An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the “@”). So e.g. “john.doe@gmail.com” has an account at gmail.com but “jane.doe@mailbox.org” has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There’s not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It’s spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.

Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone’s accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.

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.

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

• To learn Arch, install it from scratch (without archinstall), it’ll force you to read the Wiki and learn a lot of necessary commands in the process. After the installation, just keep using it. Using a Linux distro full-time as the only installed OS is the best way to keep at it and truly learn it over time. There’s no magic bullet here. Just keep using it and solving problems or issues as you go, learning more and more stuff as you go. If you need other OSses as well, run those in a VM. I don’t recommend dual-boot setups.

• Don’t blindly copy/paste commands you don’t understand. Always try to understand them first. Some commands can be very disruptive or even destroy your configuration. If you don’t understand it or are able to adapt it so that it fits to your particular configuration or system, you can EASILY damage a configuration, or even make your system unusable. Also, some people like trolling other people and deliberately share harmful commands. Generally, test potentially destructive commands or complex commandlines before actually running them.

• Document major config changes that you do. This is useful because you’ll be able to undo certain changes or even replicate your current system configuration fast when you change distros or have to reinstall in the future. For example my current Arch-based setup is fully documented in form of an almost-directly executable shell script. It does require some interactions but very little. If I ever have to reinstall this system, or upgrade my hardware, it can be done insanely fast and it’ll have the exact same configuration. This goes from basic partitioning and encryption all the way up to dotfiles and individual program configurations.

• Don’t feel the need to learn hard/advanced tools like Vim or Emacs unless you really think you’re getting an advantage from that and aren’t hesitant to put in the time and effort to learn them. Most people don’t need to use them. They’re amazing tools but you need to be prepared to lose quite a lot of time to learn them before you can become productive with them, and this might not be a tradeoff that’s useful for every single user. You can also get away with much simpler tools, like nano (as a console-based editor) or whatever programmer’s text editor you want.
• Similarly, whether a pure WM or compositor plus assorted tools compared to a full desktop environment is worth it for you or not, is up to you. There’s no wrong or right answer here. I’ve tried out pretty much everything and these days use KDE Plasma because I like the consistency and integrations and dislike having different, inconsistent stand-alone tools for panels, menus, notifications, wallpaper, file manager and so on. But again, there’s no wrong or right answer here. Just what makes more sense for you. It’s worth learning how to be able to configure and use a minimalistic setup, for sure. So trying it out doesn’t hurt and increases your knowledge overall. In general, in the Linux world it’s good to always know enough to not be screwed once some component suddenly doesn’t work anymore. For example, a competent Linux user should be able to deal with (temporarily) not having a GUI and fixing his system via commandline.

• A minimalistic, DIY distro like Arch can be amazing to learn everything, if you want to do that at least. If you just want a working desktop system with as little effort as possible, then don’t do that. But if you intend to learn every detail, then a distro like Arch is better suited for that goal than a “bloated”, fully pre-configured distro like Mint or Ubuntu is. Because Arch is much simpler on a technical level than those are. It’s much easier to understand e.g. the relatively simple package building process on Arch than it is on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. But this “simple” explicitly refers to technical simplicity or minimalism. Most users expect something else when they hear “something is simple”. Arch is not simple as in beginner-friendly, but it is simple in terms of technical complexity, which is why many advanced users and tinkerers like it because it doesn’t stand in their way. It also means though that you HAVE to learn many things, e.g. how to configure a firewall, because it doesn’t come with any preinstalled by default. With Arch, the admin is supposed to know about everything and configure every component himself, at least on a somewhat basic level.

• If you want to go to even more details, you could also try out a source-based distro like Gentoo or Crux, which can also be a great learning experience, but it’s even more details regarding compilations of each package, dependencies, compile-time options, etc. you have to deal with than with a minimalistic binary-package-based distro like Arch, so whether that’s useful for you or not is up to you of course.
• While we’re at it: LFS (Linux from Scratch) is not a distro per se, it’s a guide on how to build your own distribution from scratch. It’s VERY time intensive and not recommended unless you truly want to learn how to build a complete distribution from scratch, or maybe start your own distro some day which isn’t based on another existing distro.

