Probably because they’re incapable of maintaining a distribution: https://manjarno.pages.dev/

Manjaro is not Arch based. They use pacman, but they use their own repositories. They create a ton of issues that way.

Reminder that the license was changed to a “custom” non-free license.

I, a Linux user, agree that there is work to be done, but I disagree with the “this needs to change first” on proprietary software availability. Specifically the “first” bit.

Let me explain why: The problem of software availability is a chicken and egg problem. No users on an OS = no developers make stuff for it = no users because there is no software.

With Wine/Proton, Valve “fixed” this issue for gamers. This “opened the floodgates”, and at least in one group of computer users, made Linux viable as a daily driver. People who play video games are diverse, and have different needs for software outside gaming, so this change grew the userbase of every category of software in Linux, not just games.

With an actual userbase comes both a community of people, who are all potential contributors for FOSS, whether that’s programming, docs, or reporting issues. And a marketshare for businesses to target (and profit off of).

The ball has clearly started rolling, Linux is gaining marketshare at a pace it hasn’t seen before. The bigger the userbase gets, the more software will work overall. The more software, the more people who can switch.

There isn’t a single definable point where software availability suddenly makes a userbase appear, these two grow together.

So yes, there is work to be done, but no, it doesn’t “need to change first”.

A lot of people find out after using Linux that it’s perfect for their daily tasks. A lot of other people never bother, and thus never find out. With Windows 10 EOL coming up, and MS pushing more and more onto users (like recall and copilot), a portion of people forced to switch will look for alternatives, or will try out Linux because they’ve heard of it as an alternative.

As for your other arguments:

too much different distros not always compatible one with another

Which used to be true, but is significantly better than even a couple years ago. “Standardized” packaging like Flatpak makes a ton of software available on all distros, ensuring compatibility. Valve took a shot at this too with Steam Linux Runtime, but this hasn’t seen any use outside Steam.

depending on the distro also often an deficient support and maintance,

For the vast majority of distros, no. Though I agree that we (the community as a whole) should stop accepting terrible resources for finding Linux distros (like “top 10 distros” lists that make no sense to a new user) and push for better ones.

certain driver problems, among others.

Which is being solved too. “driver problems” is exclusively Nvidia, but the issues are (very slowly) being fixed (by nvidia), and distros are offering easy options for getting the Nvidia drivers. Nouveau/NVK is also on the slow cooker, but I trust it’ll come out great. “Among others” is not a valid reason.

Not good if an still minority OS is above to diversified, which cause a lot of problems for the devs of software.

Which fits into the point of Flatpaks for proprietary software, and highlights where FOSS truly shines. Flatpaks standardize the runtime, proprietary software only needs to support this one standard to support all distros. FOSS devs can target whatever they want for their project. If “works on my machine” is good enough for them, so be it. (People will always complain about stuff like this though). If a distro wants to officially provide some open source software to its users, it has to be packaged. With the packaging process for a distro, modifications might need to be made, which can often be contributed back to upstream.

To dethrone Windows as leader of the market does it still need a lot of work in many environments.

It’s a lot closer than you think. It’s already a viable daily driver for many. The biggest blocker is the fact that MS is a global megacorp, with advertising, OEM “support”, and a lot of money to “persuade” people and companies to use Windows.

OEM support also ties into the whole “choosing a distro”. I trust that even the worst OEMs choose at least a supported distro, which takes all pressure away from the user. When Linux marketshare grows enough for OEMs to provide the option, the least technical users going to a brick and mortar store will be presented with “100$ cheaper, but looks different than your current computer”. If Windows UI keeps being as inconsistent as it currently is, it would have similar impact for non-technical users going between Windows N and N+1 as it does going to Linux.

I have used Waydroid, mainly with FOSS apps, and although it has some rough edges, it does often work for just having one or two Android apps functionality.

Linux on mobile as a whole isn’t daily driver ready yet in my opinion. I’ve only tried pmOS on a OP6, but that seems to be a leading project on a well-supported phone (compared to the rest).

1. The main fundamental differences are the package manager, the way the system is setup (partitons, immutable distros), and possibly software you don’t want installed. Aside from that, you can install basically anything on any distro. Some do make it easier than others to install new things though.
2. Canonical (Ubuntu and direct spinoffs) and Manjaro are the ones I recommend avoiding, because their marketing and “general sentiment” goes against my opinions of the distros/maintainers. However, switching Linux distros (especially to another one with a similar base) is not nearly as daunting of a task as switching from Windows to Linux. Some corporate distro owners might pull something like advertising, but there’s often an easy way out (except with snaps).
3. As for the distros you mentioned, Fedora, Mint, and Pop!_OS are all good options. Mint and Pop!_OS are both based on Ubuntu, which could cause issues in the future, but Mint is working on a Linux Mint Debian Edition. Aside from that, my general recommendation is to stay close to upstream. Distros further downstream tend to break more often (think spinoffs of Ubuntu, Arch derivatives, forks of Fedora, etc). There are exceptions to this rule, like when a distro stays close to upstream.
4. In recent times, it should all be working okay! We’re “in the middle of a long time switch” from X11 to Wayland. Those are protocols for the way applications display to the screen. X11 is lacking features, like HDR, and can have issues with “weird” multimonitor setups. Wayland is being actively developed, multimonitor works fine, and HDR is available for some desktop environments (like KDE or GNOME). Not all distros default (or support) Wayland yet, so if you need HDR, pick a distro with KDE or GNOME as its desktop environment.
5. This situation has gotten more complex with Wayland (one of the pain points still being worked on). The features you get partially depend on which DE (or wayland compositor) you choose. Previously on X11, this wasn’t the case. For Wayland DEs, KDE is moving relatively fast, with new features nearly every release. GNOME is moving slower, but should cover most people’s needs. As for tinkering around with your choice of UI/DE, there’s many options available, but KDE offers by far the easiest customization possible (it’s all in the settings menu). There’s more complex, more customizable options available, but I wouldn’t recommend them as a starting point.
6. As for nvidia, it has been progressively getting better, but there are still nvidia specific issues that come up from time to time. There’s not really much you can do about it, aside from following changelogs and updating when the thing you’re running into is fixed.

