SavvyWolf

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.

I’d say dual booting would be best, as much as Windows will try to break it. Then you can stay in Linux as much as you can, only switching to Windows when you need to. And then, if you’re like me, you get annoyed at Windows lacking features and find alternatives that work under Linux.

For distro selection, I’d recommend Linux Mint. It just works well out of the box and most instructions online that apply to Ubuntu should work with it.

So how are you going to fund this “global media campaign”?

If you’re going to add Mint repos anyway, why not just use LMDE or Mint instead of Debian? It probably would avoid strange version mismatch issues.

Valve has put a lot of work into it, so unless you want to play hypercompetitive shooters (which ban Linux as a scapegoat for how hacker infested they are), most games will just work. Installing Steam should just set things up automagically for Steam games.

If there’s a game you’re actively curious about, you can look it up on https://www.protondb.com/ to see what other people say about how well it works.

I think realistically the best option is to stick with an older version of KDE until your issues get fixed upstream or switch to another DE.

Anyone technically literate enough to port KDE back to X11 is likely also literate enough to fix the blocking bugs.

… Unless they’re doing it purely on ideological grounds, which is probably not a healthy way to run a project.

Why not?

You say you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I think gamedev is a good way to learn a variety of skills. And doing it as a hobby takes a lot of pressure off and allows you to take things at your own pace.

I used to work as a software dev before mass layoffs got me. Our work was technical enough that most of us used Linux to the point that finding a Windows user to test things was a real problem.