Yeah okay, that makes a lot of sense and isn’t as extreme as I thought the original post to be. I suppose that for me, I used to push Linux way too hard on my friends and when I saw what I was doing, I hard pivoted away from pushing it to hardly even mentioning it unless it comes up in conversation.

But clearly there’s a very agreeable and respectful middle ground where you can bring it up as a legitimate tool to solve a very real problem for people putting up with the woes of Windows 11.

That’s a fair way of doing it I think, and I think you’re right in that I did have a negative bias towards “converting” as I tended to imagine something more extreme akin to a cult.

Convert 30 people to a free operating system

This is a detraction from the point of this post, but I wanted to express my feelings on this anyway.

I don’t feel great about that suggestion because Linux (anecdotally) has a serious problem of fanboyism and the community is notorious for driving people away from Linux because they’re too pushy. I feel that veganism has the same issue.

Sure, you might do this in a more constructive way like up cycling or refurbishing old machines to run Linux and donating them out to people in need, thus introducing them to the world of Linux and normalising an alternative OS - but is that “converting” them?

If you are converting people, then you must have them also ditch Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android with Play Services. That, to me, is unreasonable and not the approach the Linux community should be taking.

For me, I tend to show, not tell. I’ll use Linux casually as I would any other system, and if anyone asks me about it or expresses interest, I’ll answer their questions honestly. If they do want to move to Linux, I’ll help them where I can, but I wait for them to want to do it.

I’d say in this context it means just kidding, but could be a well done play on words

Can confirm. Study laptops are on Linux Mint Debian Edition, gaming PC is on CachyOS currently but it changes all the time, had Bazzite on it beforehand

I just had a quick play around with it, HEIC converter is something I didn’t know I needed (I have a large backup from my iPhone which has HEICs), and I like the .eml parser just to name a couple.

I’ll be adding this to my server for sure. Thanks for sharing

I’ve considered CalyxOS but prefer the hardening of GrapheneOS with no gapps - still means a phone decent on privacy. However I do try to keep an open mind, so if CalyxOS has additional privacy benefits to my existing setup I’d be interested.

I agree with the proprietary style of ProtonMail point, and my workaround for multiple accounts has been to use my own domain and have email rules for delivering messages to the respective folder. I don’t have immediate plans to move from them, but I am watching the news cycle and have considered Tuta as an alternative.

I haven’t used ReVanced, but I remember the original YouTube Vanced was a mod of the original YouTube apk - if that’s still the case, I feel like ReVanced would offer even less privacy than Invidious or NewPipe. However I’m happy to be corrected.

I personally use Nextcloud notes but the Obsidian setup you have sounds interesting, especially if it’s like OneNote - I’ll keep it in mind!

Completely agree on your Nextcloud points - I uploaded my uncompressed Telegram archive to it, which took like 12 hours over my Gigabit lan. I suspect it hated the sheer amount of small files

Been degoogled for years at this point:

• Stock Android --> LineageOS or GrapheneOS (no gapps)
• YouTube --> Invidious*, NewPipe
• Google Search --> DuckDuckGo, Brave Search
• Google Play Store --> F-Droid, Aurora Store

I’ve also decoupled from other similar services:

• Outlook --> ProtonMail
• Calendar --> Nextcloud*
• OneDrive --> Nextcloud*
• Windows, macOS --> Linux (after years of distrohopping, I found LMDE is incredibly stable while still being a nice “out of box” distro)
• Google Maps, Apple Maps --> OSMAnd, Organic Maps

I never used any online password manager myself, I went from writing passwords in a literal book to KeePass, to now Vaultwarden* for that

* - self hosted

As per their website:

As online advertising becomes ever more ubiquitous and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating ad clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users. Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks’ databases. As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile

SMS is incredibly antiquated as soon as you want to do anything multimedia, or heck sending an SMS longer than 144 characters.

My mother received a video over SMS the other day and it legitimately looked like it was filmed on a Nokia 6310.

I’ve encouraged my family to use Signal to replace SMS and it functions really well as an SMS upgrade. It’s more secure, private, supports sending decent quality multimedia, the interface is simplistic, it has formatting, does video calls well, and you can send a long message without it being a hacked together string of 5 messages.

From both a security and usability perspective, it wins out on SMS in my opinion.

Edit: there’s also the nightmare of group chats with SMS. I hate when extended family try to use it

While I love my ThinkPad T480, there’s a bit of me that feels bad for having that replace my Latitude E6420 that still had life left in it on LMDE, especially as I upgraded the processor to a quad core i7-2630QM from the i5-2520M it had.

That being said, the ThinkPad has been better for my back than the 2.5kg Latitude.

I just use Linux Mint Debian Edition for my study laptop, sounds pretty much the same - in over a year of use, I have literally never had a single problem with it (other than things directly caused by me like leftover fstab entries for testing). I know it’s what Debian is renowned for but god damn that is a stable operating system.

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In roughly 7 years of Linux, I think I’ve only run into issues with automated installers in partitioning if you choose to just go automatic everything and you have a wacky existing partition layout.

It’s one of the only installers that seems to take the longest compatatively and (afaik) doesn’t really let you leave it unaftended. Most other distros let you just set everything first then go, but Debian does that and then asks you what DE and other questions mid install…

I might consider that actually, I was trying to use secureblue instead of LMDE for the better security, and this was part of why I gave up on it. Cheers!

Lucky bastard. Try running Windows CE 2.11 and you’ll truly know how it feels to be caged.

Chipping in, I have no idea what Garuda is, but I also hated working with Fedora, probably because I started off on Debian-based systems and couldn’t wrap my head around Fedora.

Bazzite, being an immutable distro, is intended where you shouldn’t need to use the Fedora package manager, so you instead install applications sandboxed like AppImages, flatpaks, etc. I’ve been fine with this for my gaming PC, but currently I still use and prefer Debian (LMDE) for my study laptop because I have easier control over it.

Overall it comes down to what you want out of your computer and what works best for you, that’s the beauty with Linux, but I thought I’d chip in and mention not to write off Bazzite for being Fedora based, as someone who couldn’t get behind Fedora.

How does Microsoft manage to be both ahead and behind the curve? A decade before Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, they already were doing the same thing, and somehow blew it?

Windows CE in general blows me away how the underlying tech is fundamentally the same as modern smartphones (system is a ROM, had ARM support, goes to sleep by default) and Microsoft was still too slow to react to the iPhone. God I miss my PDA.

I love that it’s also got build instructions for Windows and macOS