I wouldn’t call it a mess. There’s a reason it’s not standard. It’s because Linux is about having choices. Linux users have such a variety of use cases and there are a zillion different kinds of hardware it runs on. There’s no one thing that works for everyone.

I think this flexibility is a big part of what makes Linux special but also what makes it difficult for newcomers. The documentation on all the various software is typically very good to excellent. The harder part is figuring out which choice to make in the first place.

I don’t really have any answers except to take it all in and be more willing to do some research than some other platforms may require.

System-wide DoH is sort of a power user thing to begin with so other platforms will likely be similar. I think you would probably be using some kind of app to do it on Windows or Mac.

By the way, you might want to take a look at stubby for your situation. I did something similar a few weeks back and that’s what I used. It’s runs a little local DNS proxy that forwards requests to your upstream servers. Then you would set your DNS server to 127.0.0.1 in NetworkManager or whatever you’re using. You have to change like 3 lines in the default stubby config a typical distro may provide to make it work.

VSCodium, emacs, vim/neovim, helix.

Helix is pretty slick, but it’s not very extensible. Very easy to use and if the out of the box features are good enough for you then it’s a fine IDE.

Neovim is my preference unless I’m working with Jupyter notebooks, in which case I switch to vscodium. It’s a pain in the ass to set up. I took the easy way out with LazyVim. It’s fast to work with and I can use it for almost everything.

I dabbled with emacs many years ago. It’s like vim but completely different. You can make it do anything. Personally, I don’t care for the keyboard shortcuts. It’s probably easier to pick up than vim, but all the key chords and sequences are too much for me. In any case, anyone willing to look at vim should also take a look at emacs.

VSCodium is accessible and extensible. You can’t go wrong with this one. It can’t refactor like the Jetbrains stuff, but if there’s anything else it can’t do then I don’t know what it is. It’s a great IDE.

Really, any of these can do just about any job and do it very well. There’s no choice that clearly stands above the others. It really comes down to personal preference.

Where are all the maglev trains in non-capitalist countries? Sooner or later, in any system, someone has to do a cost benefit analysis and decide whether it’s worth it. It’s not just about profitability. There are plenty of situations in the US where something is unprofitable but still funded because the benefit is worth it.

I’ve used Tumbleweed in the past, I use Aeon (OpenSUSE MicroOS) now, and I was a longtime Arch user before this. I will take Arch over Tumbleweed every time. The repositories, AUR and docs are just better. OpenSUSE’s OpenQA and OBS are cool, but, in my opinion, don’t offer enough value over Arch. There’s also YaST, which I don’t care for, but YMMV.

With Aeon, the repositories aren’t really an issue because it’s a different workflow with distrobox. I just pull in Arch packages if I need to. The docs still leave something to be desired, but I’ve been using Linux since the late 90’s so I’m pretty comfortable. I really like transactional updates and immutability on Aeon.

It’s awful and it feels like it has gotten worse. FSD is the second worst purchase I have ever made, a hot tub being the first. We bought our Tesla and my wife loves it so we will have it for a while. The motors and batteries are excellent with Tesla, but everything else is mediocre at best. Without a doubt, it will be the last one we own if I have my way. Elon is a con man.

Wait, what? How does that work? I haven’t seen much of the game except trailers.

Oh man. Me too. The player market and pvp were the best. I loved how there were battles to actually control territory. There were places you just couldn’t go unless you were covert. That game should have gotten so much more love back then.

Nice. I have that one on my wishlist. I’m not ready to start a new game so it’s on the back burner until the Steam sale.

I would second this. I’ve used Endeavour and it’s nice, but it doesn’t have much of a purpose. It’s an easy installer with some default packages. Once it’s installed, it’s 100% Arch but with a different name and you don’t know how some things work because they were automatically configured for you. Might as well use the real thing. The archinstall script is easy and you only have to do it once.

You will get the same version of Plasma and probably older versions of some other packages you use. With 5.27 being the last significant update until Plasma 6, you’re good on that for a while. Nothing will be newer than what you already have. None of your packages will get any updates beyond bug fixes and security updates, but it will be rock solid.

Kubuntu is also reliable and has newer packages. Personally, I don’t think there’s much to gain here unless you’re set on something that doesn’t have snap and don’t mind running older versions of most packages.

I do too. Mastodon is great software, but I’ve never been much of a user of the micro blogging format. The Reddit/hacker news format has been my preference for many years.

No. Sites and communities come and go. Before Reddit, I was on slashdot and would occasionally use others like kuro5hin, fark, etc. Reddit had a lot more going on and was much better for comments when it came along. Then it got huge and only the small subs were any good for a sense of community or discussion. For a long time, it’s mostly been good for doom scrolling outside of some niche hobby subs. If anything, it’s kinda nice that some people are motivated to try other things like lemmy and kbin.

Same here. I bought a Tesla in 2019 and was foolish enough to pay for FSD. At the time, they were saying it would be available by the end of the year. They finally rolled out a “beta” a few months ago and it’s terrible. That’s after they had me on this bullshit robo-nanny software monitoring my driving.

The motors, battery, and charging infrastructure are great, but I would never buy another thing from Tesla as long as Elon Musk is involved with the company. He is a reprehensible troll and a dishonest businessman.

Something along these lines seems more realistic to me. There will always be a place for easy, safe walled garden experiences with a low barrier to entry. In the fediverse, that could be a very large, curated instance where a broad group could find what they want without having to figure out how to subscribe to federated communities. Similar to how so many people were introduced to the internet via Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, etc.