As others have mentioned there are unfortunately issues in detail when using an inofficial version of VSCode and even more issues when using the original VSCode of course. I get that it’s currently the most popular code editor but it’s really not recommended to use it. It’s kind of painfully obvious that Microsoft is driving the development of VSCode, and MS is simply not your friend. Not even when it gives you a permissively-licensed open source tool. It’s still kind of poisoned albeit at a low dosage, making it hard to detect. The type of poison we’re talking here are opt-out (if you’re lucky) telemetry (of course!), features or extensions which are ONLY compatible with the OFFICIAL build of VSCode so you can’t 100% work around VSCode’s issues by “being smart” and using a better-preconfigured inofficial build, and as an Electron-based application it’s very bloated and prone to security issues. And, of course, Microsoft steers its development so it may at any point introduce additional anti-features (which is likely, since this is MS we’re talking about here) and also steer its users away from using inofficial builds which might in theory fix some of those anti-features. It smells, and it’s not a particularly smart long-term time investment option.

My recommendations are:

If you want another relatively easy option learn the Vim keybindings (not that hard) and then use Neovim or NVim or however it’s called officially. It can be made into a full-fledged IDE with tons of modern features including LSP and Treesitter quite quickly and painlessly. As a bonus you become familiar with Vim which is present on basically all Linux/Unix/*BSD based operating systems on the planet, so it’s useful to know its basics.

If you don’t mind the harder but more rewarding option, learn and configure Emacs (maybe start with Doom Emacs, it’s easier at the start and uses the Vim keybinds by default). Some other “starter kits” or “distributions” exist as well of course, e.g. Bedrock or Crafted Emacs. Emacs can do literally everything and more, it just needs a lot of time to tweak it, it uses a weird language, and the learning curve at the very start is basically a straight wall into the sky including an overhang. But once you’ve climbed that, it’s an amazing tool for life, going beyond just code editing. Emacs has been around ~40 years and is even growing stronger recently so it’s rock solid and highly dependable, a real tool for life. Also it’s community-maintained, GNU-backed FOSS without weird drawbacks. Since its default keybinds (as well as many other defaults) are ancient (terrible) you should either customize them in various possible ways or use evil-mode which allows you to use basically all of Vim’s keybinds inside Emacs as well.

• To learn Arch, install it from scratch (without archinstall), it’ll force you to read the Wiki and learn a lot of necessary commands in the process. After the installation, just keep using it. Using a Linux distro full-time as the only installed OS is the best way to keep at it and truly learn it over time. There’s no magic bullet here. Just keep using it and solving problems or issues as you go, learning more and more stuff as you go. If you need other OSses as well, run those in a VM. I don’t recommend dual-boot setups.

• Don’t blindly copy/paste commands you don’t understand. Always try to understand them first. Some commands can be very disruptive or even destroy your configuration. If you don’t understand it or are able to adapt it so that it fits to your particular configuration or system, you can EASILY damage a configuration, or even make your system unusable. Also, some people like trolling other people and deliberately share harmful commands. Generally, test potentially destructive commands or complex commandlines before actually running them.

• Document major config changes that you do. This is useful because you’ll be able to undo certain changes or even replicate your current system configuration fast when you change distros or have to reinstall in the future. For example my current Arch-based setup is fully documented in form of an almost-directly executable shell script. It does require some interactions but very little. If I ever have to reinstall this system, or upgrade my hardware, it can be done insanely fast and it’ll have the exact same configuration. This goes from basic partitioning and encryption all the way up to dotfiles and individual program configurations.

• Don’t feel the need to learn hard/advanced tools like Vim or Emacs unless you really think you’re getting an advantage from that and aren’t hesitant to put in the time and effort to learn them. Most people don’t need to use them. They’re amazing tools but you need to be prepared to lose quite a lot of time to learn them before you can become productive with them, and this might not be a tradeoff that’s useful for every single user. You can also get away with much simpler tools, like nano (as a console-based editor) or whatever programmer’s text editor you want.
• Similarly, whether a pure WM or compositor plus assorted tools compared to a full desktop environment is worth it for you or not, is up to you. There’s no wrong or right answer here. I’ve tried out pretty much everything and these days use KDE Plasma because I like the consistency and integrations and dislike having different, inconsistent stand-alone tools for panels, menus, notifications, wallpaper, file manager and so on. But again, there’s no wrong or right answer here. Just what makes more sense for you. It’s worth learning how to be able to configure and use a minimalistic setup, for sure. So trying it out doesn’t hurt and increases your knowledge overall. In general, in the Linux world it’s good to always know enough to not be screwed once some component suddenly doesn’t work anymore. For example, a competent Linux user should be able to deal with (temporarily) not having a GUI and fixing his system via commandline.

