SavvyWolf

Isn’t it Chromium based and thus subject to whatever Google forces them to do with adblocking?

I don’t mean to kinkshame and people can use their own favourite browsers, but Firefox has good support for all three of those areas (adblocking is an extension though).

Small thing: There doesn’t (to my knowledge) seem to be an easy way to manage mountpoints/fstab with an easy gui interface.

I’d say if the version is the same, go with the Debian packages and then fall back to the Flatpak one if it doesn’t work.

The 260MB of storage for Flatpak is a bit misleading though. If you have other flatpaks installed, it’s smart enough to deduplicate the files and share them.

Another thing to consider is xdg compliance. If you’re really picky about having a nice clean home directory and the program likes to vomit files into it, Flatpak keeps that contained in its sandbox. Not something to worry about for most people though.

What do you mean by the “Title Bar”? The thing at the top that says the window name? Not sure if there’s a way to remove that, sadly.

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong (I’m only half remembering), but don’t you also need as much swap as you do RAM to hibernate?

Ignoring the fact that nowadays ssds generally outlive their typical use times, how do immutable systems and Flatpak cause more wear compared to regular software updates from apt or whatever?

Users are going to need to tweak and modify system files. You can say as much as you want that they “shouldn’t”, but at the end of the day they may have to tweak something because they have exotic hardware or want to run a specific app.

And the benefit isn’t really that great, imo. A random user isn’t going to go poking around /etc and modify files randomly. And if they do, something like timeshift will save them.

My go to recommendation is Mint. When things go wrong or the user needs to do something complex, there are a lot of guides out there for Ubuntu which also work for Mint.

Semitransparent backgrounds for terminals are the worst. I don’t mean to kinkshame, but it, imo, should not be a default.

I think the whole “XYZ Distro is faster!” arguments are overblown. Most distros will be fast enough on reasonably modern hardware, and any performance gains will usually come with compromises and/or lots of tinkering. Generally speaking a standard arch install (that is, you’ve not manually configured anything) will be roughly the same speed as a more beginner friendly distros like Mint and Fedora (which is still more lightweight than Windows).

To answer the question in the title: Yes you’ll survive the CLI. Just give yourself time to learn the fundamentals and treat it as learning a programming language. More user friendly distros generally don’t expect you to use the CLI, which is part of the reason they are recommended.

My condolences - I’m in the UK as well and wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

If I may offer an alternate perspective: Politicians don’t actually care about any of this, they just want votes. California’s system allows them to say “Look, we solved child safety!” without having to deal with people complaining about privacy. If there’s an existing system in place, it’s easier for politicians to say “we already solved this!” and ignore those voices.

It also puts the guilt on parents. If this system in place, and you complain about your child seeing tiddy online, the question is going to be “why didn’t you set the age correctly then?”.

… Of course this might be me just being optimistic. I really hope we, as a species, grow out of this new age puritanism and government overreach.

It’d be stronger than that, since kids shouldn’t have admin rights on their pcs and couldn’t claim to be over 18.

Sure. But at that point distros can just say “no use in California lol” and enjoy the free market share from disgruntled totally-not-californian Windows users.

I can see the slippery slope argument, however it overlooks the fact that countries/states are already willing to implement the non-privacy systems.

If these systems take off, it will give privacy advocates the ability to point at California’s system and say “look, they have a system that is as effective as the strong assurance stuff but without the people sending you angry emails.”

I see it as almost a “reverse slippry slope”. A way for people to push for less strict verification.

Agreed, but at this point I think it’s worth taking what we can get.

Isn’t this an example of pushing for standardisation of parental controls?

Does the age verification stuff matter for this? Microsoft, if they wanted to, could already lock down systems in this way.

This is perhaps a controversial statement from someone who is fed up with all this age verification stuff, but having the user age be set on account creation (without providing ID or anything dumb like that) doesn’t seem that bad.

It just feels like a way to standardise parental controls. Instead of having to roll their own age verification stuff, software like Discord can rely on the UserAccountStorage value.

If it were possible to plug into a browser in a standard, privacy conscious way, it also reduces the need for third party parental control browser extensions, which I imagine can be a bit sketchy.

OSes collect and expose language and locale information anyway. What harm is age bands in addition to that?

I like having a system I know the internals of and can control.

But honestly, nowadays the software quality of Windows is just… Bad.

Instead, AerynOS leans into a tightly integrated, curated desktop experience.

This is (as far as I can tell) the unique feature the article touts. Even though that fits Mint, Ubuntu and I think Fedora.

Consider using Ventoy if you want to try out multiple distros. It just lets you put the isos into a folder on the flash drive rather than going through the whole imaging process each time.