This. (although I follow the directions here, which is a little more than apt install). The only thing I couldn’t get on Debian stable is the latest gnome. But when I tried debian testing, it was slightly broken anyway. And gnome extensions could get most of the functionality missing in my older gnome version. Debian stable + flatpak + anaconda + adding repositories (like for firefox) is a perfect compromise.

What’s nice about a stable distro is you can update the things you want to update, and your OS isn’t constantly changing a million packages a week that you don’t even know the function of.

Gotta wonder how many state actors have been using it for years.

But you still post in lemmy.ml/privacy?

Yeah, I’m trying to convince everyone to start using signal before the slide towards fascism turns into a drop

Do you think they’re lying to authorities when they get a search warrant? https://signal.org/bigbrother/santa-clara-county/ That would be quite a big deal, and someone will be going to jail if you’re right.

All they have is your phone number, the date the account was created, and the last time it connected to the service. Yes, that represents a vulnerability, but you;re just casting aspersions that the whole thing is compromised.

Maybe there is some super secret NSA back door that Signal engineers aren’t even aware of. But it’s at least pretty clear that the local fascist authorities aren’t getting that info even with a warrant.

Oh right, sometimes I forget people have computers other than old thinkpads

IDK if thats true in 2024. Debian 12 isn’t much harder to setup than mint or Ubuntu, and the version of gnome it ships with is perfectly fine. I’m not a beginner anymore, so maybe there’s something I glossed over.

Oh wait, I just remembered the thing I glossed over. Needing to install sudo would definitely throw a beginner for a loop. (Iirc, you only need to do that if you give a root password during install). And that’s the problem with trying to learn Linux. Someone will tell you the thing is easy, but they forgot about some arcane step

Open camera is the best

no.

I’ve tried to run Ubuntu, mint, Debian, and couple other distros without the terminal to see if I can actually recommend it to non-geeks. And every time, I conclude I can’t because the fucking “software center” (or whatever it’s called) is always garbage, and it’s easier to just use apt.

The only time I’ll recommend Linux to a non-tech person is when the hardware is so old that it would just be junked without Linux.