• A minimalistic, DIY distro like Arch can be amazing to learn everything, if you want to do that at least. If you just want a working desktop system with as little effort as possible, then don’t do that. But if you intend to learn every detail, then a distro like Arch is better suited for that goal than a “bloated”, fully pre-configured distro like Mint or Ubuntu is. Because Arch is much simpler on a technical level than those are. It’s much easier to understand e.g. the relatively simple package building process on Arch than it is on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. But this “simple” explicitly refers to technical simplicity or minimalism. Most users expect something else when they hear “something is simple”. Arch is not simple as in beginner-friendly, but it is simple in terms of technical complexity, which is why many advanced users and tinkerers like it because it doesn’t stand in their way. It also means though that you HAVE to learn many things, e.g. how to configure a firewall, because it doesn’t come with any preinstalled by default. With Arch, the admin is supposed to know about everything and configure every component himself, at least on a somewhat basic level.

• If you want to go to even more details, you could also try out a source-based distro like Gentoo or Crux, which can also be a great learning experience, but it’s even more details regarding compilations of each package, dependencies, compile-time options, etc. you have to deal with than with a minimalistic binary-package-based distro like Arch, so whether that’s useful for you or not is up to you of course.
• While we’re at it: LFS (Linux from Scratch) is not a distro per se, it’s a guide on how to build your own distribution from scratch. It’s VERY time intensive and not recommended unless you truly want to learn how to build a complete distribution from scratch, or maybe start your own distro some day which isn’t based on another existing distro.

This is a good opportunity to remind people that they should donate a bit to some of the open source projects which they find helpful or important. Liberapay is a nice platform for doing so.

• Metro series (very good, contains creaures/mutants but also a lot of enemies are human)
• STALKER series (very good, contains creaures/mutants but also a lot of enemies are human), some mods recommended because the base games are a bit “unfinished” for lack of a better word, but the modding scene is great and always kind of saves the games
• Deus Ex series (I’ve played 1, Human Revolution + Mankind Divided, all very good. Part 1 in particular was legendary back in the day, unfortunately it looks like absolute garbage these days (it was already critizized for its dated look back when it released), but you might find some mods beefing it up a bit)
• Wolfenstein series (the newer titles are very good in general, except Youngblood)
• Dishonored series (very good)
• F.E.A.R. series (great horror/scifi themed FPS)
• DUSK, Ion Fury, … (and in general lots of other boomer shooters, lots of them are great, these are just 2 examples which I fondly remember. Lots of high quality indie games in this category)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (as an FPS-RPG hybrid, very good since version 2.x, especially with Phantom Liberty)
• Sniper Elite series (I’ve played 2-4, they were very decent)
• Far Cry series (I’ve played 1, 3-5 + New Dawn + Primal, they were very decent. New Dawn was more like DLC-sized)
• The newer Terminator FPS games are supposedly good, haven’t played them yet
• The new Robocop FPS is supposedly good, haven’t played it yet

These are more controversial but also can be a fun option:

• Deathloop (interesting conceptually but also not amazing. Only get it at heavy discounts)
• RAGE 1+2 (don’t remember much from 1 anymore, but I finished it so it was at least okay. 2 was short and unimpressive but still works as well, it’s nothing impressive but if you just want a sci-fi singleplayer shooter they’re alright I guess, and they’re probably very cheap these days. Only get them at heavy discounts)
• The Division 1/2 also work decently in single-player, although some late-endgame stuff like Raids requires multiplayer. Might not count as FPS since it’s 3rd person by default, but it plays very close to FPS and IIRC you can change camera view to 1st person and when you aim from cover (which is most of the time) it feels like FPS regardless. I played both for a bit and it was better than expected but it’s also bland and gets boring after a while. Still a somewhat decent “realism”-based shooter. Only get them at heavy discounts.
• Theoretically Call of Duty but I’m still not going to recommend them because of unethical developer or publisher, low value in general, inflated prices in general, short lengths in general, and so on.

