In order of priority:

1. Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
2. Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
3. Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven’t used it myself yet)
4. Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
5. Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.

Tips for coping:

• Call it the Super key (actually the correct label I think)
• Bind window management related hotkeys to it

Technically, nothing you use in tech is ever really “simple”, there’s tons of complexity hidden from the common user. And whenever parts of that complexity fail or don’t work like the user expects it to, then the superficially simple stuff becomes hard.

Docker and containers are a fairly advanced topic. Don’t think that it’s easy getting into this stuff. Everyone has to learn quite a bit in advance to utilize that.

To play games, you went into the wrong direction when fiddling with wine directly, or even just indirectly by using bottles You COULD do that, but you’ve literally chosen the hardest path to do so. You should use something like HeroicGamesLauncher, Lutris or Steam in order to manage your games, install and launch them fairly easily. These will take care of all the complex stuff behind the scenes for you.

• 1. There is no universal definition what a technology needs to achieve in order to be “successful” or “failing”. Linux, in particular, depending on perspective, could have either “failed” literally all the time because it hasn’t (yet) achieved desktop dominance, or it could have been massively successful on the other hand because it has been dominant on servers and mobile phones (in the form of Android). Now if we look at desktop Linux in particular, it has also somehow “not failed” at the same time, because it has continued to grow. It was stagnant for a very, very long time at around 1% market share but recently it’s been steadily increasing up to about 5%. Again, depending on your definition or vibes, you could call this either successful or failing. Which is why these terms in isolation are kind of meaningless.
• 2. Microsoft is a company, Windows Phone was a product by that company. If a product from a company “fails”, the company will abandon that product. It’s that simple. Sure, gaining foothold against established iOS and Android is super hard. Which is the reason why Microsoft’s effort failed. But, they are just a company. Linux, on the other hand, is at its core a world-wide community-developed open source software project (as well as most of the software that runs on top of it) and so it doesn’t really matter if it grows up to Android or iOS size. It’s still being developed as long as people want to develop for it. There’s no single CEO looking at some statistics and calling to cut that project because it doesn’t serve his definition of success.
• 3. In general, any project that strives to eventually rival established software products within a market has a steep uphill battle. It’s the network effect. Developers develop for iOS and Android because 99% of the user base uses those two mobile OS. Only very few developers will be like “oh there’s this new thing currently at 1% market share, sure, let’s help it grow!”. This alone prevents lots of apps you’d like to see on mainline Linux based mobile OS to ever exist for it. So you need to fall back to some workarounds like Waydroid, to run Android apps on Linux in the meantime, while Linux on mobile continues to grow and continues to attract developer attention. This can take a long time! On top of that are anti-competitive and monopolistic strategies and tactics being used by Google and Apple to ensure they remain on top of the mobile OS food chain. One such example is Google’s so-called Play Integrity API, which is basically a form of DRM. Some app developers have been misled by Google’s marketing to believe that they should implement it to ensure that their app is running on a “secure” device or environment. What they fail to realize is that Google uses that to basically label every non-Google-sanctioned Android distribution (like Graphene or Calyx or Lineage or many others) or Android runtime environment (like Waydroid) as “insecure” or other negative terms, which then prevents the app from being run at all. Furthermore they plan to restrict “sideloading” which means they want every app to only be distributed via Google’s app repository. This means Google wants to exert a ton of control over the developers, the platform and every single app that runs on it. Developers are usually being lured into this via marketing tricks that this would much more secure than it was before or similar nonsense. What they fail to realize is that this also destroys flexibility and freedom for the users to choose what they want to install, and from where. On desktop PCs, you have had these freedoms for forever (even Windows(!) is much more open and neutral than iOS or Android are these days) - you obviously also should have these freedoms for your mobile OS because it’s also just a computer with an OS on it. It’s simply none of the business of the OS developer to tell the user which apps he should install and from where. OS and apps are completely different things from completely different developers. Choice is being limited significantly when Google centrally controls what apps are being distributed at all, there’s 1 company telling you which apps you can and can’t use. This is obviously bad and should NEVER happen, but many developers, users and other people confronted with this are easily lured into Google- and Apple-operated cages by fake security talk/marketing. That means they help establish Google’s and Apple’s monopoly on mobile OS. This, combined with the network effect for app developers, is why it will take lots of time and also not a commercial product (because no commercial product will have the amount of money or time to compete with Apple or Google) to rise up to these monopolies until a third viable option is on people’s radars. Linux, due to its open source nature, is the only project that CAN achieve this because it can’t fail. It can only grow. But we also need to ensure that at least Android remains a somewhat neutral and open platform. If Google becomes more like Apple controlling literally everything, it gets even harder for alternatives (and for Android users in general).

