Adding onto that, the app StreetComplete makes contributing stupidly easy. You basically get a bunch of quests generatef around you with missing or potentially outdated data that you can fill in by answering simple questions. Basically Pokemon Go, but infinitely more useful.

It seems to be a reaction to the restrictive design philosophy of Gnome but not moving too far from it at the moment.

For me, that’s indeed the main reason. I actually prefer their look and feel of Gnome, but absolutely loathe quite a few of their stubborn decisions, so I currently stick with KDE (which is also great). From what I’ve seen and tried, Cosmic seems to try and become a mix between those two.

That, and it’s neat having a DE that offers both tiling and floating and treats them as equally important.

I’ve also done the math a few times and every time the cost of GamePass was higher than the amount of money I would’ve saved in that same timeframe.

The only way I could’ve saved money would’ve been to not purchase any games not on GamePass and limit myself to (worse) games included in the subscription.

So if I, someone who purchases and subsequently abandons a lot of game, so basically the target audience, can’t make GamePass work, I wonder how many people just run on copium when they mention how much money they save. Either that, or they treat gaming like junk food and don’t care about quality.

Oh please, stop the act, we can see your shitty referral link.

I do think those featues have become pretty common in PC gaming nowadays, which is why I’m more in favor of openSUSE as the beginner distro if I had to pick just one, but sure, let’s put that aside.

When it comes to Linux though I just don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all distro yet that I can safely recommend to everyone. And getting beginners onto a distro that fits them can greatly benefit their initial experience, so I think it’s worth it to give them a few simple choices. That said, you’re completely right that the way OP tries to explain the differences isn’t how you should do it. Ever. Less choices, less jargon, less mentions of fringe distros. It also doesn’t help that a lot of it seems to be based on hearsay rather than actual first-hand experience.

Do you really want to recommend btrfs to beginners?

I mean, it’s the default on Fedora with all its spins, openSUSE, CachyOS and even SteamOS for its root partition.

So lots of people use it nowadays without even knowing.

Chiming in, I’ll say that I mostly agree with your points, except for one:

Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.

They won’t care about X11 vs Wayland, sure. A non-ignorable number of them will care about stuff like HDR or multi-monitor setups where different refresh rates don’t stutter and VRR works, and that’s where proper Wayland support becomes a must.

If you recommend someone a distro that can’t do those things and later have to tell them that they have to switch distros for that chances are high they’ll just go back to Windows.

What’s extra funny is that I already did all of this, and yet, I’ve been informed that my developer account is subject to deletion because I’m not active enough. Since my game does not get regular updates I said F this, let them delete my account. It’s still available for sideload on itch.io anyway. Jokes on me for believing that.

So yeah, it seems like Google is actively hostile towards building a library of software/games that just work and intentionally only wants live service garbage apps on their platform because those make more revenue.

Because it wasn’t mentioned, I’ll just note that Joplin has also has the option to sync with a dedicated server component.

While it doesn’t work in a P2P configuration like a Syncthing setup allows, I’d recommend it for anyone with access to a server.

This, so much. Looking back, it’s just insane that pretty much every program you don’t regularly use will beg for updates on Windows. There are some bandaids like WinGet now that I appreciate, but it’s still nowhere as seamless as when the OS and the whole ecosystem around it are designed with a package manager in mind.

A huge chunk of the time I have to spend on tinkering is probably already saved by me not having to wait for updates.

Mint is a fine distro, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that wants to do gaming right now either. None of the first class DEs are running on Wayland yet, which means that most monitor features of the last decade are not at all or badly supported.

I personally prefer lazygit nowadays, but when it comes to GUI clients on Windows then Git Extensions is definitely a very good pick.

I particularly like that it doesn’t hide that it’s just executing git commands under the hood and its focus on the history graph. Those two things really helped understand how git actually works and why I’m still recommending it.

It’s also less waste if one of your charging methods breaks, as you can just swap over to the other method and might even find ordering replacement parts unnecessary.

Though ideally I’d also like to see more than one USB-C port for even more redundancy.

My current toolkit (as a 3D printing hobbyist) on Linux currently includes:

• FreeCAD: Takes some getting used to, is a lot stricter, but that might even improve your CAD skills in the long term, as it forces you to think more about what you’re actually doing. The closest thing to Fusion360.
• OpenSCAD: You’re basically programming your models. Very powerful if you need parts with repeating sections and/or want something with easily adjustable parameters.
• Blender: Useful when I have to do some quick&dirty modifications to a model I’ve downloaded from somewhere.

Well, this explains a whole lot. I’ve recently paired a few devices in front of the receiver and then moved them into position and wondered why some of them kept dropping off.

And then there are those people that put a whole damn song as their notification sound.

They’ve basically set up Pavlovs conditioning experiment and inserted themselves as the test subject.

Oh yeah, statistics gathering is something I think is generally a bit underrated. Many people see it as “gimmicky” compared to the automation features, but whether it’s statistics about electricity water or air quality, I’ve found that there’s so much insight to be gained about what’s happening in your home over the course of a day.

And since you’re talking about sleep quality: One thing I’ve recently found out is that there’s a addon for HA that can calculate the absolute humidity based on the temperature and relative humidity. That way you can figure out if opening the windows will increase or decrease the relative humidity and by how much BEFORE opening the windows.
Figured this out after trying to reduce the relative humidity of the bedroom by opening the windows and accidentally letting more humidity in despite the relative outside humidity being lower than on the inside.

This is now the third post in the last 24 hours where I stumble into a needlessly long thread because this user is completely obtuse and can’t handle being wrong or a different opinion.

Although, at least with DRM-free games you’re given all the tools to preserve the game yourself if you want to.

Yup. This is basically aimed at the people who only know that integrated GPUs are bad and they need a dedicated card, so system manufacturers can create a pre built that technically checks that box for as little money as possible.