Fedora has gotten much more stable and reliable in the past decade. 15+ years ago it was generally regarded as nice but unstable. I’d say nowadays for a moderately technical user it offers a better experience overall than Ubuntu or Mint. There are still unfortunately some pitfalls for new users (media codecs come to mind). In fact, the only issues i’ve had in most of those 10 years have been related to GNOME plugins or the Plasma 6 transition, problems that also occured on Ubuntu.

I have 2 computers: one running Ubuntu, one Fedora. This has been my setup for over a decade. I have lately been finding Ubuntu more and more cumbersome to use, with less of the “just works” experience i remember having in the past. Perhaps the focus on cloud computing has caused the desktop to languish a bit.

I would like to try Pop!_OS, but i haven’t had a free evening for a while to do a backup and reinstall on one of my computers. It’s also been a while since i used Mint, so my impression could be out of date.

The nice thing about Linux overall (compared to macOS and Windows) is that each update generally improves on the experience. On commercial platforms the experience gets worse as often as it gets better, usually both at the same time. GNOME and Plasma are both overall much better than they were a decade ago (despite a few regressions) while macOS and Windows are both worse in general.

Any distro will work once you install Nvidia drivers.

For Fedora and Ubuntu you can do it from the software center application.

If you go with Fedora you want to also look up how to install proprietary media codecs. That’s the one other thing you need to do after installation. Ubuntu has them built-in.

Built my first PC in High School from scraps. Decided to try Ubuntu 10.04 (current at the time).

I was very impressed with how much performance a free OS could get out of my awful hardware. Have been using Linux in some form as my OS ever since.

“Mozilla has a bit been shady lately, so we are making the difficult decision to change our default browser to something significantly more shady. We are confident our users will feel safer knowing their data is in even worse hands than before"

Thanks! The article never mentions the direction of the MW’s spin, so the bias section reads pretty roughly. If the reader knows that going in then it makes perfect sense:

• MW spins counter-clockwise

• Most observed galaxies spin clockwise

• Doppler effect would make galaxies spinning the opposite direction of Milky Way appear slightly brighter to us,

which suggests observation bias as a possible explanation. I only got 2/3.

A strategic “also” in “This could explain why such galaxies seem more common in telescope observations.” would have helped as well.

, but according to Shamir, there are two possible explanations:

“One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole. But if the universe was indeed born rotating, it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete.”

The article never gets to the second explanation. What am i missing here?

These AI-generated thumbnails are awful

Thanks for the elaboration. I’m not familiar with how Signal works.

Less than some. The US gov has a history of forcing US-based corporations to disclose private data regardless of their policies or the law.

I can’t give you a good alternative though. I’m sure the same thing happens in many countries

It’s a messaging app, it’s useless if there is nobody to message. I dont have any friends using signal yet.

Also it doesnt work on my phone (Ubuntu touch). There used to be a community app but it’s not currently working.

I sincerely wish them success, but it’s hard to have faith that a US-based company will actually protect your privacy. Not that Telegram does either. I dont know what information they do even collect.

Nothing new here. E2E is only available in one on one chats and is disabled by default. Dont use Telegram if privacy is your main concern.

At least it has an open-source client. Very few messaging platforms can say that, and fewer have a decent UX.

It’s not perfect, but it’s got a good combination of features and multi-platform availability. None of the other messaging apps support all of my devices except Matrix, and Matrix doesn’t have stickers

Edit: Signal doesn’t support all my devices but maybe someday! The network effect is also big. None of my family and friends are on Signal, but most have Telegram. A few have Matrix.

Also Signal is a US-based company.

Edit 2: Matrix does have stickers, i guess I’m switching

My worst one was accidentally overwriting my backup when trying to clone it.

I was using a standalone drive cloning device and I mixed up the “source” and “target” slots. It was a 4tb drive so the operation took about 3 hours.

At the end, i plugged in the clone to check it and saw that it was blank. I ended up having to make a new backup before i was able to try the cloning again.

Since it was a backup, nothing of value was lost, but it sure was a waste of an afternoon

I dont have VR, but i assume you saw this?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2805545613

I don’t think the snap argument is without merit, I just think it’s an argument only had by a very technical subset of users. I think your comment illustrates that.

I don’t agree that anybody would be left “orphaned” on Ubuntu. LXD vs Podman is again a very technical question for a specific subset of users.

I also don’t agree that SteamOS is the goal for compatibility and support. Compatibility is best with Ubuntu, it’s the most widely deployed and used desktop distribution by far. Most other desktop distros are a rounding error when compared to Ubuntu user-wise.

I’ve also personally had a buggy experience with SteamOS. I wouldn’t use it as a desktop in its current state, but I’m aware some folks do just that.

For someone new to Linux who just needs to get on with their desktop work, Ubuntu is the best distro there is (flawed as it may be). Mint is also a good choice for the same reasons.

Don’t use an immutable distro like endless or silverblue. It’s a whole new paradigm to learn (in addition to learning Linux basics). You should get your feet wet with something more user-friendly first.

My big recommendation is Ubuntu. Normal ubuntu. Not one of the flavors or derivatives. It’s got everything you need, plus very easy to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. Try to avoid using the command line when following guides online, there is nothing on Ubuntu you actually need it for and the graphical tools are very good.

Don’t listen to the complaining about snaps. You won’t notice them, they won’t affect you negatively, they are designed to just set and forget. The complaints come from a highly particular and technical subset of the Linux community.

If you really don’t like the look of Ubuntu, then I’d second all the recommendations for Mint. Those two distros have the most number of non-technical users in their communities because they are both very user-friendly and well-tested. I’d recommend against trying anything else until you’ve gotten comfortable with Ubuntu or Mint.

There are quite a few niche window managers and desktop environments that it’d be a shame to loose. I’m quite fond of Windowmaker (and curious about Afterstep), Trinity DE, and NSCDE for example, and I’m not aware of Wayland plans for any of them.

Looking Glass is apparently broken on GNOME + Wayland in this exact way.

Ideally there would be a bare minimum server side decoration for Wayland apps (like Looking Glass) that don’t provide any CSD. Hopefully that’s on the horizon if it’s not what’s being discussed here.

I remember a showstopper a while back being that you can’t resize the title bar while shaded. That’s already the current behavior on x11, so I would be fine with that caveat continuing if it meant wayland support.

On KDE Plasma, my only outstanding bug is that the “window shade” button on my window controls is broken. Too bad since I use that feature a lot.

On GNOME everything seems to work as far as I can tell. It’s pretty smooth!