Yes. Open source software is never really (in theory, yes (jurisdiction of the project/developers), but not in practice) dependent on particular jurisdictions anywhere, because it’s like open knowledge that can be instantly translated/compiled/packaged into a usable product. And this open knowledge can spread anywhere and also be modified by anyone anywhere at any time.

And this is important, as we’re seeing with the US now drifting into a fascist dictatorship that stopped being reasonable or sane and just does what it wants. Open source is an important defense against the appearance of criminal regimes, because it guarantees independence and always possible continuation of the software.

So for example even if the devs/maintainers of open source projects would be legally forced to add age verification code, it’s still open source and can be patched out rather easily (e.g. be replaced by code that just does “isAdult = true; return isAdult;” without any online spyware verification systems behind it, and the modifications can then be distributed by anyone, anywhere, anyhow and be applied by all users of that software.

This age verification stuff is only really broadly applicable within the context of proprietary software where users have zero control over what the software does and have to use it exactly like packaged (although there are probably workarounds even in that case). Worst case scenario is that they’ll realize this and as a result not scrap the whole idea or make an exception for open source, but instead try to make open source software illegal simply because it can’t be enforced there. But that would of course prompt such a major backlash world-wide that they won’t achieve anything with that except make themselves look silly. But you never know what those politicians and lawyers are smoking next…

KDE Plasma is one of the easiest desktops to use for a user coming from Windows, that’s for sure.

Gnome also has its place. I’ve used it for a few years (up to the Plasma 6 release, where I fully switched to Plasma on Wayland) and I like Gnome in general, its UI is a “modern” mix of the MacOS desktop and a mobile phone UI, whereas Plasma goes the traditional (one might also say boring) Windows desktop look&feel route (although you can also reconfigure Plasma heavily to look and feel however you want, but by default it’s very Windows-like).

Main difference, if you set aside the UI, is that KDE Plasma offers a ton of settings and features (available easily via the GUI), while Gnome intentionally doesn’t - that means to change some things you need to put in more effort in Gnome (use extensions or change settings via dconf editor, or custom CSS files. and so on).

Then there’s the factor of stability - Gnome has always been rock-solid stable for me, while KDE Plasma since 6.x release has been very good but still not rock-solid. I’ve had maybe around 5-7 plasmashell crashes so far during the whole time of using Plasma. Plasma has a recovery feature for this integrated now, so it isn’t as bad, but it’s still not rock-solid. The small price you pay for all the great and many features Plasma has is that it’s (still) slightly less stable, but due to it being able to self-recover most users probably don’t need to worry about it. I’ve had it on Windows as well - whenever the explorer shell crashes, it instantly restarts. You might have noticed this when suddenly the taskbar and everything is shortly gone but then re-appears. It’s kind of the same in Plasma, just that you also get a notification that plasmashell has crashed. I’ve never had any of this happen in several years of Gnome usage.

However, the Gnome devs are doing some weird decisions… they have very strong opinions about things and tend to not agree to things which they should agree to in order to make interoperability with other software easier. There have been a lot of unnecessary discussions about how to handle client-side window decorations, desktop portals, how to implement cerrtain Wayland extensions and things like that and often there are 2 factions at the end: the way Gnome wants to handle it vs. the way everyone else wants to handle it. I don’t like this attitude or selfishness at all from the Gnome project.

But in terms of software and UI quality, I think Gnome definitely has its place. Whether you like its UI or not, is something that every user will see differently. I’d assume that users coming straight from Windows and who maybe also want to continue to use the Windows UI paradigm on Linux will tend to find Gnome a bit alien. That’s understandable. Gnome has its own UI paradigm that doesn’t try to cater to Windows users. So you need to adapt to it, not the other way around. I also never really care that much about what desktop environment I’m using, because I’m doing so much with Emacs, the terminal and the browser, it almost doesn’t matter much what’s “around” that. So take my opinion with a grain of salt - I can probably use any UI paradigm and be fine with it. So maybe I’m not the best person to judge how well a UI is done. But I still wanted to give credit and criticisms where they’re due.

Yes. It’s already grown from ~1% to ~6% within the last couple of years. There are several major external factors at play: Valve helping to push gaming on Linux, the continued and increasingly big enshittification of Windows, and the current deranged US regime (resulting in less trust and less users of US-company-produced proprietary operating systems). Remember that Linux or the open source BSD variants are the only (usable/practical) operating systems you can use if you want to achieve digital sovereignty. Plus, it’s also getting even better over time by itself of course (that’s the internal factor).

There was or is a specific bug with earlier Ryzen CPU generations that causes system freezes when the CPU enters the powersaving c-state #6. If that applies to your machine, try the kernel parameter max_cstate=5 for a while. I had one PC build where this 100% resolved the system freezing after several minutes. Note though that this is ~6 year old info. Issue might have been resolved in the meantime. But worth a try probably if you have an older Ryzen CPU.

Agreed. Also, they did include their own mistakes in the video (first telling about problems but then later saying that it was their own fault). You could just not include that in the video since it’s pointless info about Linux when you yourself did the mistake. I think all of this in combination is meant to subtly influence viewers for “Linux = expect problems”. And since LTT is generally more on the entertainment side and less on the factual/trustworthy side, and still very well-known, it could also mean that they’re being paid to spread a little bit of that FUD.

On the other hand, genuinely newbie Linux users can definitely reveal some bugs or problems which might not have occurred otherwise. It’s like running a fuzzer that tests the ability of a program to deal with lots of random and nonsensical input. Because some of those Windows gamers sure have some questionable habits when interacting with their PC.

