BladeFederation

Endeavor also has a decent installer if I recall, and Arch is already going to be more up to date than almost anything else, so yeah no reason to install a new OS I’d wager.

Nobody said you shouldn’t use SMS ever. When you can avoid it though, do.

RCS and iMessage are essentially just separate internet based messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp. iMessage doesn’t even require a phone number if you’re only messaging other iMessage users. The only difference being, they CAN message phone numbers, but if it isn’t “their” app, they’ll fall back to using SMS. iMessage has implemented RCS if messaging someone using Google Messages, but it is not encrypted, so essentially the same thing as SMS from a privacy and security perspective.

As far as understanding it, both carriers and Google/Apple need to pay for infrastructure. For carriers it is cell towers, for internet based stuff it is servers. Carriers need you to pay for the infrastructure because they offer a single service (kind of, all 3 sell your data). Google & Apple make all kinds of money off of you in many ways, and getting high adoption for their apps makes them more powerful, especially since they have closed standards while SMS is open.

And alternate apps exist, but combining them confuses people into thinking SMS is secure.

Might I suggest a VoIP provider? It costs money, yes, but since you are using your real number on VoIP, you can routinely switch carriers to get new customer deals. For example, I pay $15/month for unlimited data and $5/month to JMP.chat. JMP gives me unlimited text, 2 hours of voice, and voice is less than a cent/min after that is used. I was paying $40/month before for unlimited (still capped after 10 GB). JMP doesn’t require personal information (though they will know if you port an outside number and your phone number is public no matter what, so…). You can lie about your name and address to Mint (though I recommend putting a hotel address near you to comply with regional taxes for your payment plan. They’ll know your approximate location anyway).

But why would you REALLY do this? Decoupling the phone number you actually use from your SIM card/eSIM is powerful. Everyone who wants to know your phone number can, especially if you live in the US. People search sites are crazy. Even barring that, you give it to the government, job applications, credit card companies, banks, random restaurants, tech companies (even if you are privacy conscious now you probably gave it to Google, Apple, and Microsoft at one point). Your SIM shows your approximate location, which can be legally pulled by the government. Stalkers, PIs, and bounty hunters can and do bribe carriers for this info as well. Unless you have a degoogled phone, your texts are likely being scanned by Google or Apple (look into the way they are blurring nude photos in texts unless your age is verified and asking you if you’re sure you want to send or open them).

VoIP protects you from this, and also prevents targeted SIM swaps. You can also get multiple numbers (for JMP it is half price) if you need a work phone number, or for dating new people, restaurants, calling anonymously, etc.

Downsides: Some websites won’t accept VoIP numbers. One government website even wouldn’t allow me to verify with my number that was previously not VoIP, but was the only number I had used, and therefore the only way to verify.

If you talk on the phone a lot it can get pricey. But you should really be using something like Signal for anyone who you frequently talk to. Traditional voice, SMS, RCS, and even iMessage are all terrible for privacy & security, and should essentially be treated as a public social media post that you can’t delete.

If your phone is carrier locked, it is nearly pointless: larger carriers require personal info so you don’t gain much anonymity, nor can you save money. If your phone is not degoogled, it is also a lot less useful since Google has your (much more accurate) location data. However, if you don’t have a Google account tied to your real name (or don’t use one at all) it still may be worth it.

Except with a sane installer, and more performance optimizations.

Gayyyy

The “explain like I’m 5” version: Anarchist is Libertarian Left, Libertarian is Libertarian right. The political compass is wildly imperfect but it is a useful thought experiment. Certainly better than “left vs right except actually it’s right vs right” that politics have become.

Most anything that used KDE or GNOME will use all Wayland features. Every once in a while some distros with GNOME won’t but I forget who and they may have fixed it by now. KDE has better customization and looks more like Mint/Windows by default so I’d stick with that personally.

I use Fedora KDE. It gets more updates than Ubuntu based stuff but nowhere near what rolling distros like Arch do. It’s a very well documented “regular person” distro. I like their package manager better than apt. Can still use KDE Discover for just about any app installation. Downsides: you have to install Nvidia drivers manually, and sign them + your Secure Boot keys if you want to use Secure Boot. Not relevant to you though.

Bazzite is Fedora Atomic but with additional gaming tweaks. Atomic/immutable means you can’t break it, but also aren’t supposed to/can’t install native packages and drivers yourself. But Bazzite gives you everything you need from the jump like drivers. Also Secure Boot needs Universal Blue’s signature I think which isn’t too hard but you will have to look it up. You must use flatpaks only.

Cachy OS is Arch but with a sane installer that walks you through everything in GUI. It has even more optimizations than Bazzite, and is #1 for gaming. It also holds back updates slightly from regular Arch, so breaking happens less often. But it’s still “basically” a rolling distro, so breakage may happen. You pretty much have to use their app store instead of KDE Discover or whatnot. No Secure Boot.

Overall Fedora and Bazzite are both easy to medium difficulty at worst, but for different reasons. Cachy is medium difficulty but best at gaming & general performance optimization.

It definitely takes time, and stable distros should exist. Wayland has been the clear choice moving forward for 7 years though. It feels like Mint & a few others are just stalling at this point.

Wayland: display server. The thing that shows the visual stuff on screen. Wayland=new and more features (features explained below). X11=old but stable and takes time to transition from without bugs.

