Gnome with a ton of extensions and a Catpuccin theme for gtk apps

I’m mainly going into the negatives because the positives are fewer in number. Though those few do outweigh the negatives I’m about to write about. In my opinion at least

From what I’ve read it’s a lot better than what it used to be, but you can still bump into some weird issues that require more knowledge of your computer (compared to Windows) to get it fixed. Usually it’s audio, Flatpak permission issues or some application that comes preinstalled but crashes anyway. (i.e. Kontact on Fedora’s KDE spin). And in one case NetworkManager just disappeared on the family computer.

Gaming can be an issue, depending on what you like to play. AAA games with an important online component usually don’t work on Linux because of their anti-cheat. Not all of them of course like CS2, Rivals, and Dota 2. It was a bummer since I switched to Linux with the expectation that I’d still be able to keep on playing League, only to see it being unusable after a year. But if your friend group doesn’t play those kind of games (and I got lucky on that part), you’re fine. For example Peak and Gambling with Friends just worked on launch. I didn’t even bother looking at ProtonDB

I’ve seen a lot of people downplay the fact that you may not be able to play the games with invasive anti-cheat. But if that’s the game you (or your friends) like to play, that’s the game you like to play. No shame in that, especially if you don’t care/mind the anti-cheat. It’s your computer, you don’t have to be fully into foss to use Linux and you should (in my opinion) be able to weight the pros and cons yourself.

Another con (for people who just want to use their computer) or pro (for those who like to thinker around) is choice. There are so many distro’s with a ton of DE’s and ways of customising those DE’s where a new user will probably get stuck just deciding what they want to pick. Or you can just as easily look at something more technical and decide what compositor or init system you want to use. It’s a lot and for many users the deeper stuff doesn’t really matter to them.

I wasted* at lot of time tinkering with my Nix configs and my Arch install to not even use either distro anymore. It can get a bit much, especially if the thing you’re tinkering with is your main computer. Now I just have a separate second hand laptop to mess around with now so it doesn’t get in the way of actual work.

All of my most painful issues wouldn’t have been too bad if I just had someone to guide me in the right direction. This became really apparent when a friend of mine bumped into a lot of the same issues I did when he switched. He got his fixed fairly quickly since I was there to explain, for example, what was wrong with his fstab config and why he got into emergency mode because of that.

*It was a ton of fun looking back at it (and educational). But if you go into it with the idea that it’ll help you (in part) with productivity, you’re going to have some regrets with the time you actually spent on it in the moment

Just so people know, Belgium has one-party consent laws regarding the recording of conversations. I’m Belgian, see Art. 314bis in our penal code.

Maybe you can use some client to navigate your share in a more pleasant way instead of hosting something new? I never tried that so I can’t recommend anything for that unfortunately

If you are already hosting Nextcloud, the Memories app might fit your needs well.

Immich definitely isn’t a bad option either. It doesn’t take ton of resources, has a clean user interface and is multiplatform. Just like Coolie4 said, you can just try it out with a small collection first before committing to anything.

If you don’t want them on cloud providers because you’re not comfortable them being able to see those pictures, you can also pay for Ente.

Self hosting Ente is also an option, which is what I use for my family

You might also be able to get away with hosting something like Seafile and use directories as albums. But you won’t get random shuffling in that case (My bad I can’t read. This isn’t much better than what you’re doing currently)

Don’t tell me you actually read through the millions of lines of driver code in the Linux kernel

The Bitwarden client, extension and app keep those locally as well. So unless you have a prolonged power outage, you should be fine. Though if you don’t have anyone you need to share passwords with I’d recommend KeepassXC with Syncthing. You can set keybindings with the browser extension

Heyhey, nice overview, though on the “just works” thing on atomic/immutable distros I want to say that that’s not the case by virtue of a system being atomic.
I’m on Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite layers on) and the codecs you’d expect being on there aren’t because of licensing (just like all of Fedora’s distros).
I also don’t believe Fedora Atomic does anything in particular in regards to drivers. So the advantages you’re talking about are there because of the people who worked on Bazzite.

On breakage, it’s definitely not a bad thing for a system to *gently* push users into installing software in user space and with some isolation, but it’s far from a requirement for a stable system.

And if you’re going to be layering everything anyway (so installing basically only installing using rpm-ostree), you’re not gaining much by choosing an atomic distribution. Those layers can conflict like with any other distro packages

Fedora KDE, which I ran for almost a year, has not given me any issues except for the codecs which I had to install myself.
It’s actually more of a pain to get codecs to work on Fedora Atomic because of how RPM Fusion needs to work with layering (https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/OSTree), which wasn’t an issue on standard Fedora.
So you’ll end up needing to manually updating the repository RPM Fusion repository every 6 months.

Also some software, like Steam, is also a pain to work with when using the Flatpak. \

VanillaOS (which *doesn’t* use rpm-ostree since it’s based on Debian) and Bazzite are both good atomic distros if you really want that, while having those kind of annoyances handled for you.

It’s fairly clunky. The developer is a nice guy and responds really quickly, but files sometimes didn’t sync and I got an error twice where it just completely stopped syncing.

There also isn’t a proper setup guide or documentation (but you can always add the help flag halfway through your jar usage to know what parameters you’re missing). The developer has been kind enough to help me through that though.

It might just be a skill issue on my end of course. Though needless to say I moved back to something else after a couple of months (In my case to Seafile)

Also its Dutch translation is acceptable (I did that)

At the very least you’re misguided or don’t know what you’re talking about. Passkeys are not vendor locked in and of themselves.

You can make the same argument against password managers because most iPhone users that use them, use Apple’s one.

No, I currently use Syncthing to sync my documents and music folders between my devices. If there’s something else, like the clips I make when playing with friends, the computer automatically syncs them to my Seafile instance with their sync client.

That way I can easily share the folder and check it on my phone using the app. If you don’t encrypt the drive it will show up and be navigable in your files app, without taking space (at least if you use the stock gos files app)

Personally I’m more than happy to cover the Dutch translation if you have the time to get translations working. Thanks for the project!

I have GOS, you can’t remove it unfortunately. Those kind of people are everywhere online but never forget it’s your device. You can do with it whatever the hell you want, regardless of what the “point” of anything is.

I’m currently using a Pixel with GOS on it. But I “went away from Google” (stopped using their services) because I don’t trust them to keep the telemetry about me they store safe. (Or use it in a way I’m fine with).

And altering the physical hardware in a way to spy on a phones users, irregardless of the operating system, isn’t a reasonable concern (I believe you can think of a fair few reasons).

There are very few phones that actually have open firmware, which is unfortunate, but in most peoples cases (like when you don’t trust Google to use your data responsibly) they can accept that risk. They have done it with every other phone they used as well. And those were (probably) a lot less open than Pixels are.

You can also make the more meta-argument that since the police in Catalonia and French law enforcement saw those phones as a threat, you can be sure you have secure phone in your hands.

p.s. This was a lot less concise than I expected. Sorry for the text wall :)