It’s not the worst recommendation, as it is at least better configured than standard Debian out of the box, and comes with an easy Nvidia driver installer tool, but yeah I probably wouldn’t recommend it to most people due to how old and enterprise-y the default app store it comes with looks.

Mint’s interface is very close to Windows 7, it’s the most user-friendly of all the Linux desktop environments, IMHO. It does not handle fractional scaling as well as KDE though, if you use a 4K monitor.

KDE is also quite good, it offers a lot more features and customization, though it can be a bit more buggy than Mint’s Cinnamon.

Standard Debian would be hard for me to recommend to someone new or not interested in tinkering with Linux, or for someone with an Nvidia GPU. I do think Mint’s Debian Edition is a very good Debian option for those without an Nvidia GPU, though, and is what I use myself. It’s basically just standard Debian but preconfigured with sane defaults to minimize tinkering.

They are nationalist racists trying to cloak themselves with populist leftist ideas. This is the leader of that party:

https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
“I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.

One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.

In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said

Remember; the Nazi’s did the same thing by strategically calling their party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, despite them not being socialist nor a working class party. This was chosen because Socialism was gaining popularity, and thus the Nazi’s thought it would help their chances of getting votes and public support.

If you go in with the expectation to never making any compromise or touching anything its not realistic imo.

I agree, but I would argue it doesn’t really make sense for someone to recommend a distro that is more likely to need tinkering and research over one that is more likely to not need much intervention, especially to someone who is averse to needing too much tinkering.

Immutable distros have great promise, and I believe in the future they will become the standard, but right now their potential benefits aren’t likely to be realized by most average users yet, as the ecosystem isn’t quite ready for them to be as easy as a normal distro is currently, IMHO.

Without meaning to offend, I think your experience in both using an immutable distro as well as your general knowledge of how to use Linux from the commandline may be clouding your perception of how intimidating that would look to an inexperienced user.

As an example, despite using Linux for many years, I have never had need to interact with systemd, and thus I wouldn’t have known to start it with systemctl or to use -daemon. I could learn that if needed without any hesitation, but to someone way less experienced in Linux? That would more than likely just reinforce the perception of Linux having a high learning curve or only being good for people who like to tinker and fiddle in the command line.

In contrast on a normal Fedora install, the user can just copy and paste the commands on the Mullvad website without having to research or look through a specific distro’s manual, and at the end the app will be added to their launcher for them to use as normal. That method is likely to give a better impression, especially if they feel like their previous Linux attempts were janky or didn’t go well, as the OP has mentioned.

Needing Ostree is probably not a good newbie experience, and VPN’s in particular should only be installed from secure sources, not an unverified community package.

The average user will not notice any difference between systemd or any other init, nor will they interact with it, know what it is, or likely form a strong opinion about it (and honestly, good for them).

Ubuntu based distros are going to have a very easy Nvidia driver experience (just open the driver tool from the start menu and select the version you want, and bam, done). However, one downside of Ubuntu itself is their pushing of snap packaged apps, which are considered a bit crap, and can cause weirdness (I think Valve officially don’t recommend the Snap version of Steam).

You can avoid the snap stuff with Linux Mint, as they totally strip that out. Only downside of Mint is that it’s still on an older LTS version of Ubuntu, 24.04 (the latest is now 26.04, two years newer). You will need to add an additional PPA (a third party repository) to access the latest 610 Nvidia drivers on it, which some of the very latest games like the James bond require to launch in Proton. That may or may not be an issue for you. Mint also has the best built in app store, IMO.

Fedora is nice, but the Nvidia driver isn’t quite as easy to install, and it doesn’t come with some needed video codecs out of the box, though this script maker can make those pretty easy to get. I’d recommend it if you want more up to date apps in the repos and don’t want to encounter Ubuntu’s snaps.

Nobara is a spin of Fedora with all that stuff included (and has an installer with the Nvidia driver pre-installed, I think), made by the Glorious Eggroll who makes improved versions of Proton.

I personally would suggest choosing between those options, since both Ubuntu and Fedora based distros have a lot of 3rd party support, such as Mullvad, which only supports those two officially, and they have large communities with lots of help.

The Gnome store on Debian worked pretty okay for me, though it is a bit slow and always like, reloads the page you’re on after installing something, which is annoying. It uninstalled apps fine, AFAICT.

It had access to the entire Debian repo for me, so I’m not sure why only 3 things were showing up for you.

The Mint store has flathub enabled by default, but you can flip it off in the preferences. If flathub is enabled, it’s show both the flatpak and the native version from the repos, if available, allowing you to choose.

The Linux Mint store has been the best IMO. Perhaps one day Cosmic’s store will out do it.

Linux software repos can usually be trusted to a far greater degree, and never come with odd malware toolbars or weird 3rd party ‘downloaders’ like windows install wizards can come with.

This post was uplicated twice (that’s what the other user’s were informing you of in the other duplicates). I removed the two other duplicates and kept this one as it had the most upvotes.

No. I find virtually all AAA games for the past decade or so to be unsatisfying. I only pay for indie games nowadays.

Good find, hadn’t considered that effect. I always tend to use the mineral types that study seems to show blocks sweating the most.

Flohmarket is just the name of the software, which as another said, is the German word for flea market. I suspect the creator is German.

Anyone who self-hosts their own flohmarket instance can call their instance whatever they want.

Was curious from your comment, and found a rather good article testing if sunscreens caused skin to heat up more. They found un-tinted sunscreen does not meaningfully contribute, but tinted ones did. TIL!

Movim is a federated Discord alternative, though not part of the fediverse/Activitypub, as it is based on XMPP instead. It’s still a bit clunky in the UX department, but is currently the most full featured federated alternative.

Also @HubertManne@piefed.social

Valve has a history of hiring modders and making the mods official products (counter strike started as a Half Life mod). Black Mesa was originally a free mod, they then approached valve about selling it later, which Valve then approved. Had the devs not asked permission, Valve probably would’ve shut it down had they tried to sell it.

The CEO of Commodore appears to be completely out of touch on people’s perception of AI use, as they’ve been using it a fair amount in videos and the advertising for this phone (AI music and AI video generation) since buying Commodore, and poorly justifying it in the comments of their videos with links to their FAQ.