One thing that surprises me is the level of "aha" moments using the additional apps. Gwenview and Okular have so many power-user-friendly shortcuts that are intuitive. Lot's of "Oh that's nice but it would be perfect if..." moments followed by seeing the option in the settings and/or programmable via a shortcut key

Good to know. I will say as a colorblind person, it's always a tad ironic because as a colorblind person, the filters don't make things definitive. It's still a bunch of random colors that I can't identify lol

How's it compare to gitea?

I'm 75% finished with the book myself!

I think the issue is that you are hypothesizing what you think you'd like, while ignoring all the real life examples that show things can go astray. For example, you talk about the benefits of not having a million little kings w/o acknowledging that the one kingmaker can make the head of groceries his inept brother-in-law who pockets half of the funds.

Instead of responding to people why you like totalitarianism, how about you show reference a historical example that was beneficial to a society?

GNOME = iOS where they make decisions for you
KDE = Android where it's completely customizable

Based on my (limited) experience, Gnome is especially well suited for people new to Linux or inundated with too much to worry about customizing a DE.

Personally, my desktop runs KDE and I've spent hours researching/customizing it, while my laptop which is a glorified web browser, runs GNOME

Did not know about this. Care to elaborate?

Yeah. If they want to keep the structure as is, they should score the results to make the compatibility levels more obvious

404 for me too

I'm still using public instances for now. I started w/ Piped but the buffer speed was lacking for most of the instances I used. Switched to Invidious and the buffer speed as amazing, albeit a lot more error messages that Google is blocking an instance temporariliy

16 upvotes shows most people just upvoted the header lol

My intro to Linux was Google. Their chromebooks allow you to install Linux and I've played around w/ Debian. I never took it serious in terms of a viable alternative to Windows, but it was a great way to supplement the barebones ChromeOS over the last 4-5 years.

My desktop was from yesteryear (i7-2600) but could still get most jobs done outside of heavy gaming/local LLM, but I was not going to be able to upgrade to 11 which sucked since the desktop seemed perfectly functional. My plan was to ride out the Windows long-term support until 2028 and then buy a dirt cheap refurb desktop then.

On a separate track, about 3 months ago, I started my foray into front-end alternatives. I canceled YouTube Premium and started using Piped via redirector (redirects webpages to websites of your choosing) and then I found out about libredirect, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and across multiple popular services including twitter, reddit, imgur, etc.

Initially I occasionally used the reddit/twitter alternatives, but as they became clearer bad actors, it became my defacto options. This nudged me to kbin and privacy-focused subreddits where Linux was not the red-headed stepchild.

The hype/reviews around Debian 12 made me curious to try the full desktop environment, so I decided to dual boot my desktop. I bricked it, bought a new W11-capable desktop and dual boot that with Debian 12.

Now, Linux my daily driver, and only use Windows 11 for workflows that are not optimized for Linux yet. The most surprising thing is the level of customization on things that I never thought about before. It can be overwhelming initially, but I'm finding the sweet spot over time.