Excessive for my threat model, one more thing which could break something (even if by no fault of its own).

I like it, but many of my devices don’t use it.

Why not Debian directly instead of MX?

Debian requires more config out-of-the-box to get a nice desktop/laptop experience. This is ready to go.

I’m only used it as installed onto a USB, and in fact I chose it for that reason, so my experience isn’t ideal because of that USB drive speed but it’s a great lightweight OS that looks nice out of the box. Lightweight doesn’t have to look clunky or feel strange or unfeatured. I recommend it if there are reasons that lightweight is important (old hardware, low-end hardware, portable OS, … )

Yeah I read it as Operating System too.

Defenestrit

Adblockers have been mentioned a hundred times, as they should.

Annual reminder to donate to Invidious too. YouTube has done some serious work to try and block most of the instances.

That’s it, I’m deleting the internet

Oh hey, my anniversary is coming up.

For base daily driver on desk and lap, just a stable standard beginner friendly distro. I’ve customized it a lot, added custom hotkey scripts here and there, but it’s so close to base that a stranger could use it. VMs for anything specialist, a couple of portable USB distros for presentation/demo/one-purpose OS environments, but for the most part I’ve just kept it simple and clean.

And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.

That’s a good point. If we’ve reached a point where the basic experience Just Works while solving real Windows issues (incl updates and performance), then it’s going to get word-of-mouth praise instead of complaints. And if regular people start hearing about Linux stuff improving their computer, it’s going to mean far more than my ideological rants about owning your own tools and community created software.

Thanks. Lots of the documentation was difficult to parse for a beginner so your explanation of those features is very helpful.

The site hasn’t been designed yet, so I can use whatever database is most appropriate. I’m only familiar with SQL and MongoDB so far, but this project shouldn’t be a complicated design so I’m open to alternatives.

I can definitely add a field for that, and I suppose I could use even a lightweight langauge model (or hypothetically even a static thesaurus dataset) to populate it automatically, allowing for manual overrides by a user in case it suggests something irrelevant.

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.

but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience

Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)

If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.

no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks [snip]

Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.

I wonder if this has any practical benefits over running a Windows OS in a VM…

edit: piping, or easier collaboration between, Win32 and Linux programs could be an example. The creator mentions creative and gaming applications.

Win32/Hurd when?

I’ve willingly learned Calc (LibreOffice’s open-source spreadsheet tool) because I’ve made spreadsheets for my own needs. But to “become employable”? No way.

Our cogs do not feel amplified.

For an extra answer, GrapheneOS is based on stock Android, in contrast to the Linux-phone options they mentioned. Since it’s only (officially) supported on Pixel phones and focuses on security and privacy more than other customization, it’s actually the most stable and easy transition I’ve made, coming from an Android phone already. Installer is super easy compared to other phone OSs I’ve tried, you can do it by connecting the phone to a computer, opening https://grapheneos.org/install/web , and just pressing buttons to do all the normally-complicated steps. I was very impressed with that.

This post just gave me flashbacks to when I was trying to make a custom Plymouth boot logo on QubesOS and kept having to restore from backup after bricking.

But hey, at least eye strain won’t be an issue for your lxdm now

I think the description starts off too technical - “link aggregator” is correct, but not a term that many people know about. “Selfhosted” might even be lost on most people.

Perhaps something more simple would help as a first introduction, there’s plenty of opportunity for the more technical-minded to learn more. Maybe calling it a “network of content-sharing and discussion forums”? I’d love to put “decentralized” at the front, although I’m not sure how obvious that term is.

Yep. “Hmm, ‘unknown?’, let’s assume they’re all Linux!”.

Linux is doing well, no need to lie about it!