arsCynic

I’d give up computing altogether, or even commit suicide if living mainly means being subservient to these soulless parasites.

Neo: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger
[He does]
Neo: and you give me my phone call.

Zen, LibreWolf, and Waterfox strip Firefox clean of AI.

Zen is a feature powerhouse like Vivaldi, without the bloat. LibreWolf is privacy focused and ships with uBlock Origin by default.

Zen is my main browser. LibreWolf at work for stability. Waterfox works on PC and Android, but I only use it on the latter so can’t vouch for its performance on the former.

There are even more Firefox forks, but these are the one’s I use.

About 10 years ago a friend discovered Linux during his studies and suggested I try it out.

I haven’t looked back ever since.

Liked, bookmarked, installed. Can finally start using GIMP.
On Arch Linux pacman -S gimp will do, run and close, and then overwrite as instructed above. No need for Flatpak.

“‘F the Police’ but who’s stopping you from killing me?” ―Harder Than You Think - Public Enemy

I do believe about 20% of police officers have good intentions and significantly more signed up with that attitude, not knowing that they protect the wealthy elite and crooked politicians more than they uphold democratic values and ethical standards in society.

Unfortunately, probably more of them consider such a career because of the authority it gives them. Therefore I prefer to say that “many cops are bastards”; granted, it doesn’t have an equally nice ring to it.

So far I’ve encountered the smoothest OS experience with Arch-based EndeavourOS. Perhaps twice a year something breaks for which the forum or Arch Wiki usually provided the fix within a day. The other 363 days I simply update in the morning/evening and all is well—sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm and yay --noconfirm.

Conversely, on Debian, it drives me nuts that one is prevented from updating even if one public key from one unimportant repository is missing or something. This troubleshooting is way harder for beginners than most things I’ve needed to do to fix my EndeavourOS install.

I’ve got a complete Linux beginner to start off with EndeavourOS without problems. She’s even troubleshooting and fixing suddenly non-working Steam games by herself.

In any case, any Linux is better than Windoze. Try different distributions if you’ve got a spare PC to test with and see what fits you. For the greatest peace of mind, always have two or more hard drives or have a directory that instantly syncs to a cloud to separate the OS from crucial data one cannot lose in case something goes awry. As for desktop environments (DE), I started off with Xfce about ten years ago, used that most of the time. Then fell for the KDE Plasma hype for about year—they’re doing great stuff, but a bit too bloated and buggy for my liking, as well as trying to have a KDE app for everything instead of acknowledging some other software is simply better. One can’t be the best at everything. Anyway, then I tested multiple DEs because all of them have exclusively useful features, and the perfect mix between the most prominent ones (Xfce, Plasma, Gnome) I’ve found to be Cinnamon, the default on Linux Mint. For me that’s the perfect beginner friendly DE that also remains highly configurable/extensible to suit experienced users, without being overwhelming/bloated to anyone.

Have fun and build whatever you want in your new awesome sandbox. Screw M$ without restraint nor compassion.