IMO, definitely dump Ubuntu as quick as you can. Linux Mint is a great Ubuntu-based alternative that gets you all the benefits of Ubuntu (plus some) and none of the Canonical bullshit. If you want to divorce from Ubuntu entirely, LMDE is a great project that rebases Mint on plain Debian! Another lovely project by that team.

Personally, my first pick daily driver is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. If you like playing with config files and the idea of hyper-replicable system setups NixOS is a very interesting project that I've enjoyed a lot in the past.

CachyOS is getting quite a lot of attention recently, and as far as Arch-based distros go I have enjoyed using it. It has a lot of performance claims, but does come with all the drawbacks of ArchLinux and bleeding-edge rolling release distros -- not that it's a terrible experience, it just requires you to be more mindful and more capable than your average distro, especially if you're going to utilize the AUR.

TL;DR - there are a boatload of interesting distros out there. My first recommendation would be Linux Mint/LMDE for familiarity and ease of entry.

Just gonna... Drop this here...

Consistent in frying pins and fraying cables.

I'd argue that for the vast majority of users, a stable, modern Linux distro will meet their needs perfectly. Web browsing, watching YouTube, checking e-mail, looking at pictures of cats on the internet...

It's special/professional use-cases that are still lackluster. Try doing professional level photo editing on Linux... It's a nightmare. Integrating with corporate cloud solutions? Nah. Are these things doable? Absolutely. By the majority of users in that specific use-case? No.

But day-to-day, general use PC stuff? Yeah, absolutely. Even gaming is more accessible than ever. There's exactly one game in my Steam library that doesn't just work... To be clear, it doesn't work at all, but that's just because of my hardware setup. (Halo Infinite + Intel ARC + Linux = Game can't even launch. Worked fine with an AMD card, but when I upgraded late last year it borked. Known problem with Vulkan, DX12, and ARC)

There is a place for graphically gorgeous distro's

As a current KDE user but extensive user of XFCE in the past, it may not come "pretty" out-of-the-box but XFCE can be a very aesthetically pleasing desktop environment. It can be configured just about every which way, and if I had to switch back to XFCE right now I could have things just about how I want them and be 100% as happy with my desktop as I am with KDE.

It's got defaults that just make sense, doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or the way we interact with our desktops, it's light and fast and reliable. It's associated default programs (Thunar, etc.) follow the same design paradigms and are a delight to use.

I Iove XFCE, and it will always have a special place in my heart.

"I really only use the PC for gaming. Mostly, I play Valorant."

There ya go, you're not getting that working under Linux even if you are a master tinker. 🤷‍♂️ He did eventually switch, but not until long after he stopped playing Valorant regularly.

Some reasons are silly, some are incredibly valid. Sometimes it's just "I don't want to" and that's OK too, lol.

I adore OBS. I've been teaching my friends the basics on how to use it, as they've all been using some proprietary crap that makes their lives marginally easier in one or two areas but adds a huge headache in others.

So, if there were no consequences, you'd walk into a store and take whatever you wanted without paying? And if someone tried to stop you, you'd beat them down for it? You'd push a disabled person into traffick for money? You'd be willing to sell children into slavery?

Morals don't happen just because something bad happens to you when you do bad things. As the other comment says, morals happen because humans are, at their core, an empathetic species. It's how we survived. It's how we evolved to create and use tools, it's how we developed society. Yes, there are unempathetic individuals who stand on the backs of the rest, squeezing every ounce of value out allowed within the law (and some don't even stop there) but they are a very visible minority, in my experience.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but... The folks at RHEL aren't factually wrong. They're not violating any GPL clauses by putting source code behind a paywall, or by not putting in all the work they have been these past years to basically spoon-feed their source to rebuilders.

RHEL has contributed and continues to contribute a lot to the FOSS community. Take the time to read this RHEL blog post that was linked to by Rocky. By metrics, the majority of people taking advantage of rebuilders aren't hobbyists or students trying to become familiar with RHEL, it's professionals who are trying to avoid the pricetag associated with all the work and support and value RHEL provides. As they say, they've got a lot of people working on that project, and those people need to be paid for their work. Sure, they could take donations... Or you could pay for their product.

As far as I can tell, all this uproar about RHEL is basically the community getting up in arms because RHEL has decided to stop devoting resources to such activities as... De-branding their sources to make the lives of rebuilders easier? Rebuilders can still do their jam, they just have to put in a little more elbow grease now.

I haven't seen anything about RHEL cutting off paying customers who share source. It wasn't in the link you shared, it wasn't in any of the links provided by Rocky in said blog post you shared. I'd love to read about it if I've missed it, and reform my opinions.