HDR: high dynamic range. If you have a really nice TV or monitor, this gives you better color accuracy. Make sure you have good brightness levels with brightness cranked up, or it will counter intuitively look worse, like the brown filter PS3 era of video games.

VRR: variable refresh rate. When you run a game, some parts are harder to render than others due to increased detail and things happening in the screen. Thus, your frame rate will dip, making a noticeable jittery effect that is not smooth, especially if you have a high refresh rate monitor. My monitor refreshes 165 times per second to detect changes, and if the frame rate goes from 140 frames generated to 90, that is very noticeable. VRR syncs the refresh rate of your monitor to the GPU itself, so it knows exactly how many frames it will be getting. My monitor will refresh 90 times for that second that I got a frame drop instead of 165, which drastically decreases the jittery effect of the dropped frames. You can still kind of tell, but it is more smooth and responsive in terms of what is happening on screen.

Heterogeneous displays: monitors of different resolutions.

Fractional scaling: this allows you to set display zoom at different percentages on different monitors, as well as setting non-integer scaling (integer is 100% to 200%, non integer is 100% to 125%). This is important because 100% scaling is often too small on high resolutions, and 200% is comically large. Also for the multiple monitor scenario, most people have a new monitor and their old monitor as the secondary. For example, 4k will require 150% scaling at least to be readable st most screen sizes. 1080p will look too zoomed in at over 100%, and not match the look of the other monitor.

In summary, most of this is going to matter only if you are a gamer or watch HDR content like movies on your computer. Having matching monitors despite non matching resolutions is pretty nice though. But if you have matching monitors or 1 monitor it doesn’t matter either. Hence, Mint is not a good choice for a gaming or home theater situation, but its hyper focus on being stable makes everyone else like it more because they never do anything different unless it is for sure going to work. At this point though, most distros are using Wayland with no issues.

And Arch is for trans people. Damn, when will they make a distros that straight people can use? 😔

You’ve got to remember…

Yes. Running it in browser is far better than not using one at all. But third party is significantly safer, since your browser is trusted with a LOT already.

That would include not installing Nvidia drivers though, no?

Interesting, are their really no other major differences than the container images? Have you ran into any additional hurdles with the atomic experience? You may have convinced me to try Bazzite or SecureBlue.

It is technically fully community driven though. And if you moved it up you’d need more squares. No way in hell is it on the same level of corporate as Ubuntu, or especially Android.

There’s an argument that it would be between Fedora and Ubuntu, since being immutable makes it more locked down and you are beholden to the devs to push out important updates like drivers. Then again it is basicallt customized Fedora Atomic so if we’re counting “Fedora” as an average of all Fedora versions, maybe not

They got pretty bad in the mid to late 10s, but build quality is a lot better now. No iPhone bend-gate level stuff in a while.

This did happen. Supposedly they stopped after they got fined. You can say liquid glass is a less blatant version of that hidden as a feature, but as far as I can tell they don’t directly do the “slow down” button for new hardware. And if we’re going to talk bloat, Microsoft is far worse. Linux is holding out for us.

You can get an M5 Air for under a thousand bucks with an education discount, which isn’t verified. I’d go for the 24 GB RAM 512 storagw version which would bring you to 1200. Might be able to snag an M4 for even cheaper if they’re trying to dump inventory. The Neo has a better chip than anything close to its price range of $500. You won’t be able to find better build quality OR specs for either of those 2 price ranges, let alone both. Believe me, I remember when they were overpriced 2k Intel machines. They’re not that anymore, they’re the gold standard, and looking even better with how Windows laptop manufacturers have gotten so greedy. You can barely find anything at all decent that’s x86 for under 1k. There’s a point where it doesn’t make sense to go Apple if you need a ton of RAM and local storage, but most people aren’t going to get a 128 GB RAM Macbook Pro.

macOS is demonstrably better for privacy than Windows. Better than Linux? Of course not. Sabotaging apps? Huh?

At the end of the day, I try to get whoever I can convince to go to Linux. I try to convince whoever I can to get a desktop instead of a laptop, especially for gaming. But if they NEED a laptop, or if they NEED apps that aren’t on Linux, especially creative apps like Adobe and CAD, I’m sure not going to recommend Windows, from any perspective, hardware or software. Microsoft is just awful these days, and has no redeeming qualities left, with Proton being as good as it is for games. So its going to be a Macbook. If they’re a student or general user with a budget that doesn’t need a lot of performance, get whatever refurbished business laptop you can get a good deal on with 16 GB RAM, 32 if you can swing it, for like 300 bucks, and put Linux on it.

Lol definitely not a bot. I’ve always been more of an Apple hater due to the ecosystem and business practices, but they’ve turned it around a lot in the 2020s. They’re still a trillion dollar company and not to be trusted, but yeah, they make great laptops.

I main Linux on my desktop and old laptops, like I mentioned. You can say ARM doesn’t belongin laptops but Apple has proven that’s not true. They outperform just about any chip, with battery life efficiency that is not even approachable by any other laptop chips. That’s just the facts. You can spend 3k for a laptop chip that is as good in performance as an M5 (which costs 1k), or you can get a Snapdragon chip that is almost as good as an M5 for efficiency, for over 1k. But not both. That’s where we’re at. Intel especially is asleep at the wheel. At least AMD is making good desktop CPUs still.

I’m also excited for RISC V, I’m considering getting one on an SBC to make a CyberDeck out of. It’s not come as far as ARM yet but it’s promising and we need an open standard.