Well, it might seem that way sometimes. But in the end, what’s different to religion is that this is all rooted in facts. Facts which are quite abstract, so not everyone gets them and even those who do get them sometimes wonder whether it’s important or not sometimes. The thing is, Linux is at its core a neutral, open and free operating system, and it’s basically the only one which is advanced or mature enough to be a real competitor to let’s say Windows or MacOS. Of course it’s more than a competitor on the server, it’s basically the only relevant server operating system (Windows Server has a niche in application servers within a MS intranet domain, or to control Windows clients via policies, that’s about it, and MacOS server is already long dead I think). Of course, some of Linux’ success is because those same companies also contribute a lot to the development of Linux, because they need it for themselves as well. But that’s just one more thing which makes Linux a very unique thing. It’s like a neutral baseline for an operating system. Like a very capable OS core that everyone works on, even the competition works on it, because they also rely on it.

That it’s open source and transparent and that anyone can use it or improve it or change it or whatever makes it special, because it’s not a commercial black-box product where you just consume it as-is and have zero rights whatsoever to do or change anything about it. That’s actually incredibly special in today’s commercialized landscape. Its open nature also means it can never die, only grow. And because it’s a proven good system which is also so very different compared to established desktop OSses, it can happen that its users or fans can seem somewhat religious towards it. But, again, compared to religion, religion is based on pure belief (otherwise it would be called fact). There’s nothing religious about Linux or open source software. It’s simply a special operating system, and not in a bad way at all. And closely related to it is, of course, the whole free/open source software movement. Which every user, even those of closed operating systems, can and do benefit from.

And since today’s commercial software continues growing more and more user hostile (ads, spying, bloat, dark patterns, high prices/software rental models), it’s getting increasingly important to have at least the option of a true alternative. Even users who absolutely hate Linux and open source software should be glad that alternatives do exist, so that once the food they are being fed by Microsoft and so on doesn’t taste good anymore, they at least have an option to switch to something else entirely.

• Mint
• Kubuntu
• Fedora KDE Edition
• OpenSuSE
• Pop!OS

These are all easy to use desktop distros (or variants). Use them with their respective default desktop environment. Check screenshots first or try them out in a VM or via live USB before installation, to see whether you like the look&feel.

Signal. Also see https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html

He’s obviously doing all of this to get less regulation, which in turn means more money and more power, more being able to do what he wants. Big corporations and rich businessmen will benefit from that short-term, but long-term we all suffer, because we’ll get a neo-nazi government and do even less against climate change.

Even if we manage to prevent or at least overcome the neo-nazi government once people realize that’s not a good thing to have, nature will be standing right next in line to punish us really hard for being so goddamn stupid. History will not remember us fondly. Future survivors will think of our generation(s) as insane and/or stupid, when they learn that people willingly voted for entities which destroy the planet even more, and make living conditions for citizens even worse, despite knowing better way ahead of time (earth heating up is known since the 1970s or so, and the results of nazi-governments are also known very well), and despite having the internet as an easy means of global communication and coordination.

1-2 decades earlier maybe (meaning: 60s or 70s). Location… I don’t know. Maybe Norway, I’ve never heard anything bad about Norway. Might just be random selection bias though.

Gnome on my work notebook, KDE Plasma on my own machines.

I like KDE Plasma better overall but Gnome was a little bit more stable for me so far. I don’t mind UI differences that much, I’m not very much reliant on the GUI and can deal with pretty much any UI paradigm.

There are a lot of phenomenal indie games. There also are still a couple of really good AAA games, but AAA gaming isn’t what it used to mean. In fact I’d be careful with AAA by default unless reviews state that the game is actually good. Ubisoft even tried to establish an “AAAA quality” game with Skulls & Bones or how it’s called and it’s a total flop.

The real quality these days lies in indie games or (mostly) independent gaming studios. I think it’s kind of safe at this point to just assume by default that Bethesda, Microsoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard and so on simply cannot produce actual good games anymore (there may be some exceptions, but again, wait for independent reviews, and unless it was independently verified, don’t trust them to produce a good game).

Another problem is the sheer mass of games flooding the market, because it means that true gems aren’t found so easily. But they exist. There’s no shortage of great games, you just have to look harder, and look in the right places.

Portal 2 is THE highest rated game on Steam.

Doom or Tetris were probably the most influential ones?

Personal experience - I used some late version of Plasma 5.2x on desktop and now Plasma 6.x of course (always Wayland, generally always the latest stable version available), and Gnome (always Wayland, always the latest stable version) on my work notebook. I’ve never experienced any “serious” bug on Gnome, but I have experienced multiple on Plasma over that time period. I think the most “serious” bug I’ve had on Gnome was that the cursor was flipped upside down for a while until they fixed that (some time ago). While the most serious bug in KDE were multiple crashes in plasmashell since Plasma 6.x. (Meaning all your open apps got closed, I’d say that’s pretty serious for a bug). Another smaller bug, very recently, was that virtual desktops in KDE Plasma were named wrong and when I renamed them they didn’t get saved so it reverts to the wrong names (e.g. “Desktop 1”, “Desktop 3”, “Desktop 4”, “Desktop 4”). But it seems they fixed that with the latest update as well.

