What downsides though right? “We” object to Ubuntu over matters like Canonical being a for-profit company or their choice of Desktop Environment. At the end of the day, who cares? If it works it works, right?

It’s an interesting angle, the hostility thing. People in the know have largely fallen out of love with Ubuntu but imho that’s not necessarily because Ubuntu fell in quality but just because so many “better” things have come up since Ubuntu 04.10. It is definitely a sound choice for non-techy people, maybe more than ever. Personally I’d prefer (almost) any contemporary desktop over Gnome these days, but I can definitely see the appeal for others in terms of simple design language.

Basically you can turn any old laptop into a Chromebook these days using Linux, and most people just like your parents most definitely do not need more than a functional webbrowser. Basically a smartphone with a larger screen and physical keyboard. Even if you don’t care about your privacy (or freedom from notification-spam) why still pay the Microsoft-tax.

Which are about as related as the knowledge required to mount drywall and the knowledge required to run a ham radio station. You tell me which is more complicated but either way there are most certainly radio amateurs out there that don’t know the first thing about handywork and handymen that could barely find the on-off switch on a broadcast-rig.

I bought a used old gen Sonos Connect about a year ago to integrate my Logitech Z906 into an existing pair of Sonos speakers. They made it deliberately tedious to downgrade those speakers (who had gotten the S2 “blessing”) back to S1 to make them work with the Sonos Connect. I’m an IT repair shop guy and I cursed all the way through this downgrade process.

I would have gladly bought current hardware from them again if their prices were anywhere within the realm of plausibility. Credit where it’s due, that Sonos Connect hookup with the 2 wall-mounted 1st party speakers works absolutely reliably. That company just seriously lost its bearings since they engineered those parts.

Thing is, the RNC is cleptocratically his now and will be for a while. Other than that I’d hope for similar things as most people are commenting here. It will be bonkers either way until he stops breathing and then some.

I can’t chime in on that specific angle but on exactly the opposite. I’d call myself an Arch guy, or Manjaro and Endeavour more specifically. But recently I started hearing more and more about Nobara, I own a Steam Deck and use GE Proton on there which is from the same guy so I said I wana try Nobara and I immediately felt at home. I’m not a big KDE fan but really the out of the box Nobara experience when it comes to gaming needs felt and feels so complete to me I really couldn’t complain about a single thing.

It obviously wont replace Arch in my homelab but I don’t think I’ll ever consider anything else besides Nobara for my desktop again. Point being I had next to zero practical Fedora experience up to that point. I tried Garuda before which is also Arch based and supposed to cater to gaming needs but with that direct comparison I now feel like Nobara is the only distro that truly gets gaming. It’s SteamOS for the KBM based Desktop.

If Mullvad is not available as a Snap or Flatpak (2 ways of installing self-sufficient auto-updateable packages without dependencies on other packages) then youre probably stuck with either adding this 3rd party repository (something which isn’t always recommendable either) which gives you automatic updates or using a .deb installation file like you would probably prefer and then manually retrieving updates when needed.

Anyways, others have told you as much already anyways. What I’d like to add is that it is definitely worth it to learn to work the terminal. I get that there are many people looking for an alternative to Windows or just an open approach to computing in general without looking for added complexity. Who wants complexity right? Whether such an experience exists in the Linux world is probably subjective. Ubuntu has definitely been a safe bet for the flattest learning curve required since its inception in 2004. But its still a niche thing that won’t experience user-friendly support from everyone (ie Mullvad).

So one could conclude that in order to truly be “free” (as in Free Software freedom) one needs to claim that freedom. You will fuck things up. You will learn from your mistakes. You will regroup and you will grow as a user and dare I say PC-curious person.

I recently “upgraded” one of my raspberrys SD cards to an industrial grade one. Seems to me like those are a lot slower but for that particular use case it doesnt matter to me. What matters is that the card doesn’t die. It runs noticeably cooler when lots of data is being written to it so I feel like I must be onto something there.

I used to (over a span of about 4 years now) just rely on a RaidZ2 (ZFS) pool (faulted drive replacements never gave any issues) but I recently did an expansion of the array plus OS reinstall and only now am I starting to incorporate Docker containers into my workflows. The live data is in ~ and nightly rsynced onto the new larger RaidZ2 pool but there is also data on that pool which I’ve thus far never stored anywhere else.

So my answer to the question would be an off-site unraid install which is still in the works. This really will only be that. A catastophe insurance. I probably won’t even rely on parity drives there in order to maximize space since I already have double parity on ZFS.

As far as reinstallation goes, I don’t feel like restoring ~ and running docker compose for all the services again would be too much of a hassle.