Not sure there will be a big change there, because they are already powerful enough for most common tasks since several years now. And everyone owns at least one phone or tablet already. So I don’t think that number is going to rise significantly anymore. Those people who are OK with using a phone/tablet for everything probably already do so right now. Maybe if living conditions for the non-super-rich become worse and people look for more affordable computing devices. But even then, older devices which can run Linux desktops for example are already dirt-cheap. I just don’t think that the UI/UX of phones or tablets is on par with desktops or notebooks running a regular desktop OS when using a big screen. Those UIs are primarily made for touch and for smaller screens. Trying to do everything with just one UI paradigm just leads to Windows 8 ugliness.

Desktop Linux’ marketshare is going to steadily increase, but as time progresses, so will the speed of that increase. Linux was at or below 1% for a really long time but within the last 5 years or so it jumped to ~5%. As this not only means more users, but also more attention and developers, this will of course snowball. The end of Win10 will also give a bump. And if the enshittification of Windows continues (it probably will) and if US-based companies are becoming a red flag for non-US-customers (will probably also happen) then it will snowball even faster.

The old question of “what happens when Linus/other senior kernel dev dies” mattered far more like 20+ years ago than it does now. The kernel developers are organized quite well, Linux is in general an extremely well-organized open source project these days, and there are several who could fill in. Linus’ “2nd” is Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is the lead maintainer of the stable kernel branch (i.e. the one most are using). Linus is the lead maintainer of the in-development branch.

But of course we hope that Linus continues doing this for a long time. Most people never create even one world-changing technology, Linus casually created two (Linux + Git).

Original article is 404, so probably a fake or other error.

That’s only true up to a certain size. If Ground News ever grows big, they’ll still retain enough of a user base regardless of what they’re doing. Compare it to e.g. Meta, Google, MS services. Or even X. Many people just never leave once they feel at home there. Meta could do even more disgusting stuff and people would still use WhatsApp, Instagram, and the likes.

Fedora gives you a secure and functional desktop distro out of the box while with Arch, you can get that as well but have to invest more configuration time, since you have to configure things like Secure Boot, SELinux, disk encryption, firewalls, AppArmor and other security stuff by yourself, it’s not going to have all that jazz by default, since Arch is a minimalistic and modular DIY-like distro, so it’s up to the user to configure this. Arch doesn’t put obstacles in the way of the user but also doesn’t just preconfigure this stuff. But it’s all there if you need it. Arch also offers a linux-hardened kernel variant which uses various hardening patches of the GrapheneOS project for the kernel (not sure if Fedora offers this as well). Experienced Linux users tend to like Arch’s approach because of more flexibility, modularity and minimalism while still offering everything necessary, but the less experienced of a user you are the more you probably will have problems with this approach, and the more you want more things to be pre-configured out of the box, so that you as the user have to configure less stuff. The more you view it that way, the less suitable Arch is for you.

But both are excellent and modern distros. Fedora is generally for people who want to generally spend less time configuring their desktop distro. Arch is for people looking for either a more universal distro or something more modular, technically simple and customizable.

The RedHat backing of Fedora can be a blessing (lots of great stuff came from RedHat so far) but also could become a curse soon due to IBM’s influence (which bought RedHat some time ago, and IBM isn’t such a great company, and this can negatively impact RedHat as well) and current US politics (it’s a US-based company). Arch, on the other hand, is even more independent than Fedora is and it’s a fully community-run distro, and from all community-run distros, it’s of very high quality, similar to Debian. Both Debian and Arch are also quite democratic in nature. If IBM hadn’t bought RedHat, and US wouldn’t be like it is today, I’d maybe view this differently but as it is I’d rather use a community-run distro than a US-corporation backed one. Even if Fedora is still very independent as a project, or so it seems.

If you’re very well familiar with Arch there’s really no need to switch to Fedora, but it can save you some time or configuration trouble overall in some cases, while it could also mean more potential trouble with major upgrades than with Arch with its frequent but lightweight updates all the time and never a big major version upgrade because Arch has no versions at all, it’s purely rolling, whereas Fedora is a mixture of rolling and point release. That said, if you update your Arch very infrequently (e.g. only once every couple of weeks), you will also have a higher chance of update troubles (though these are often easy to solve for an experienced Arch user, but can be crippling for a newbie). To benefit from Arch’s update mechanisms, you have to update frequently, as in every couple of days, at the very least once a week. And you really should set up a fallback mechanism, e.g. via filesystem snapshots, so you can revert an update which went wrong. Although so far, one of my Arch installations here is like 7 years old and there were only very minor update issues during that whole time, all of which were solvable via downgrading a specific package, waiting 1-3 days for the fix and then upgrading that package. So I’d say Arch is much more stable than its reputation, but still, even objectively small update issues can be devastating for you if you don’t know how to solve them, so it again depends on the user.