Now for your list of applications:

• Gaming (through steam) works great! There’s definitely still issues, but I’d argue there’s not really more issues than on Windows, just different issues. There is one category of games that’s still problematic, games with kernel level anticheat. They do not and likely will never play on Linux. Other launchers (EA Play, Ubisoft Connect, Epic) can have their own issues, although there’s often fixes/workarounds available rather quickly.
• Firefox works just fine on Linux.
• VLC works great too, although there are other options available that are more modern or better in some ways. It’s up to you to decide what to use.
• Spotify works just fine, there’s always the website in case nothing else works, but the “app” as a flatpak or even through repos works too.
• Discord has some issues accepting that Linux exists, but have recently started making some changes with that. Most people either use Disocrd in the webbrowser (to prevent too much system access), or run a custom client like Vesktop.
• Godot works great on Linux, I don’t have much else to say about it tbh.
• Visual Studio Code too, it’s basically just a webapp. Some integrations might be slightly different (like the terminal), but otherwise stuff “just works”.
• Git was quite literally made for Linux first (as a project, but also as a platform to run on).
• Photoshop is going to be difficult to get running, if it works at all. You can certainly try, but it might be a good option to find an alternative for this one.
• Audacity works great
• Davinci Resolve does have a Linux version, but the free version can be picky about codecs. There’s always tools to reencode your inputs, but it’s not always convenient drag and drop.
• Misc. tinkering is going to be much more fun, as things in Linux ecosystems are often open source. Not only can you mess around with tools that already exist, you can edit them, or even make your own. Some “niche” hardware might give you issues (like iirc the goxlr, or some capture cards).

Good to note this example is from 2022-08-30. Despite its “reputation” among some, Arch doesn’t break that often by itself.

Not OP, but modularity. An X11 WM is just a WM. You can choose compositor, bar, shortcut daemon, etc. With Wayland, a single implementation holds most of that, and more. If you need a specific feature from your display server, you are stuck on WMs that support it. This has forced me to use KDE for Wayland on my main workstation, and although it works well, it’s not my prefered WM/workflow.

Alongside that, no clones of several X11 WMs exist. bspwm for example. Riverwm exists, but has major limitations, and the workflow isn’t the same.

The antivirus: Used to be good, decent free (in price) tool if you’re in a situation where you need one. Otherwise, Windows Defender is good enough for your needs. (And just don’t install goofy ahh apps on Android, you also don’t need one there).

The VPN: Same as any other VPN company. Chances are you don’t need one, and all of them are based fully on trust. “Least bad” VPN award goes to Mullvad.

NordVPN (and their entire service stack) is not trustworthy at all.

The extra y just forces a database update. The mechanism to detect when not to update the database is a simple timestamp compare, and shouldn’t break. archlinux-keyring might need a “manual” update if an Arch Linux system is left without updates for a longer period of time. That’s the only situation doing pacman -Sy, then pacman -S archlinux-keyring is recommended, and it needs to be followed with pacman -Syu to avoid a partial upgrade.

https://ntfy.sh/

Easily set up, and easily attached to other things. Simple notifications about whatever is needed, like service health or updates, new posts on public platforms, etc. A simple curl is plenty to send and receive notifications, and it works on Android without requiring FCM (Google infrastructure).

I use mautrix/discord, it can work in both puppeting (sign into your account) mode and relay (bot account with webhooks) mode.

1. A puppeting (personal account) Discord bridge basically requires your own homeserver. You are trusting the homeserver owner / bridge host fully with your Discord account.
2. It is technically against Discord ToS. While I don’t think anyone’s been banned yet, several people have started receiving warnings that they “spammed”, most of them after sending an attachment. These warnings are on your account for 2 years, and could contribute to an account ban.
3. Voice chat is not, and probably will not be supported.
4. Do NOT bridge a “large” server. You are essentially re-hosting the chats, which can be extremely taxing for large and active Discord servers.

I use mine for a single channel in a “medium-size” server (~2k people), a friend group server, DMs, and a few channels that follow a bunch of announcement channels on other servers.

““compromised device”” in this scenario is any device with a chat app installed, push notifications on, and the chat service uses Cloudflare CDN. This is a very common setup, Discord and Signal were mentioned as examples. Many others are vulnerable for the same thing. With read receipts on the chat platform (like Signal), no push notifications are required.

The headline is sensationalist, but it isn’t something to be ignored. Especially for more privacy focused platforms like Signal, even leaking the country someone is in can be considered a risk. That’s effectively what this attack allows.

If you notice things are missing, feel free to contribute to OpenStreetMap. For example, by using StreetComplete. If you add the map details that are missing, it makes the map more useful for everyone.

virt-manager only requires access to the libvirtd socket, as long as the flatpak.has that as default configuration (which I imagine would be the case), there’s zero difference beteween flatpak and native.

Sorry, posted that on mobile without checking that it’s not the mobile link.

There’s a legal precedent that cookie stuffing is considered wire fraud

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