Linux phones are usable right now, but of course you have some limitations in practice… many apps aren’t available or you have to use workarounds. If you mostly use open source applications you could be fine though. Although it’s likely that you still need a secondary, small Android-based phone that you turn on just for those rare cases where you absolutely need a certain mobile app and it’s only available for Android. At least while Linux mobile OS usage is still low. It’s probably going to grow faster in the future, because those monopolistic companies usually enshittify their products and services at some point (Google is already well on it) and then regular Android/iOS users become so annoyed at what they’re using that they also open up more for alternatives. It’s basically what’s happening in the desktop OS space right now - Windows continues to become more user-hostile and annoying to use, and desktop Linux passively (as well as actively) becomes more popular as a result. At some point, these companies forget what made their products popular in the first place and are only operating in the mode of milking users for data and profits, because they don’t need to work hard anymore to improve the product - it’s already popular enough. At that point, regular users who normally don’t care about things like freedoms, privacy and ethics in the product they use will notice that things became worse and might switch simply because of inconveniences they didn’t have before.

Another very good option beside Linux-based mobile OS these days is GrapheneOS. It’s the best Android-based distribution you can have currently, nothing comes close (not going to elaborate here because long post is already long). But you still should be prepared for increasing hostility from Google towards unofficial Android distributions, and some apps which use the Play Integrity DRM to not work. If you encounter this, make sure to let the app developer(s) know. They need to realize that they are only serving Google’s interests with this, not their own.

So unfortunately websites routinely and carelessly lie about basically everything related to data protection stuff. This already begins with the term “technically necessary cookies”. No cookie is truly technically necessary. What they usually mean by that is “we really really want to put this tracking cookie from our ad partners like Google into your browser, and we don’t care whether you want that or not so we just claim it’s technically necessary”. But even if you refuse a cookie prompt, often your choice isn’t respected at all and cookies are created regardless. In fact, many cookies are already created at the very beginning before you make any choice in any sort of cookie banner. Basically this whole ad/tracking industry is a complete mess and no one really cares and it’s just best to completely ignore what sites claim and use technical means to protect yourself at least a little bit because you cannot trust ANY site’s claims regarding that. Most of the time, even the phrase “we value your privacy” is already the very first and biggest lie. Don’t trust what websites claim. It’s pointless, and nothing happens when they violate their own rules or data protection laws anyway. Which they do almost all of the time anyway. This illegality is routine and almost omni-present. Cookies are also far from the only thing that sites can use to track you. They’re just the most well-known method, which is probably why we have these near-pointless laws requiring sites to put up near-pointless banners to annoy visitors with.

So as a user, you should just ignore any of that and completely rely on technical means to protect yourself from any or most kinds of shenanigans websites can do to you. Most privacy-respecting browsers have features that limit what sites are able to do with you, such as cookie isolation which prevents other sites from being able to read the contents of cookies belonging to other sites. Or more general, isolation of any website data, not just limited to cookies. But not every browser has these types of protection. If you use very common browsers like Chrome, Edge or Opera, then it’s likely that you have none of that because the developers of those browsers are companies which profit from the user being more easily trackable through the web.

So the easiest solution as a user is to use a privacy-respecting, well-pre-configured browser like Librewolf or Mullvad Browser, and use uBlock Origin as the only extension with several enabled filter lists. This alone makes you a much harder tracking target. And of course you can safely ignore or block any cookie notices, it doesn’t really matter what you select in them most of the time anyway. Although your IP address is still always a liability with ANY browser, because it can be fairly easily linked to your person and you will expose your IP address with any regular browser, so if you want to browse anonymously you should use the Tor Browser (with mostly default settings and no additional extensions). That means that you won’t have ad blocking protection, but at the same time the site and any ad servers don’t know who you are anyway (you’re just some random person from a random country for them), unless you make a mistake and log into a personally-identifiable account or so. The Tor Browser also contains the most amount of anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting techniques possible. For casual anonymous browsing you should absolutely use the Tor Browser, because with it it’s highly unlikely that a website is able to identify you. Its main disadvantages are that it’s slower, some sites block that kind of browser, and since you shouldn’t add any other extensions you will see ads with it, but your identity still remains protected unless you make a mistake. Still, it should be your go-to browser for anonymous browsing. Switch to your regular browser for when you want to log in to an account with personal details.