This is a good opportunity to remind people that they should donate a bit to some of the open source projects which they find helpful or important. Liberapay is a nice platform for doing so.

Well, it might seem that way sometimes. But in the end, what’s different to religion is that this is all rooted in facts. Facts which are quite abstract, so not everyone gets them and even those who do get them sometimes wonder whether it’s important or not sometimes. The thing is, Linux is at its core a neutral, open and free operating system, and it’s basically the only one which is advanced or mature enough to be a real competitor to let’s say Windows or MacOS. Of course it’s more than a competitor on the server, it’s basically the only relevant server operating system (Windows Server has a niche in application servers within a MS intranet domain, or to control Windows clients via policies, that’s about it, and MacOS server is already long dead I think). Of course, some of Linux’ success is because those same companies also contribute a lot to the development of Linux, because they need it for themselves as well. But that’s just one more thing which makes Linux a very unique thing. It’s like a neutral baseline for an operating system. Like a very capable OS core that everyone works on, even the competition works on it, because they also rely on it.

That it’s open source and transparent and that anyone can use it or improve it or change it or whatever makes it special, because it’s not a commercial black-box product where you just consume it as-is and have zero rights whatsoever to do or change anything about it. That’s actually incredibly special in today’s commercialized landscape. Its open nature also means it can never die, only grow. And because it’s a proven good system which is also so very different compared to established desktop OSses, it can happen that its users or fans can seem somewhat religious towards it. But, again, compared to religion, religion is based on pure belief (otherwise it would be called fact). There’s nothing religious about Linux or open source software. It’s simply a special operating system, and not in a bad way at all. And closely related to it is, of course, the whole free/open source software movement. Which every user, even those of closed operating systems, can and do benefit from.

And since today’s commercial software continues growing more and more user hostile (ads, spying, bloat, dark patterns, high prices/software rental models), it’s getting increasingly important to have at least the option of a true alternative. Even users who absolutely hate Linux and open source software should be glad that alternatives do exist, so that once the food they are being fed by Microsoft and so on doesn’t taste good anymore, they at least have an option to switch to something else entirely.

• Mint
• Kubuntu
• Fedora KDE Edition
• OpenSuSE
• Pop!OS

These are all easy to use desktop distros (or variants). Use them with their respective default desktop environment. Check screenshots first or try them out in a VM or via live USB before installation, to see whether you like the look&feel.

Gnome on my work notebook, KDE Plasma on my own machines. I like KDE Plasma better overall but Gnome was a little bit more stable for me so far. I don’t mind UI differences that much, I’m not very much reliant on the GUI and can deal with pretty much any UI paradigm.

Personal experience - I used some late version of Plasma 5.2x on desktop and now Plasma 6.x of course (always Wayland, generally always the latest stable version available), and Gnome (always Wayland, always the latest stable version) on my work notebook. I’ve never experienced any “serious” bug on Gnome, but I have experienced multiple on Plasma over that time period. I think the most “serious” bug I’ve had on Gnome was that the cursor was flipped upside down for a while until they fixed that (some time ago). While the most serious bug in KDE were multiple crashes in plasmashell since Plasma 6.x. (Meaning all your open apps got closed, I’d say that’s pretty serious for a bug). Another smaller bug, very recently, was that virtual desktops in KDE Plasma were named wrong and when I renamed them they didn’t get saved so it reverts to the wrong names (e.g. “Desktop 1”, “Desktop 3”, “Desktop 4”, “Desktop 4”). But it seems they fixed that with the latest update as well.

Which is also why I’d like to keep it that way, Gnome for work and KDE where it’s not super important if plasmashell crashes or does some weird thing every once in a while. I think KDE is more prone to bugs because it’s simply more complex than Gnome. Gnome is quite minimalistic and doesn’t offer lots of features, KDE is a powerhouse desktop with literally tons of features, dwarfing probably every other desktop environment, at least in the available options for which a GUI exists to set them. Also, Gnome doesn’t support many advanced features like HDR (yet), while Plasma does. So the complexity in having all that stuff means Plasma must be more prone to bugs.