EDIT to add: folks below have provided links and quoted segments from RHEL's license. I encourage everyone passing through to look them over, as they're pretty damning and unambiguous in their language, and was the piece I was missing as I formed the above opinion. Thanks everyone for the discussion!

FF is the way. I found out you can get Edge on Linux now and threw up in my mouth. ☺️

Just for my personal curiosity, could you clarify what you mean when you say Linux is "too addicting" for you?

Assuming you've got simple taxes (you don't work for yourself, didn't pull from your retirement, etc. You'll probably know it if you have "complex" taxes) and live in the USA, Free Tax USA will let you file free federal and has the cheapest state filing I've found. They're also a fairly trustworthy company that's not owned by Intuit and their corporate allies, so that's a plus.

EDIT: Adjusted the level of trustworthiness.

Lol! I'm fine with GIMP, actually. As a matter of fact, I prefer it to Photoshop. That's likely due to GIMP being my first introduction to photo manipulation though, and so I'm used to its paradigm.

Photo EDITING, though? There's no competition on Linux for the likes of Lightroom or Capture One Pro (my preferred RAW editing software). I gave up photography for a while because I hated editing my photos on Linux so much. I tried EVERY alternative Linux had to offer, and they all suck. Eventually, I started carrying around a USB-C SD card reader and just transferring photos of my camera to my phone to edit them in Snapseed of all things, I hated editing on Linux so much.

I can't offer much but to say I'm quite jealous, lol. My wife and I have researched just about every possible opportunity to do the same, just to find everything either doesn't apply to us or is just out of reach at this time (and for the foreseeable future). Asking for help around this topic typically leads to an insane amount of backlash online, so I've found...

I've been looking for a good password manager, and I've heard a LOT of good things about Bitwarden... guess I'll have to bite and see what all the fuss is about!

Why would you have to manually set them up? Most smart TVs have a Jellyfin channel/app you can install, and failing that there should be some kind of general media server app you can get on them. There's a mobile app for Android (though someone else here says it's pretty trash) and probably for iOS as well. The only device to configure is the server, the app can find a local network server automatically.

To be frank, Apollo is the best Reddit has ever been for me, period. Apollo was the Reddit app for iOS. It was even so ubiquitous that it earned praise from the folks high up in the Apple food chain, and getting directly named in their recent event.

The guy behind the whole project was previously an intern at Apple, and wanted to make something that "felt like it was created by Apple," and damn did he succeed. I spent a pretty penny supporting that project when I had an iPhone, and I continued to throw a little money that way once I finally got away from Apple. I'd have bought it all over again if it ever came to Android. To be clear, the app was free and ad-free with optional paid tiers for extra features or just to support the dev. Absolutely incredible work.

When I came to Android, nothing ever quite replaced Apollo. Not that there's anything wrong with the plentiful other third party apps, Apollo was just... That good, IMO. Sad to hear he won't be pivoting toward supporting an alternative, like Lemmy, but I understand why.

Fun fact: you can silence most gas pump ads by pushing the second-from-the-top button on the right-hand side of the gas pump screen... Not all pumps, and every now and then I encounter one that uses the third button down, but most pumps I've run into can be silenced.

It's unforgivable they've jammed ads into pumps full of disgustingly overpriced gas that you're already paying for...

That's a logo, not a mascot. A logo is a mark that denotes a brand, the apple with the bite taken out for Apple, the footprint for GNOME, the stylized and colorized G for Google...

A mascot is a character that acts as a face and a voice for a brand. The gecko for Geico, Tony the Tiger for Frosted Flakes, Flo for Progressive.

Many brands looking to keep a serious, "sophisticated" brand aesthetic eschew mascots in favor of simple logos. GNOME follows suit with that trend. Nothing wrong with it, in fact I think it works quite well for them. If they were to adopt a mascot now it would be... Strange.

Endeavor is fantastic. For all the time I ran it, I never had any of the issues that people say Arch is riddled with: updates irreparably mucking up your system, packages making a mess of things, the AUR being unstable and dangerous. I've found that most of these claims come from people who are against the way Arch does things and have never actually tried it for any extensive amount of time.

You do need to be mindful of updates being pushed to your system (read the newsletters, they will tell you if anything in the update is broken and how to fix it) and have the technical know-how of how to fix those things when they do happen... And they will happen. That's any rolling release, though.

Personally I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for gaming, it was a breeze to set up and continues to be a breeze to work with. I love every second of it. But EndeavorOS is a very close second for me.