When I was new to the Linux desktop world (late 90s to 200x) I tried lots of different distros and (X11) window managers and tools and whatnot. Changed themes a lot. And so on. And I think there’s value in all that, because it expands your horizon of what’s possible on the desktop, how different UI/UX paradigms work out in practice for you, and you learn how to use different environments.

On the other hand, there’s also value in having a consistent, well-integrated desktop environment. It can mean less “pain points” in various circumstances, and it’s also efficient when multiple programs share the same libraries or code base instead of having separate tools all around.

In the end, it comes down to what works best for you. But this might also change over time. For example I’m really considering switching to Cosmic once it’s mature. I’m also considering taking a look at Niri because it seems well thought-out. But currently I feel cozy using Plasma at home and Gnome at work because Plasma is currently the least-annoying and at work I still use Gnome because it’s been historically more stable than Plasma for me. I’ve tweaked Plasma’s hotkeys so they work more like Gnome’s and since I also need to use a couple of Windows-based systems at work I’ve also configured common Windows shortcuts like Super+L, Super+E, Super+R so that they all behave the same everywhere.

Oh, and my distro is Arch everywhere because I’ve used it for ages now and I like its technical simplicity, stability and modularity. It’s the one distro that gets in my way the least.

I think one should learn enough to be flexible and be able to use everything, while also not being too narrow-minded and just focus on one solution too much. What works best for you now might not be the best choice for you in a couple of years.

Not sure there will be a big change there, because they are already powerful enough for most common tasks since several years now. And everyone owns at least one phone or tablet already. So I don’t think that number is going to rise significantly anymore. Those people who are OK with using a phone/tablet for everything probably already do so right now. Maybe if living conditions for the non-super-rich become worse and people look for more affordable computing devices. But even then, older devices which can run Linux desktops for example are already dirt-cheap. I just don’t think that the UI/UX of phones or tablets is on par with desktops or notebooks running a regular desktop OS when using a big screen. Those UIs are primarily made for touch and for smaller screens. Trying to do everything with just one UI paradigm just leads to Windows 8 ugliness.

Desktop Linux’ marketshare is going to steadily increase, but as time progresses, so will the speed of that increase. Linux was at or below 1% for a really long time but within the last 5 years or so it jumped to ~5%. As this not only means more users, but also more attention and developers, this will of course snowball. The end of Win10 will also give a bump. And if the enshittification of Windows continues (it probably will) and if US-based companies are becoming a red flag for non-US-customers (will probably also happen) then it will snowball even faster.

• Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
• Vanadium (GrapheneOS’ Chromium-based browser, maybe it’s usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
• Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
• Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
• Proprietary browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used

An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the “@”). So e.g. “john.doe@gmail.com” has an account at gmail.com but “jane.doe@mailbox.org” has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There’s not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It’s spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.

Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone’s accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.

Sure.

• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf … and when you use for example Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei made mobile OSses, it’s even worse of course, because then their own telemetry comes on top of that from Google as well. They want to have pieces of the cake too.
• https://www.kuketz-blog.de/google-play-services-die-ueberwachungswanze-von-google/ (you might have to translate that page. That guy is a well-known privacy and data protection researcher, white hat hacker and also a data protection official in a federal state in Germany. He’s very objective)

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy with UnifiedPush to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure. But you need a UnifiedPush server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.

Haven’t read anything bad about Tuta so I guess it’s fine. Other good ones are Proton, mailbox.org or posteo.de. Anything that’s not by Google, Microsoft, and so on.

I use several, depending on use case:

• Tor Browser for general and anonymous web browsing (e.g. reading news, looking up stuff, and so on)
• Mullvad Browser as a clear web alternative for general use
• Librewolf for generally logging into sites with personally identifiable accounts (e.g. to buy stuff)
• Ungoogled Chromium for those few sites which only work with a Chromium-based browser, or other specific cases
• On Android (GrapheneOS): Tor Browser and Vanadium

All regular browsers have some hardening applied and uBlock Origin installed.

Since you only mentioned 25% gaming, I’d recommend against a gaming-centric distro like Bazzite. Instead, use a generalist desktop distro. Since you mentioned that you’re rather new-ish, I’d recommend against Arch-based distros like CachyOS. Instead, check out e.g. Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE. (Probably in that order of priority) These aren’t hard recommendations, so you can do whatever and probably be fine either way, but it still doesn’t fit that well.

In theory, the law applies to everyone. In practice, it doesn’t apply to rich entities.

Well, “nice” to have that feature, but you still shouldn’t use Discord, or at least limit your time on it as much as possible. Remember, when you use it, you’re part of the network effect that makes Discord big. You have to resist that. Take a look how Discord compares to pretty much any other messenger or communication tool in existence: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html Avoid it whenever possible, get your friends to leave it and weaken its network effect.

