My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.

MX Linux. It’s exactly how I’d set up Debian if I wasn’t too lazy. Although, I’ve gone back to Debian after Bookwarm was released. I love it but miss MX

Windows will reach 12 this year. Double score!

I have been using wayland on kde the last two years on Debian and MX Linux with zero issues. My general usa includes coding, music production, Libre office and web browsing. So, no much gaming, if that is your concern.

Snap has a locked and proprietary store, even if the client is FOSS. There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.

For someone as tech illiterate as my mom, I’d advise against trying it. But you are here and my mom would never know that Lemmy is a thing. You also ask about Linux.
I’d guess that you will have great fun using and appreciating what Linux and the foss communities have created.

The author is exited but I’m not. I am not a big fan of corporations taking the free work of FOSS developers and turning it into a proprietary dystopia.

I’d like to see them try.

From DRM-equipped browsers to DRM-equipped brains. Now, that’s progress…

You have a point here indeed. But it is much easier to create a CLI tool that combines the updates of all systems rather than destroying the incredible things that flatpak and pip offer. A five-line bach script would do. Although, a reliable distro would probably want to rely on something much more elegant and harder to break. For Fedora specifically, the python-based dnf tool should be straightforward to be extended to do that. Perhaps the Debian apt tool has a lot of functionality to carry on and may be harder to do. In the essence of unix philosophy and modular approach, it should be a separate tool. I’m looking forward to that too.

I know that a lot of people share the same thoughts with you but I respectfully disagree. If you want your system to be updated only with your apt/yum/dnf program, then just don’t install anything useing snap/flatpak/etc. Sure, you will not have all the apps available in the repos, which was also the case in the past before these systems. Back then, your only option was to compile from source, which was more work-intensive than flatpaks/appimages/snaps. And updating was also much more complicated. Therefore, unless you wanted something really special, you’d stick to your repos. Flatpaks allow developers to distribute their software (and users to install it) in a less labour-intensive manner for the developer. Compiling and testing your app for Debian, Fedora, Arch, SuSE, MX-Linux, Linux Mint, Linux Mint DE, Gentoo, and all the other popular distros is an impossible task for small developers. Flatpaks was a godsend for them and for the users who don’t want to compile from source. Now, you can argue that we shouldn’t have all these systems (flatpak, snap, appimage, docker, etc…) but one would be OK. And again I will disagree. One of the most important aspects of FOSS is diversity. Embrace it even with its drawbacks. It would require a much longer post to explain this and others have done it already better than I would.

I think the case is crystal clear even to someone who has no technical knowledge. The question is whether the judge will be swayed by the lobbying power of the Big Tech

well…

From one perspective, all screaming is in the void.

A city and a village are both social structures. I prefer to live in a nice, small village rather than isolated in a horrible city, even if there is only a small number of people who communicate with me. I love this place. Facebook? Not really. Big media? Not at all.

That’s not true. I post on Lemmy and Mastodon, which I consider social media. I don’t think that websites that communication based on algorithms aiming to serve unsocial purposes should be considered social media.

True. However, when something goes wrong with an ignorant person’s machine, they are quick to blame it on the “unconventional” choice someone else made.

I generally install chrome to people who have no idea what they are doing. But since you are tech-savy enough to be in the fediverse, I’d recommend firefox without a second thought.

That was really nice but I think the lady was lucky that she met you. Can you imagine if she had met Linux Torvalds himself? He would have told her off for not knowing that the 2.6 kernel was many years old, the whole Linux world had moved on with strides beyond this old piece of software and reached 6.5 and there was no reason wasting everyone’s time with this kind of question. Plus: “we never, ever break the user experience and hence the mouse should work without questions!”

I have been blessed to have worked only for small companies of less than 25 people. Now I work for a company that I own (minority shareholder) with three more colleagues. Less than 15 people. We are extremely happy now, although I used to say the same for a couple more companies that I was the employee of up until a few years ago. My wife works for big organisations that last few years. I don’t know how she copes with all the meetings.