So I view KDE Plasma as “slightly more buggy” than Gnome, still. Especially for dot-zero releases. But the KDE devs are also improving it all the time, so it might become more stable soon. But still, for personal use, KDE Plasma is “stable enough” despite those mentioned bugs, some of which were also fixed in the meantime. For example I didn’t have any more plasmashell crashes since they said that they fixed those causes. Which is why I’m using KDE Plasma 6.x for my personal machines. I like it more than Gnome, but when I want “100%” reliability for a DE, I’m still using Gnome. The main thing I dislike about Gnome isn’t actually its UI or design philosophy or even the limited GUI-based options it offers, but rather its philosophy regarding standards or compliance or making interoperability easier. The Gnome devs often do their own thing and don’t play that nice with others.

It depends. It’s viable if you just need a phone with several open source applications (non-Android) and are fine with that. But if you need Android app compatibility it’s probably going to be harder or more inconvenient to do, though I haven’t checked the status in recent time. And then there’s this evil thing called Google Play Integrity (essentially DRM restricting which apps can run on which OS) which is a problem even for non-proprietary Androids, so you probably won’t have any chance if you’re dependent on such an app (thankfully it’s rare but as we all know stupid ideas tend to become annoyingly popular).

Main problem, as usual, is that Android and iOS have become such big and popular “platforms” for mobile apps that establishing a “third” platform for app developers is basically impossible (also remember what happened to Windows Phone OS, they were late to the market and failed spectacularly to catch up. Of course in this case it’s open source so it can grow regardless of user numbers, but still, it’s hard to catch up when lots of great Android apps were already developed specifically for Android). So you can only hope that Android app compatibility grows mature enough to be close to 100% compatible, so that you can also run almost all Android apps on your mainline Linux mobile OS. Then you’re not “limited” anymore. (At least if you consider it “limited” when you can’t run Android apps. Which most probably consider to be “limited”).

So I think it’s less about the hardware and OS/UI (I think they work fine these days) and more about the available apps.

[My main daily driver phone is a GrapheneOS (Android) and I have a Pinephone with Linux for playing around in WiFi at home only]

Use Matrix or any good messenger like Signal or Threema for daily communication with friends.

If you want to see a good table of messenger recommendations, see https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html

E-Mail is not a suitable replacement because it lacks end-to-end encryption (unless you and your friends use PGP or S/MIME for that but since that’s rare and slightly too complicated for the common user to use, I’ll just assume that you don’t). While mails are usually encrypted during transport, they lie in plain text format at their destination servers. Depending on which e-mail host you or your friends use, that means the whole content of your e-mail might be scanned and analyzed automatically. Especially if you or your friends use privacy-disrespecting mail hosts like any big commercial one or Gmail or Outlook or what have you. Then your communication via unencrypted mail to or from that person isn’t private.

Just FYI I installed the apk from the github repo (not the google play version) via Obtainium a few days ago and it tried to make a connection to 2 cloudflare IPs during setup of my account. Without prior consent or any mention. So just be aware that there is still some form of telemetry or unwanted connections happening, even though they removed the telemetry flowing to Mozilla’s own telemetry endpoint. K-9 had zero of this, it just spoke with your mail servers and that was it. So be careful and block outgoing app connections by default. I did not analyze the data being sent, just that there were those 2 unwanted connectiins. happening.

Don’t use Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive (all privacy nightmares). Instead:

• Self-host https://nextcloud.com/ (this is the gold standard of self-hosting a secure and private cloud storage, you just need your own server with the disk space you need. Open source)
• P2P and/or self-host https://syncthing.net/ (this will automatically sync files in shared folders between several devices. Best if you have one device which is online all the time. Will use the space on your own devices. Open source)
• Storage on a trustworthy 3rd party host: https://proton.me/drive (this is the most similar to Onedrive/etc. where you sync your stuff to their servers, so you don’t need to host anything, but contrary to anything from Google/MS/Dropbox, this is at least a reputable and secure/private host which doesn’t abuse or sell your data. Data is encrypted by default. Also open source)

Furthermore, accessing Onedrive from Linux might be painfully inconvenient because there’s no official proprietary client for it by MS. There are 3rd party clients but I’m not sure how good they are, also MS could at any point change their API or even block unofficial clients, rendering your unofficial client useless at least for a time period.