Also, it shows that genuine newbies maybe need more guidance from their distro to break certain Windows habits. For example, how to install drivers (you don’t because they should be there already) and applications (you shouldn’t download them from the manufacturer’s websites as a 1st priority). Somehow, these Windows-user friendly distributions never really include hints like that, even though that’s a completely different paradigm of using the OS.

“MS Office with its integrated spyware and other anti-features doesn’t meet basic security and data protection requirements so I use LibreOffice”

I still like Arch the most. Since ~22 years now.

Mint or Fedora(KDE) are great choices. Kubuntu, PopOS or OpenSuSE might also be suitable for beginners. Stay away from Arch-based distributions until you are at least a bit more experienced.

Intel (anything) works without problems on Linux (in fact, Intel is among the most Linux-supportive companies out there and most or all of their drivers are open source and part of the kernel, as it should be in the Linux world).

Nvidia GPUs used to be problematic in the past, it’s better now, still not as great as AMD GPUs are on Linux (they’re literally plug and play these days) but I think when going with the distro mentioned above it’s going to be just as easy Just make sure to enable support for NVidia drivers or “enable 3rd party drivers/repositories” (you’ll be asked during setup) so that those distributions will also install those slightly non-standard Nvidia packages which they might not do otherwise for “purity” reasons.

Linux Mint is often recommended to users coming from Windows, so… Kubuntu, Pop!OS and OpenSuSE are maybe also decent for that use case.

Manjaro isn’t recommended. They made lots of weird decisions and mistakes in the past, maybe still do. Wouldn’t trust them. Endeavour or Cachy are the current recommendations for “easy Arch”. If you’re able to install and maintain vanilla Arch, I’d recommend Arch though. Cut the middleman.

I’m only a little bit familar with the TUI browsers. I’m also not sure about gemini and gopher support so you have to look that up on each project page, but I can give some general directions:

• Lynx is basically the oldest TUI browser, so probably not the best and no modern choice, but still maintained I think
• ELinks started as a fork of Links (and Links started as an alternative to Lynx, so both ELinks and Links are newer than Lynx). It has a lot of features and is actively maintained, so it’s decent I think. Probably better than Links (and Links is probably better than Lynx)
• Links2: no idea, just know that it exists. If it’s still actively maintained I would suggest comparing it to ELinks because they’re both probably similar (both related to but newer than Links))
• W3m is the one I’d recommend, it’s powerful and can be integrated more easily into other applications. For the classic TUI browsers, it probably comes down to the choice between w3m and elinks
• There’s also a modern project called Carbonyl which is essentially Chromium running in a terminal, so this one might be “better” than all of the above in terms of features and modern website compatibility. But again, it depends on what you want out of a TUI browser - if you only need something basic this is probably overkill. But I didn’t try it out.

Congrats.

Yes, desktop Linux is generally very usable for the majority of users these days. This was already claimed to be the case in the late 1990s, which is probably why many non-IT-professionals had a bad first expression with desktop Linux. But this has changed since (very roughly) about 10 years ago or so, and for gaming in particular it has changed since very roughly about 5 years ago. This is also the reason why desktop Linux was at like ~1% market share all the time but has suddenly grown to ~6% within the last couple of years already. And with higher popularity comes more developer interest and support. Furthermore, Windows is becoming worse over time because Nadella is more interested in milking his user base instead of nurturing it, and many want more independence from US-based proprietary software due to the current political situation, and so it’s very likely that desktop Linux is going to keep snowballing upwards. The trend is looking very positively for desktop Linux, it will probably reach MacOS market share within the next couple of years. For gaming specifically, it’s already #2.

The most important thing about the Linux ecosystem is of course that most of it (at least the core components) is free/open source software and this is necessary to have digital sovereignty.

Other users interested in making the switch can make their transition easier by doing it in 2 steps: first, replace all important applications you’re using on Windows with Linux-compatible applications (for example, no MS Office, no Adobe), then adjust to the changed workflows while still using Windows. Only after that, install Linux as the primary OS (or set up dual-boot, but it has disadvantages. Best is to physically disconnect your disk containing Windows (so you still have a backup in case you desperately need it) and use another disk for Linux). That way, the culture shock is a bit mitigated because you’ll have at least some familiarity (the applications you need) inside an otherwise unfamiliar new OS environment. That way, the change will feel less overwhelming.

If there are still dependencies which can’t be worked around, there’s also the emergency solution of using either wine or a Windows VM on Linux. In the latter case it’s probably best these days to use winboat, which allows running Windows-only applications which then run inside a specific Windows VM or container on Linux. Or you just use a full regular Windows VM on Linux, with a shared folder between both systems for exchanging files.

It’s for window management related hotkeys. Obviously. All about windows. With a lowercase “w”.

Most news is bad news and you certainly are exposed to more (bad) news these days than decades earlier. That certainly must be one factor why you can get increasingly bitter about the world.

But that doesn’t mean that the situation hasn’t gotten worse. It definitely has.

The three main factors are (although #2 and #3 are related): increasingly problematic climate change and exhausting the planetary resources too quickly while at the same time polluting it more and more, increasingly ruthless neo-liberalist capitalism (leading to increasingly poor regular people and increasingly rich rich people), and the rise of right-wing extremism / fascism (related to the previous factor because whenever the population is worse off, they tend to vote more for right-wing populists lying to make everything better and knowing the true causes, while in reality they deflect from real problems and will make things even worse for the general population, and faster). And since we have the internet, local fascism doesn’t stay local. It spreads globally.

It’s been downhill since W7

Tips for coping:

• Call it the Super key (actually the correct label I think)
• Bind window management related hotkeys to it