Another factor is probably going to be whether the AUR or Fedora’s community repos have more of the additional packages that you need for your use cases, from the packages that aren’t in the default repos.

Which of the two distros makes more sense depends highly on the user, the user’s familiarity with Linux basics, the user’s available time, and general use cases. I’d say both choices are excellent for a desktop distro, and Fedora would immediately become my daily driver if I ever became unhappy with Arch. Which so far hasn’t happened.

Another option if you still can’t decide between those two excellent distros would be an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, which pre-configure more of Arch for an easier desktop use out of the box. So they are more like Arch of course (based on it) but trade away some of Arch’s subjective “weaknesses” for Fedora’s subjective “strengths”. I say “subjective” because those weaknesses and strengths can be different for each user and use case. Sometimes this gets forgotten in discussions like this. It’s not a clearly defined drawback if your distro doesn’t preconfigure most stuff out of the box. Whether that is a drawback or not depends on the user. However I’d assume that most users probably prefer more pre-configuration. But still, one size doesn’t fit all.

Well this got longer than intended but I hope it helps for decision making.

• Cult of the Lamb
• Vampire Survivors
• Halls of Torment

I use several, depending on use case:

• Tor Browser for general and anonymous web browsing (e.g. reading news, looking up stuff, and so on)
• Mullvad Browser as a clear web alternative for general use
• Librewolf for generally logging into sites with personally identifiable accounts (e.g. to buy stuff)
• Ungoogled Chromium for those few sites which only work with a Chromium-based browser, or other specific cases
• On Android (GrapheneOS): Tor Browser and Vanadium

All regular browsers have some hardening applied and uBlock Origin installed.

Since you only mentioned 25% gaming, I’d recommend against a gaming-centric distro like Bazzite. Instead, use a generalist desktop distro.

Since you mentioned that you’re rather new-ish, I’d recommend against Arch-based distros like CachyOS. Instead, check out e.g. Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE. (Probably in that order of priority)

These aren’t hard recommendations, so you can do whatever and probably be fine either way, but it still doesn’t fit that well.

There are lots of great live bands but maybe these were most memorable for various reasons: Magma (just hypnotic), Lazuli (very entertaining live band every single time), The Pineapple Thief (great prog rock with incredible drummer), The Musical Box (playing and re-acting old Genesis. Too young to see the originals but just in time to see the remakes), Le Silo (super high energy duo or trio, don’t even remember, but man that was wild), Aranis (they don’t exist anymore unfortunately)

I don’t view it as badly. He’s probably overly defensive and paranoid and interprets some forms of criticism as attacks. But I do not see this as an argument against his competence or contributions to the project, or against using GrapheneOS altogether, at all. In fact, I even kind of like having someone paranoid as the head of a security-focused OS. Seems like a useful synergy to me. Also, AFAIK the GrapheneOS project now also has others posting about the project, not just him alone. I think this was also a result of his “miscommunication” in the past. Furthermore, the project is too important (there are almost zero high-security and high-privacy mobile OSes!) to escalate this into a problem. And furthermore again, there might also be parties involved who are ACTUALLY interested in attacking GrapheneOS and weakening its popularity, for their own gains. And so when your successful and also high-quality project is under regular attacks from various angles, you might get more paranoid and misinterpret some valid criticism as a result. Combine that with Rossman’s over-dramatic nature and high reach, and someone paranoid like Daniel might take it the wrong way. And then communication spirals out of control into various escalations. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Around 2.5-3 days. On a LAN party in 2003 or so. 2 nights without sleep. Lots of caffeine. It was fun at first but really started feeling terrible after the 2nd night.

He’s mostly correct about lots of things, but not about everything (for example, he hated on everything GrapheneOS just because its lead dev is a bit socially awkward). Plus he’s overly dramatic and verbose which can be annoying. Sometimes you must be to get abstract or complicated points across better, but I still feel he’s too aggressive in that regard. I also like what he’s trying to achieve with FUTO in general. Overall, he’s a great and valuable activist who has almost all of his eggs in the right baskets.