Which is also why I’d like to keep it that way, Gnome for work and KDE where it’s not super important if plasmashell crashes or does some weird thing every once in a while. I think KDE is more prone to bugs because it’s simply more complex than Gnome. Gnome is quite minimalistic and doesn’t offer lots of features, KDE is a powerhouse desktop with literally tons of features, dwarfing probably every other desktop environment, at least in the available options for which a GUI exists to set them. Also, Gnome doesn’t support many advanced features like HDR (yet), while Plasma does. So the complexity in having all that stuff means Plasma must be more prone to bugs.

So I view KDE Plasma as “slightly more buggy” than Gnome, still. Especially for dot-zero releases. But the KDE devs are also improving it all the time, so it might become more stable soon. But still, for personal use, KDE Plasma is “stable enough” despite those mentioned bugs, some of which were also fixed in the meantime. For example I didn’t have any more plasmashell crashes since they said that they fixed those causes. Which is why I’m using KDE Plasma 6.x for my personal machines. I like it more than Gnome, but when I want “100%” reliability for a DE, I’m still using Gnome. The main thing I dislike about Gnome isn’t actually its UI or design philosophy or even the limited GUI-based options it offers, but rather its philosophy regarding standards or compliance or making interoperability easier. The Gnome devs often do their own thing and don’t play that nice with others.

Kind of correct but never say never. There should be a point upcoming where an explosive mixture of MS’ software becoming too enshittified to make any more sense to use, and also too expensive to use (MS wants everyone to have a M365 subscription which they can then increase the prices for all the time), as well as competitor’s growing stronger over the years as well, making them a more and more capable alternative, will result in MS Office losing market share and dominance. Windows is also already on a slow decline, it had around ~90% market share during the Win7 era and since then it’s sliding downhill, at about ~70% right now. Sure it takes many years, decades even, but it’s bound to happen with MS’ current course of action as well as the competition growing better as well.

Using it since many years on many Pixels and loving it.

Main pros: zero bloat, efficient, highly secure and highly private (about as private and secure as it can get on any smartphone), and it’s an Android without any of Android’s typical weaknesses (privacy issues, bloat, etc.). You get to utilize the advantages of Google (its security) and completely avoid the disadvantages (its many privacy issues). You get to use all the advantages of an Android mobile OS while completely avoiding all of its disadvantages. It’s like getting your cake and eating it too. You’re much better off in terms of security and privacy than almost(?) all other smartphone users. According to leaked documents, Cellebrite for example can’t crack GrapheneOS on Pixels at all. They can crack almost any other smartphone if they have physical access to it. Most smartphones are really easy for them to crack. iPhones may pose some trouble depending on model/OS. And Graphene on Pixel is the literal brick wall. And even on top of that it has tons of great security features, like auto-reboot after X hours of inactivity, charge-only-mode for USB-C when locked, distress/duress PIN entry to immediately wipe the phone, many things like that. On the privacy side it’s looking great as well: Some folks have analyzed Graphene’s network traffic and there’s zero privacy issues from the OS or its built-in apps. And the few connections it does make (for updates and so on) are all documented and work exactly like they documented them, and they only transmit the exact least amount of necessary data without anything beyond that (guess what - that’s super rare). And on top of that there’s even more great privacy features, some of which are invisible but well thought-out, for example any SUPL request goes through a Graphene proxy server first (configurable) which strips all personally-identifiable data from the request and then redirects it to your provider’s SUPL server (which is most likely Google’s SUPL server in the end). I’m seriously impressed by the quality of the GrapheneOS project. Maybe you don’t realize how good and rare such things are nowadays. Also the documentation is very good and actually answers most of your questions and doesn’t contain any marketing blurb. The social media feeds and forums are a great source of info as well. On top of all that it’s even easy to install GrapheneOS.

