On GNOME, I like BlackBox, though Prompt looks promising once it’s stable.

Yeah, MacOS wasn’t originally intended for x86 CPUs.

He’s pretty much the quintessential QA tester. He wants to do things his way, regardless of whether or not the OS wants him to do that. He’s usually skilled enough to fix anything he messes up, but he doesn’t know enough about Linux to do that, so he ends up breaking things. I feel like most people have a better experience than he did, but his technique uncovered a ton of bugs and usability issues that significantly improved the Linux desktop to have fixed.

Tiling addons. I like having a full DE, but I also want tiling, so Pop!_Shell on GNOME and Polonium on KDE are invaluable (and yes, COSMIC looks really promising).

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Thanks, though your correction is also incorrect. Display managers, like SDDM, GDM, or LightDM, are the login screen. They’re called “display managers” for historical reasons, but they also run on top of the display server.

Display servers, not window managers. Window managers are built on top of X11 or Wayland.

Wayland is a “display server,” which basically means it manages the way GUIs show on the screen. X (most recently X11/Xorg) was the standard for over 30 years, but it was designed for computers 30 years ago. Modern concepts like scaling and high refresh rate displays need extensions to it, but it’s really complicated and hard to work with, so a lot of improvements that need to be made can’t be made. It’s also fundamentally insecure, as every window has access to both the contents and the input of any other window. Wayland is a modern replacement that focuses on security and expandability, and basically everything is working on switching to it. There are growing pains, but it’s constantly improving, and most distros use it by default now.

Great answer. People frequently think that Android phones work just like desktops, but they are very different.

Have you installed a custom ROM on it? If not, you definitely don’t have the skills for this. If so, have you built your own ROM for it? If not, do that so you learn how it works in a predictable environment. Then port something existing to it, like UBPorts. Only after you do all of that and probably a lot more should you attempt to effectively develop your own distro on hostile hardware.

VanillaOS and BlendOS also use containers to install apps, just like Fedora Silverblue. In fact, it’s easier to install native packages on Silverblue than it is on VanillaOS. Just set your terminal to start a container by default.

I’ve been using Linux for ten years, and I’ve never done that. It’s not really a part of the Linux experience anymore.

I do not like it, Sam I Am.

Cockpit.

Be extremely careful. Plenty of people are really smart and malicious, so you need to isolate it from everything on your network. You’re giving random people remote code execution on your local network, which is like the worst case scenario for security.

Correct, but new users don’t want to need the command line for something as simple as installing packages.

As well as running on all distros, it also provides other benefits:

• You can run modern software on old/stable distros
• Dependencies being (mostly) included in the package means that different applications can more easily have different versions of dependencies
• Finicky packages are more stable for that same reason
• Distro maintainers don’t need to package as many applications (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/46ZZ6GZ2W3G4OJYX3BIWTAW75H37TVW6/), and application maintainers don’t need to worry about multiple distros and versions of dependencies

However, some applications don’t work as well because of the sandbox, but I think this will change with the rising popularity of Flatpak, as more developers will use portals instead of direct access. Also, there are some bugs and missing features, like how heavy use of the org.freedesktop.Flatpak portal for dbus causes a memory leak (https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/issues/51), but it’s overall pretty good. Most applications I use are Flatpaks.

Do you know what a VPN is?

I’d recommend Fedora, but the suggestion of EndeavorOS is also good.

Dual-boot, and if anything is missing, boot back into Windows to do that while you work on figuring out how to do it on Linux. There might be something to do what you’re asking, but I find it unlikely because Windows and Linux are very different internally.