Wait, it doesn’t support caldav? That really kills the appeal of the convenience they provide as a one-stop-shop, as I’d have to deal with hosting my calendars in another way. I guess at that point I could just get SimpleLogin and use the rest as I have it, even if that gets close to proton unlimited price-wise…

Really, I’d just recommend using nano then. It’s installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it’s not necessarily meant for everyone.

I am on EndeavourOS and install packages via the command line and on top of that I primarily use Neovim, so I spend a decent amount of time in the terminal

Most people here suggested meme names, but that’s actually a really great idea! And the names are pretty beautiful on top of that. I hope OP chooses this despite it being far from the top comment.

It depends on what you’re used to and the programming languages you use. I learned typing on a German QWERTZ keyboard and while that works for languages like Python and Haskell, which are indentation-based, but for languages which use braces like Java, C, Rust, or similar, it can be annoying to have to use altgr+7 or altgr+0 for { and }. Thus I switched to a US ANSI layout, which was nicer for those specific characters, but caused problems when typing local characters like öäüß. After switching to Linux I set up a compose key, letting me press compose + a + " for ä for example, and while that’s a decent patch, that still breaks the typing flow. So now I’m in my ergo keyboard phase and trying to get my own personal layout going, which meets my own needs for needed characters, based on a colemak-dh design.

You know, Valve once considered making an entire OS to prevent cheating. I’d assume something like SteamOS, but incredibly locked down and designed for playing Valve games. Obviously that never got past the idea stage, but disregarding the truckload of issues with that idea, one big one is that you could use either physical cheating tools, by messing with the direct hardware inputs, or run it in a VM. Basically, unless you have a player in a locked-off room, with a pc, keyboard, and mouse provided by you, and the pc running your own locked-down OS… well, someone’s gonna figure out a way to cheat.

That’s not to say that anticheat can be ignored entirely, but since there is no remotely reasonable state which could eradicate cheating entirely, you need to find a happy medium of not “infecting” the player’s pc with a new backdoor, because even if you’re not malicious, someone else will be, and nothing at all. Something that has a minimum level of invasiveness with a maximum level of cheating prevention, at least filtering out basic script kiddies.

The problem with that is, nobody cares. Basically nobody even knows what a “Kernel” is and what “Kernel-level” means and implies, so it’s just some weird anticheat for them. Also, as long as DRM doesn’t interfere with their playing experience, they don’t care either. Barely anyone will even notice if a few frames are missing, because Denuvo is chilling in the background, keeping the game “safe”.

We are a subset of privacy-minded people in a subset of somewhat knowledgeable gamers. Losing us as customers doesn’t matter in the slightest to the devs/publishers, and nobody else will make a fuss, or at least they’ll not stop spending money.

Oh, I did not even know it supported RSS/Atom, that’s lovely! I think I’ll move to that then, thank you :D

Newsboat, which others recommended, also seems interesting, but I personally appreciate images, so that one is sadly a no-go for me, even if being able to ssh into a home server to check up on news, instead of having to sync the feeds across multiple devices, would be absolutely lovely.

After reading all this, and generally being predisposed towards Arch since my experience with EndeavourOS has been rather comfortable so far¹, I’d say I’ve less been rationally convinced of using it, but rather not deterred enough. So I think I’ll just go with Arch, but make sure to keep my home folder in a separate partition, so I can bail if needed, with Fedora as my preferred backup.

1: Well, I say it’s been comfortable for me, and that’s true, but a friend of mine who installed EndeavourOS at the same time as me recently booted his pc up to find a terminal staring back at him. He says he didn’t do anything weird, and didn’t even update, but who knows. If I understood him correctly, reinstalling (one of) the Kernel(s) (I think he has two installed, one as a backup) fixed the issue. Problem is that this takes time, and when you’re not home, with shitty or possibly no wifi, that’s gonna be a big problem.

I’d rather just have it working properly inside a browser, instead of it telling me that it has this neat cross-platform app, which turns out to just be Electron. On mobile that can be fine, but I dislike it on Desktop, personally.

Do excuse me if this is false, I have never actually worked with Electron on the developer side myself, however I don’t believe it offers anything you couldn’t do through a normally provided website. I know for example Discord only allows screen sharing in the desktop app, however I’ve also seen websites which allow screen sharing, so that seems more like an arbitrary restriction than anything. I mean, in the end it’s just a dedicated Chromium install for one single website, so where is the need to force the website onto your pc?