Main cons: it’s only available on Google Pixel phones, so if you truly despise Google and don’t want to buy or use anything from them, it’s not the right device/OS for you (or maybe buy it used?). However, the reason GrapheneOS is on Pixel is purely a technical one: Pixels do offer very high hardware based security already (probably the most, although iPhones have good hardware-based security as well. As is known, Apple tends to be produce good quality hardware, not quite so good software) as well as a very high degree of “platform neutrality”, i.e. it’s supported by Google to flash a different OS on it or use more advanced tools like adb without any sort of tinkering or unnecessary danger involved. Also you don’t have to register to unlock your phone or anything, you only need to be online once to enable the OEM unlocking feature (I think this is because Google needs your IMEI to check whether the phone is carrier-locked (cannot ever be OEM unlocked) or can be unlocked, and they will immediately receive some device data including the IMEI as soon as you go online with the preinstalled Android OS once [of course they will receive some more device data than just the IMEI]), so it’s best to not insert your SIM yet (and not do anything with the preinstalled OS) before you’ve installed GrapheneOS on your new Pixel. Do the OEM unlocking step on WiFi only, best on a public WiFi so Google has much less of a chance to identify you based on your IP or related data. Then install Graphene, then insert your SIM and start using your new phone. Other cons exist but they’re rare or pretty much irrelevant in daily use. If you have to hear them, read an older post by me about some potential downsides: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/19867254/12069767

Similarly helpful advice: a broken clock still shows the correct time twice a day.

So I don’t know this figure except I’ve seen it a couple of times in no particular context and I always thought that it was supposed to be a mouth with 1 tooth, I didn’t ever think of it as a nose when seeing it.

You shouldn’t have to sign into any account just to use your operating system. This is wrong regardless of OS. It’s wrong and bad on iOS and proprietary Androids, and it’s wrong and bad on Windows. Also, it wasn’t even a thing on Windows before Win8. Don’t just blindly accept such enshittification. It would be tolerable if it would be opt-in and purely optional, but MS is pretty much enforcing this crap upon their users, and that’s more than a red line being crossed. That’s simply hostility towards their users.

MS noticed that people do this willingly on iOS/proprietary Android and thought hey if we do this on Windows we can harvest even more data from the logged-in users and we have a confirmation of identity and also always get their current IP address and more device data.

To better sell this to the average user, they offer some minor benefits such as settings synchronization across devices, for which they also harvest your settings data, obviously (and even more they’re not telling you directly). Either way, the only real reason they want this is to know who uses their OS, to control access (they could disable your account) and to harvest even more data from the logged-in users. With local user accounts, as it should be, this would not be possible.

Online accounts make sense for online services, not for your OS which should work independently from online services.

Either use a Linux distro (desktop/notebook/server/mobile) or an open-source Android distro such as GrapheneOS, DivestOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS, LineageOS (mobile).

It depends. It’s viable if you just need a phone with several open source applications (non-Android) and are fine with that. But if you need Android app compatibility it’s probably going to be harder or more inconvenient to do, though I haven’t checked the status in recent time. And then there’s this evil thing called Google Play Integrity (essentially DRM restricting which apps can run on which OS) which is a problem even for non-proprietary Androids, so you probably won’t have any chance if you’re dependent on such an app (thankfully it’s rare but as we all know stupid ideas tend to become annoyingly popular).

Main problem, as usual, is that Android and iOS have become such big and popular “platforms” for mobile apps that establishing a “third” platform for app developers is basically impossible (also remember what happened to Windows Phone OS, they were late to the market and failed spectacularly to catch up. Of course in this case it’s open source so it can grow regardless of user numbers, but still, it’s hard to catch up when lots of great Android apps were already developed specifically for Android). So you can only hope that Android app compatibility grows mature enough to be close to 100% compatible, so that you can also run almost all Android apps on your mainline Linux mobile OS. Then you’re not “limited” anymore. (At least if you consider it “limited” when you can’t run Android apps. Which most probably consider to be “limited”).

So I think it’s less about the hardware and OS/UI (I think they work fine these days) and more about the available apps.

[My main daily driver phone is a GrapheneOS (Android) and I have a Pinephone with Linux for playing around in WiFi at home only]

Use Matrix or any good messenger like Signal or Threema for daily communication with friends.

If you want to see a good table of messenger recommendations, see https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html

E-Mail is not a suitable replacement because it lacks end-to-end encryption (unless you and your friends use PGP or S/MIME for that but since that’s rare and slightly too complicated for the common user to use, I’ll just assume that you don’t). While mails are usually encrypted during transport, they lie in plain text format at their destination servers. Depending on which e-mail host you or your friends use, that means the whole content of your e-mail might be scanned and analyzed automatically. Especially if you or your friends use privacy-disrespecting mail hosts like any big commercial one or Gmail or Outlook or what have you. Then your communication via unencrypted mail to or from that person isn’t private.