Here are my "two cents" on the topic.

1. Do your best to try as much FOSS alternatives to your software stack while you're still on Windows. If you do this, then you will know what to expect on Linux in terms of workflow. Linux is much faster than Windows; also it's free from advertising and data-mining... your computer will fly in terms of performance. However, this will be useless if you cannot accomplish your work.

• 1.1. If there is software that you cannot find an alternative for, consider running under Linux a Virtual Machine with Windows; check your computer's hardware - if it's on the higher end, then you will not have any problems with that.

2. Pick a distribution that matches your computing preferences. Some Linux distributions are on the bleeding edge (like Arch), others are on the leading edge (like Fedora and Ubuntu non-LTS), and then you got those on the dinosaur-edge (like Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, openSUSE Leap) who are ment for enterprise deployment and feature ultimate stability with older software packages in their repositories. Personally, I like to be on the leading edge, but with a decent level of stability. I achieve this with Fedora by staying on the previous release and upgrading to the next one 1-2 months before mine reaches end of life. Why? I simply don't have time for bullsh#t, i.e. dealing with bugs, tinkering my system and so on. When I need the latest version of a program, I get it from Flathub.
3. Pick a desktop environment. In my opinion, GNOME and KDE are the best, and you can discard all the other options. That said, XFCE scores great when you run some big data workloads or similar processes, where every bit of RAM matters. Apart from such use cases, idk why anybody would use anything else than GNOME or KDE.
4. Always keep in mind that nothing in this world is perfect, y inclus Linux. When there's something wrong with Linux, don't judge it harshly and remember what this system gives you in terms of efficiency and freedom. Always keep a backup of your important files. Data storage is dirt cheap nowadays.
5. Don't mind salty people and haters inside the Linux community. As in every community, there are those no-life people who are so obsessed with something that they are actively fighting for it and insulting others for whatever they think it's important. No matter what whoever says, your system is yours and you should use it the way it suits your needs.

I use it because I love how the Gecko engine renders web pages. For some reason, Gecko renders fonts way better than the Chromium engine, that is literally bashing my eyes. There's something terribly wrong with the Chromium rendering... and I don't know what it is 😅

That's awesome! I wish more OS-es follow, especially Debian. Having support for an OS that can cover the whole perceived lifecycle of the hardware is something that was once (in the 2000s) the standard. This is something crucial for businesses, but it's also great for home users.

What I expect it to do is to run great out of the box and to be reliable enough. I don't mind some post-install configuration, but for me "tweaking" usually ends on the day of the installation and down the road I simply want to do my daily tasks on the PC without even thinking about the system. What I need is Firefox, LibreOffice, Onlyoffice, Thunderbird, plus running a VirtualBox with Windows 10 there. Playing Steam games is also something I would like, but it's not mandatory for me. When I have time, I usually play some classic titles, that probably don't require latest versions of VGA drivers.

Basically I need something stable and predictable, with optimal font rendering since my work is tied to texts. I'm stressing on this, because back in 2018 when I first tried openSUSE Leap, it had the worst font rendering of Cyrillic fonts across different OS-es (both Linux ones and non-Linux ones) that I have seen in my entire life. Probably it's already fixed, since five years have passed from then... but yeah, back then openSUSE was a real pain for the eyes. The OS I picked up was Linux Mint and I am still using it. For my next install though I want to try something new. I decided to try KDE... never used it before, but hearing a lot of good words about it. I decided to switch away from the Ubuntu base too, so that I add some learning curve to the whole experiment. And after some research, I figured out that I might probably make a choice between Debian and openSUSE.

BTW, if you have the time, can you please share your views on openSUSE (Leap) vs Debian? I'm divided between these two for my next Linux install.

Ublock Origin Dark Reader Proton Pass Zotero Betterfox UserJS

Here's a great and beginner-friendly article on the topic of secure (and private) messaging and why Matrix currently doesn't fit there: https://proton.me/blog/whatsapp-alternatives

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This 🎯💯

Tidal Music. Was on Spotify before that.

After being on Spotify for some years, I switched to Tidal.

Ubuntu... before Canonical nuked it.