Well, “nice” to have that feature, but you still shouldn’t use Discord, or at least limit your time on it as much as possible. Remember, when you use it, you’re part of the network effect that makes Discord big. You have to resist that. Take a look how Discord compares to pretty much any other messenger or communication tool in existence: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html Avoid it whenever possible, get your friends to leave it and weaken its network effect.

So, some of the drawbacks (there’s probably more):

• Discord has weak security (see URL above)
• Discord has non-existent privacy
• Discord has an incredibly vague privacy policy which means they do what they want. Even companies with strong privacy policies screw users over routinely. Guess what companies do who don’t even care about good privacy policies. They even weakened it further a while back because they need to train their new AI features on your data as well, and probably even their weak privacy policies were in the way before. Well, good thing that the users agreed that they can change it at any time for any reason and be fine with it.
• You grant all rights of everything you write, say, share or do on Discord to Discord, and everything you type, say, upload or share is being processed by their servers
• Discord tracks what you’re typing before sending it
• Discord suspended accounts and required even more user data for “verification”, such as telephone numbers which is completely unnecessary except for tracking and data selling purposes
• Discord shares chat logs with law enforcement (and they can share everything because they’re collecting everything)
• The Discord client app tracks what programs you have running so it can for example display what games you’re currently running. That means it contains a process logger. It has to scan every running application and then finds games out of those, and then you have to hope that only the game-specific bits are uploaded to their servers. Maybe that is the case, but can you trust them, and also to never change that? No.

If you have to use it:

• Never use their desktop app, always use the web version from a secondary browser (web apps running in the browser have much less rights than locally running applications), and even then limit what the site can access to the least amount of stuff necessary. If you never use your mic or camera then block it in the browser settings. Don’t trust Discord’s own mute setting (this also applies to other proprietary software).
• Use a fake e-mail alias / telephone number when creating your account, generally give them the least amount of data possible. Opt out of any options or features which are tied to you exposing more data to them
• Don’t give them additional money e.g. for their premium stuff (you already pay with data they gather from you)
• Block at least these API endpoints which are purely used for tracking purposes (there may be more though, and they might change) [easy to do with uBlock Origin for example]:

https://discord.com/api/v*/science
https://discord.com/api/v*/channels/*/typing
https://discord.com/api/v*/track*

• You can also block these related hosts safely without impairing Discord’s main functions (again there may be more):

crash.discordapp.com
status.discordapp.com
b.stats.paypal.com
app.adjust.com
client-analytics.braintreegateway.com

Yeah, I also don’t like such general laziness. It’s also not just limited to switching to Linux, it’s kind of the same with switching to anything that’s better but slightly(!) more inconvenient than what you’re used to. Well, you can’t make or be part of some progress unless you’re willing to sometimes get off your comfy couch and do something you’ve never done before. Like switching to Linux. Like stopping eating meat. Like stopping supporting certain evil companies. Like going to vote for a non-retarded option. Like voting with your wallet for the products you use/buy and also NOT use/buy. If everyone would do it, the world would be a different (better) place. But still too few are doing it. Because it’s slightly less convenient. And that would be so damn hard to change. Oh man would that be hard. Not.

Distro hopping is fairly normal if you’re still relatively new to Linux, I guess you do it less as time goes on, because you’ll have a better idea of whether or not a specific distro is appealing to you or not. To be able to even judge that you have to try out some distros for yourself, of course, so you need to do some distro hopping in order to tell what “direction” of distro is best for you. Sure you can read about it or watch videos but it’s never the same as actually running it for yourself.

The question is kind of impossible to answer because the two are so different. It doesn’t make sense to compare Linux to a version of Windows.

Also:

One side (myself included) is usually disgusted at Windows for being so bloated, full of spyware and dark patterns, closed, untrustworthy, fraudulent and inefficient. So personally, I’d rate Linux to be as good as a non-existing future version of Windows that’s never going to appear.

While the other side (most “average users”) are usually disgusted at Linux because Fortnite, Photoshop and that random stupid thing they bought at some store don’t run on it. As stupid as it sounds but that is usually enough reason for an average user to not like Linux. Also, he’d have to install it himself because it’s not preinstalled. Also a major hurdle for that kind of user. Unfortunately, the majority of users. Users like that probably rate Linux as bad as something like MS-DOS or Win 3.x because they feel that Linux is limiting them, but at the same time don’t want to change anything about their software choices.