So, some of the drawbacks (there’s probably more):

• Discord has weak security (see URL above)
• Discord has non-existent privacy
• Discord has an incredibly vague privacy policy which means they do what they want. Even companies with strong privacy policies screw users over routinely. Guess what companies do who don’t even care about good privacy policies. They even weakened it further a while back because they need to train their new AI features on your data as well, and probably even their weak privacy policies were in the way before. Well, good thing that the users agreed that they can change it at any time for any reason and be fine with it.
• You grant all rights of everything you write, say, share or do on Discord to Discord, and everything you type, say, upload or share is being processed by their servers
• Discord tracks what you’re typing before sending it
• Discord suspended accounts and required even more user data for “verification”, such as telephone numbers which is completely unnecessary except for tracking and data selling purposes
• Discord shares chat logs with law enforcement (and they can share everything because they’re collecting everything)
• The Discord client app tracks what programs you have running so it can for example display what games you’re currently running. That means it contains a process logger. It has to scan every running application and then finds games out of those, and then you have to hope that only the game-specific bits are uploaded to their servers. Maybe that is the case, but can you trust them, and also to never change that? No.

If you have to use it:

• Never use their desktop app, always use the web version from a secondary browser (web apps running in the browser have much less rights than locally running applications), and even then limit what the site can access to the least amount of stuff necessary. If you never use your mic or camera then block it in the browser settings. Don’t trust Discord’s own mute setting (this also applies to other proprietary software).
• Use a fake e-mail alias / telephone number when creating your account, generally give them the least amount of data possible. Opt out of any options or features which are tied to you exposing more data to them
• Don’t give them additional money e.g. for their premium stuff (you already pay with data they gather from you)
• Block at least these API endpoints which are purely used for tracking purposes (there may be more though, and they might change) [easy to do with uBlock Origin for example]:

https://discord.com/api/v*/science
https://discord.com/api/v*/channels/*/typing
https://discord.com/api/v*/track*

• You can also block these related hosts safely without impairing Discord’s main functions (again there may be more):

crash.discordapp.com
status.discordapp.com
b.stats.paypal.com
app.adjust.com
client-analytics.braintreegateway.com

Yeah, I also don’t like such general laziness. It’s also not just limited to switching to Linux, it’s kind of the same with switching to anything that’s better but slightly(!) more inconvenient than what you’re used to. Well, you can’t make or be part of some progress unless you’re willing to sometimes get off your comfy couch and do something you’ve never done before. Like switching to Linux. Like stopping eating meat. Like stopping supporting certain evil companies. Like going to vote for a non-retarded option. Like voting with your wallet for the products you use/buy and also NOT use/buy. If everyone would do it, the world would be a different (better) place. But still too few are doing it. Because it’s slightly less convenient. And that would be so damn hard to change. Oh man would that be hard. Not.

Distro hopping is fairly normal if you’re still relatively new to Linux, I guess you do it less as time goes on, because you’ll have a better idea of whether or not a specific distro is appealing to you or not. To be able to even judge that you have to try out some distros for yourself, of course, so you need to do some distro hopping in order to tell what “direction” of distro is best for you. Sure you can read about it or watch videos but it’s never the same as actually running it for yourself.

The question is kind of impossible to answer because the two are so different. It doesn’t make sense to compare Linux to a version of Windows.

Also:

One side (myself included) is usually disgusted at Windows for being so bloated, full of spyware and dark patterns, closed, untrustworthy, fraudulent and inefficient. So personally, I’d rate Linux to be as good as a non-existing future version of Windows that’s never going to appear.

While the other side (most “average users”) are usually disgusted at Linux because Fortnite, Photoshop and that random stupid thing they bought at some store don’t run on it. As stupid as it sounds but that is usually enough reason for an average user to not like Linux. Also, he’d have to install it himself because it’s not preinstalled. Also a major hurdle for that kind of user. Unfortunately, the majority of users. Users like that probably rate Linux as bad as something like MS-DOS or Win 3.x because they feel that Linux is limiting them, but at the same time don’t want to change anything about their software choices.

The main problem is that common users are usually tied to specific proprietary software (or specific formats which can only be opened by specific proprietary software) which ties them to Windows, and anything that doesn’t run that software cannot be an alternative for them. That’s probably also the reason why MacOS isn’t more popular because it also can’t run everything, but it’s still better than Windows. So unless those users change their habits and the software they use, they will always be shackled to Windows and remain on that sinking ship until they’re literally beneath the ocean, because they never realize a sinking ship.