I’ve already considered Debian, but… I dunno, this isn’t what I’d call the most logical reason, but I just kinda don’t like it as my desktop OS. I’d use Debian over basically anything else for a server, but as a desktop OS I don’t like the vibe.

Keep in mind, I started using Linux this summer and in a few years I’ll probably look back at this wondering why I was such an idiot, but I gotta fall and get a bloody nose first to notice ;3

Huh, I never expected anyone to recommend Arch to me because you have to tinker too much with an alternative distro. I thought simplicity was the reason why people liked NixOS, no?

Because of course the arch wiki has the info needed. I should’ve just checked there from the start, thanks!

Huh, neat. On my current EOS Desktop PC it’s a bit too late to uninstall everything and reinstall it as a Flatpak, but I’ll keep that in mind for new Linux installs. Thank you :3

Excuse me if this is a bit of a dumb question, as I have never particularly worried about packaging methods and simply installed what I needed from the official Arch packages or AUR, but how does Flatpak lead to fewer updates? I know it sandboxes things, that’s why I’ve been interested in it for applications I don’t quite trust like Discord, but I never got around to actually switching applications of that sort over and trying the format out.

Speaking of Discord, hooking that out of the “normal packages”, aka everything I update via yay, would be beneficial anyways, since it’s the only thing that forces me to update my system by saying how I’m oh so lucky about a new update coming out and I don’t wanna mess with partial system updates. That’s kinda besides the point though, I just wanted to complain.

Personally, instead of Tmux, I’d recommend trying Zellij. I started with Zellij right out of the gate, but a friend of mine who dislikes Tmux a lot quite enjoyed Zellij, so I assume it’s somewhat better.

Any reason not to just use yay? That’s an alias for yay -Syu, which in and of itself, at least if I understood it correctly, is basically just pacman -Syu and from what I’ve read on the arch wiki -Sy is heavily discouraged.

I think that would just be illegal, although I am not certain… maybe it’s not

What I’d be more worried about personally is metadata. Sure, they might not know what you sent, but they know who you sent it to and when. The data is generally just gonna be “Oh, this person texts their mum every morning”, but Meta already provided message contents in an abortion case, so what if someone is accused of having an abortion (the fact that you can be “accused” of that now in the US is still fucked up imo, but that’s besides the point) and then Meta provides info that this teenager sent WhatsApp messages to a medical professional who can perform abortions. That would obviously not work as well as the contents themselves, but it does have value to the legal case.

In the end none of us have anything to hide… until we suddenly do

I know this wasn’t argued here, but I’d like to make it clear anyways: You don’t have to deal drugs or be a hired killer to want privacy. There are a bunch of reasons you could get in trouble with the government which fall into morally ambiguous areas. And sometimes we just don’t want our entire life being analyzed to have an algorithm decide what advertisement is the most effective in getting us to click on it.

As this is my personal strategy as well, I would like to add that your sample size is now 2, with a 100% success rate :3

Although for me personally I don’t have to retrain that quickly. My resistance to motion sickness certainly gets weaker over time, but I seem to have reached some kind of baseline, compared to my previous state, where about five minutes could give me an awful headache, while now I can take it for a bit longer, even after not being in VR for a month or two.

Speaking of, we need more VR games. I’d love to play more of them, but nothing new is really big and exciting or anything, which is how these long breaks even happen.

Thank you to all of you for the great advice <3

I think for now I’ll get a Moonlander, or at least something similar, and in the (very) long run, if I’m not satisfied or it doesn’t suit all my needs, invest in a soldering kit and a 3D printer to start testing out more and more smaller diy style keyboards (depending on how many I’ll test that’s probably cheaper, tinkering is fun, and I’ll probably find other uses for those as well) to see what fits me best, or what I could use as a secondary option.

But for now, I’ll just get a nice base that will certainly work. Experimentation comes later. Thank you all. I’ll be sure to at least have a good look at all the keyboards recommended here, and make a list of my favorite ones for long-term experimentation, but at the time I just don’t quite have the money for more than one keyboard, even if many of them seem very cool (；・∀・)