The main problem is that common users are usually tied to specific proprietary software (or specific formats which can only be opened by specific proprietary software) which ties them to Windows, and anything that doesn’t run that software cannot be an alternative for them. That’s probably also the reason why MacOS isn’t more popular because it also can’t run everything, but it’s still better than Windows. So unless those users change their habits and the software they use, they will always be shackled to Windows and remain on that sinking ship until they’re literally beneath the ocean, because they never realize a sinking ship.

netstat is kind of deprecated, ss is more modern (from the iproute2 package) and uses very similar parameters.

• awk
• the (usually rust-based) coreutils “alternatives” like bat, fd, eza, procs
• trash-put (rm with trash integration. But beware that it also operates on directories by default, which rm only does with -r. There should be an option to change that behavior but there isn’t. Don’t alias rm to this)
• wl-copy/paste (or the older one for X11, ‘xclip’ IIRC. Enables you to do stuff like “cat image.jpg | wl-copy” to copy it to the clipboard. Best alias it to something shorter)
• xdg-open (open the file using your associated program for that file type. Alias to “o” or so)
• pass (awesome password manager, when you have a GPG key pair. Even better in combination with e.g. wofi)
• notify-send (to send GUI notifications from shell scripts)
• ledger (plain-text accounting software. If you use Emacs you should take a look at this as it’s written by an Emacs dev, and has good integration of course)
• nc
• nohup

• Cyberpunk 2077 (very good since 2.x and with Phantom Liberty expansion). Since I have similar hardware to you, you can play it with Raytracing enabled and have at least above 30 fps which should be enough for most playstyles except maybe fast melee-based combat. The game’s lighting effects look absolutely gorgeous with Raytracing.

• Witcher 3 (keep at it. It’s amazing. It can feel clunky at the beginning due to its weird combat mechanics but you get used to it. Also you can switch it up by integrating signs (magic) into your swordfighting. Which is what I recommend doing. I think it’s more varied). Also, the game gets better as you go. The base game is great, but the DLCs are even better, especially Blood & Wine has kind of a legendary status among all DLCs, you rarely get such value inside a DLC, except Phantom Liberty which has a similar scope and quality to it.

• Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the best game of the last decade or so so highly recommended. It’s not open world, but it’s still huge and is at the same time very densely packed with stuff, so you need a lot of time when you want to explore and loot everything. The game feels huge that way. Especially compared to open world games, it’s like the opposite - open world games have a vast area but almost nothing in-between major points, which means the world can feel empty in a lot of open-world games. Baldur’s Gate 3 has something around every corner and never feels empty (unless you’ve cleared a whole area already).

• Red Dead Redemption 2 - a lot of people like it, so far it didn’t feel right to me (so slow) but I can still see how it’s a good game and if you like chilling with a game it might be just your thing

• Elden Ring is amazing but has very tough combat/action of course. Still, it really feels great as an open-world game. It completely throws the “Ubisoft formula” out of the window, which most open-world games follow, and that’s precisely why it’s so good. I’ve rarely had more feeling of true exploration and accomplishment within an open world game. Still, combat is very challenging, so if you prefer games to be on the easy side, then it’s not right for you. But if you don’t mind a challenge (a challenge you can also often delay for later when you’re stronger) then it’s a must-play. If you don’t know, as most or all games from From Software, these games don’t offer different difficulty settings so there is only one difficulty which is the same for every player (and it’s tough). These games are also very fair and reward accurate playing - it’s possible to not get hit at all by anything, for example, if you’re really good. So they never feel unfair and when you die (which you do a lot) you’ll always know why you died and have an idea how you could do it better. Besides the difficulty, what can also feel oppressive in those games is the fact that all enemies (except bosses) respawn whenever you rest. But Elden Ring kind of mitigates that because you can skip a lot of areas and come back when you’re better prepared (i.e. gained more levels/attributes or better gear). Then, past challenges can start feeling easy. And skipping weak enemies is kind of the normal thing.

• STALKER 2 (may still need a couple more patches but it’s playable and has a great overall atmosphere and visual design. They fixed the worst post-launch problems I think). Very strong in atmosphere and immersion.