I’ll do a (simplified) Windows analogy, if you’re already familiar with Windows.

Microsoft Windows is closed-source/proprietary, which means only Microsoft has the source code for it, and only Microsoft is legally allowed to create or distribute copies of Windows. “Windows 11” for example is a “distribution” of Windows containing the “Windows NT kernel” (core of the OS) alongside other important software to make the OS usable, like a boot loader, service layer, graphical interface, desktop environment, and lots of included “system” applications like a file explorer, a web browser, apps to adjust settings, apps to display menus and task bars, and so on.

“Linux” by itself is just the kernel, the core of the OS. Which is by itself not a “usable” operating system yet, just like holding a CPU in your hand doesn’t allow you to use it yet. More components are needed for that. Since Linux is open source and under a permissive license, anyone (even you) can go ahead and create an operating system made with the Linux kernel. If you do that, this is called a distribution or “distro” of Linux. Since there’s not just one company allowed to do that, many distributions exist. They all made their own operating system on top of the Linux kernel. Even though hundreds of distros exist, only a handful of them are actually popular, stable, secure and recommended for general use. They all use similar, but sometimes different software to include in the distribution. Like the Linux kernel, most of that software is open source so it can also be modified or extended.

Since “Linux distribution” is rather long to write, people often just write “Linux” but mean the whole distribution, not just the kernel. These are just common inaccuracies in communication, but what the person meant should be obvious from the context.

Common and recommendable Linux distributions (= full, usable operating systems) include: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch, Debian. These are full operating systems and they all include the Linux kernel at their core. Of course, the similarities go further than that. Most distros are similar enough that if you’ve learned one, you can also use any other with little additional things to learn. However, some distros are deliberately a bit more different or tailored to more specific users or use-cases, for example Arch targets more experienced Linux users because it’s a very minimalistic distro, it expects the user to know which packages he wants to install. It pre-installs almost nothing. You can think of this like “Windows Server Core” where it just boots into a minimalistic terminal by default, no usable GUI yet, but you can of course install the desktop environment and everything if you need it and make a full-featured desktop out of it. The distro just doesn’t want to preinstall anything which you later might not like, which is why it gives you the choice, but that makes it a minimalistic distro and it’s harder for beginners to use that way. Other distros like Mint are much more similar to the client editions of MS Windows in that they preinstall everything the user needs for a desktop OS and more, so that the user can boot into and use the desktop as quickly and easily as possible. And then there are even more special-purpose distributions like Kali Linux which includes things like penetration testing tools (i.e. “hacker tools”), which makes it a distribution for IT security people, so they can boot into it and have access to most needed tools right away without installing much else (also good on a bootable USB stick). But usually, in general threads like this one, people don’t talk about specific-use distros, but about generalist distros which you can install and use as a regular desktop OS.

Desktop environments also exist on Windows but there’s basically only one, made by Microsoft. In the Linux world there are several to choose from. The most common ones are: KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE. These desktop environments contain window managers or compositors, task bars or panels, menus, various tools like file managers, process viewers and text editors, and various background programs. This is all needed for the user to have what is commonly known as “a desktop environment”, because if you didn’t have one, you’d be basically staring at a screen containing at most a cursor and a wallpaper, with no way for you to interact with anything. Of course, these can look and feel different from each other (just like Windows looks and feels different than MacOS), and they have different features and strengths and weaknesses, but their goal is always the same. And as usual in the open source world, there’s not just one project but multiple, and out of those multiple a couple are popular, viable and stable enough so that they are usually included in most Linux distributions. Which is why most distros also give the user the choice to have a specific variant of the distribution with a specific desktop preinstalled. For example, Ubuntu also has Kubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled KDE Plasma) or Xubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled XFCE). These can have various names but in the end it’s just the base distribution (“Ubuntu”) with a different preinstalled “face” so to say (and you can change those faces or desktops from within the same distro, of course). Most other things are exactly the same between those distribution variants.

As a new user, you don’t need to learn about everything. Just pick an easy to use generalist desktop distro like Linux Mint and use the default desktop environment or variant which they provide or recommend by default. You can start experimenting with more choices later on if you want, but you also don’t need to. If you have something you’re comfortable using, then you can just stick with that.