Linux is linux. In the end it’s more your personal taste with just a little sprinkle of use case that decides.

The main differences are:

• Update speed: How quickly are the repositories getting updates. That’s a spectrum between getting cutting edge version in days or weeks or having things unchaged for up to several years. Or in other worlds you will see more bugs in freshly released software, but also bugfixes often within days. Compared to getting new feature only after years, but rarely any bugs (the very few ones that slip through… well, you will get the fix in a few years). That’s also where use case plays a bigger role. If you use very new hardware and want software that uses their newest features, a rather stale slow updating distro might not be the right fit for you.

• Update scheme: Fixed vs. continues release. Continues releases are slowly but constantly changing over time but once installed they can basically used forever. While fixed releases are mostly just shipping critical bugfixes and security patches and doing everything else in big release steps (think in terms of Windows upgrades here: You mostly have the same thing for years but at a certain point there is a newer version that might bring changes in defaults, new pre-installed software, UI changes etc. and after a couple of years you lose support if you don’t do that step).

Also more depending on your personal taste and habits:

• How much are you willing or interested in tinkering? Basically all distros give you access to all software. But what is pre-installed changes, both in what is provided by default and also how much software is there already. For example do you want stuff for video editing set up already or don’t you care as you will test out all the options available anyway?

• The same is true the basic desktop environment. Gnome and KDE are the two big ones (with some more oftens based or forked from those two). And it mostly a difference of “here is our environment exactly as we think it’s best with very little customisation” (Gnome - also the one with most forks, by people who did not agree with the Gnome devs vision) and “have fun customising” (KDE). Is customising stuff to your liking your thing? Or do don’t care and also prefer something as close to what you are used to on Windows? Again: Distros have all the options available. But some have one environment or the other pre-installed. Or they come in different flavors from the beginning. If customisation isn’t your cup of tea the decision on a certain distro matters much more.

Other considerations:

• Immutable distros are more on the newer end of things. They are basically designed more like for example Android. There is a base system that rarely changes and allows basically a “reset ot factory settings”, with updates and additionally installed software provided as incremental changes and/or highly containerised. That has benefits (you can revert screw ups easily) but also drawbacks (decades of available linux instructions are now worthless until you really understand where that regular config file you can’t edit anymore is now located in some separate container only used by one specific piece of software - and most people that google for such solutions don’t). Again this is mostly decided by habits. Are you expecting to tinker with your system or do you just want something that works on its own that neither you or an upgrade cannot possibly break. In the latter case an immutable distro can be the thing for you. And as always… you have all the options and you can also setup most other distros with extensive systems of “save points” to revert problematic changes anyway.

Things to not consider:

• ignore the answers speaking about “it provides WINE for running windows stuff” or “it comes with NVIDIA drivers” because they basically all do (minus the already mentioned combination of running cutting edge hardware with very slow updating distros - that’s not a good idea). At the worst it usually requires clicking some “Yes, I don’t insist on open source stuff exclusively but will also to use proprietary drivers if available” checkbox in the installer.

I guess “FBI infiltrated group of immigration activist” would be boring and not fitting the FUD about encrypted messaging…

Nectcloud has always been incredible slow for me. (And that’s beside other issues like updates failing more often than succeeding…)

And as I was using it mostly for basic filesharing between my machines and as a CalDAV/CardDAV server I replaced it with Syncthing and Radicale now.

Someone does this in times of increasing Iridium prices? What a waste…

but it me a couple reads to determine if that was a really bad autocorrect

Fun fact: it took me a couple of reads to understand that you forgot the verb.

Kind of… the regular driver officially supports everything from Maxwell to the newest cards.

But then there is the new open source driver now, supporting Turing and above. Which is recommended to try by Nvidia developers, but also still has issues (like power management problems on Turing for example).

Also CUDA-specific stuff still pulls the proprietary driver as a requirement anyway.

As someone with an ancient 750ti happily running on the regular nvidia drivers…

Dedicated support for “older cards” as in “requiring different drivers” usually starts much later (Kepler and before), so about 4 generations before an 1660Super.

Yes, preventing the boot process when something tempers with the files is the whole point of secure boot.

And beside the backups you should always have (remember: no backup, no pity for you…) the keys to sign your EFI files with are on the encrypted disk so the running system can get updated. So deactivating secure boot again, unlocking your encrypted disk from some live boot stick and fixing it is always an option (as is having a live system at hand signed by the same keys if you want to…).

That article triggered an unexpected roller coaster of “there is something called vimdiff I never heard about?” to “no, there isn’t because for me vim is just an alias for nvim” to “oh, it’s actually just vim -d anyway…”

You are just moving things. When you change your EFI partition from being unencrypted and asking for your password to the BIOS asking for your password (or other credentials) you just shift the attack surface.

Somewhere there has to be an unencrypted part to start with.

Lock your unencrypted ESP down with secure boot and your own keys (shitty as it is that is in fact the one conceptional usecase of secure boot, not that stupid marketing bullshit MS is doing with getting vendors to pre-install Microsoft keys) to prevent tampering and you are good to go.

manjaro 2.0

Was that insult intentional and if yes then what did they do to deserve it?

the ground is full of dust and we are now adults

I seem to see an easy solution there…

The cases got taller and the power buttons moved to the top edge (and often got smaller).

So now those under-the-desk units have their power buttons directly under the plate. Mine specifically it now more a knee- instead of a foot-job… I could press it with my finger without bending down but you have to keep traditiones alive.

Why do you think the most unanimously hated windows versions

I know that people hated every single one since Windows 98SE… it’s basically a constant cycle of releasing shit, then keeping it relevant -mostly via forcing people to buy it with their PC- long enough that people resignate and believe tech has to be that bad, then forcing the next and even worse version on people. So which were those unanimously hated versions. Or -maybe easier- which version was widelys adopted before people had no choice because all support for older ones was cut?

People are used to Microsoft Office, Acrobat Reader, Outlook, the Creative Cloud, etc.

And that is some kind of law of nature? Or the result of paying massive amounts of money to flood everything with this shit for free? Seriously… I think you competely misjudge the majority of users. They are not so much clinging to the familiar as just lazily sticking to whatever pops up when they press the power button.

Why do you think chromebooks sell so well?

They do? I have seen one chromebook in real life. Which I would probably not have noticed between all the other laptops and tablets if it wasn’t for the fact that this was the most overpriced piece of shit constantly having issues with even the most basic stuff.

(Edit/PS: I just did a quick search and most numbers I found point to chromebooks being more rare than Linux. Which is an achievement given that barely any piece of basic consumer laptop/tablet/whatever comes pre-installed with Linux.)

But I know the sales internationally were declining for quite some time until they spend a lot of money to bribe governments to hand them out as the tech version of a gateway drug.

So for example at the moment increases in chromebook sales in the last years are mainly caused by government procurements in Asia. Japan alone saw sales increase by a factor of 20 in 2024… so I really, really doubt anyone actually wanted a chromebook. But this will probably change after the next generation of students conditioned to think that this shit is how it’s supposed to be enters the market. *sigh*

1. “They use Windows because they are used to Windows” is not an argument but a cop out.

2. “They know Windows better because they use Windows” is not an argument because… guess what… people can learn. That’s how they got their (probably very basic) knowledge of Windows in the first place.

3. Paid and externally supported Linux/Foss exists. Choosing Windows instead because that’s somehow magically the only one with support available is just a recursion to #1.

If you want to talk facts however, start with money spend on lobbying, on pushing it on education early, on forcing people to buy their hardware with Windows pre-installed etc…

The ‘random numbers’ I mostly generate are UUIDs…

which can indeed be done nicely in the terminal by just reading directly from the kernel’s rng at /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid

I was about to ask how to get that error after checking with a non-firefox-based backup-browser…

But people stupid enough to still run actual chrome nowadays don’t deserve any better.

Unless you use modern artillery. Then you want to aim even higher because at those ranges/heights it’s beneficial to reach less dense air layers quickly.

Ubuntu:

It has strong security, automatic updates, and great hardware support.

As basically all distros (or in the case of auto updates: all DEs) have.

Mint:

It’s stable, lightweight

As every Linux is compared to Windows.

Zorin OS:

supports many Windows applications through Wine

Is there a reasonable distro that doesn’t?

Pop!_OS:

it has built-in NVIDIA and AMD driver support

So again like basically all distros that don’t go out of their way to only use free-software… for NVIDIA that is, AMD drivers are part of the kernel anyway.

Debian:

supports several desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, and Xfce

Same, same… again.

Seriously… How many sloppy “Which distro is for you?” articles do we need to finally get a single one competently describing differences and not trying to pin general Linux features to specific distros? 🥱

I just saw that bind now comes with tls support (for quite some time actually…), which was the reason I originally went with unbound instead. So I guess I have an excuse to look at it again… 😀