I’m sorry to hear about your child’s condition. Hope they can find a cure for it soon, wish you all the best.

Sir this is the nerd zone, and here you are complaining that there’s nerds in the nerd zone talking about nerd things.

I convinced many of average Joes and Marys to switch without issue, never have I had to bother tell them what a wayland or X11 is, I just put Linux Mint on their laptops, give them a few practical tips (stuff like “use the app store instead of scouring websites for your software”), things just work and they happily go do whatever they do with their PC.

Which distro?

Whichever one you prefer.

I don’t have the Windows issues you all tell me I have

Cool, /c/windows is over here you might probably enjoy it more than this place.

Yeah just erase files

Just FYI, or rather FTI, the arch wiki can still be a useful tool for non-arch distro. Debian also has a wiki.

They need to understand there are differences between arch and Mint, of course, and also some between Debian and Mint to an extent, but those tools can still provide helpful info.

Fedora, specifically the DE you are using.

I normally go with Mint as a recommendation but generally speaking you must understand these people will ask you for help for any small issue, so it will be a lot easier if you use the system yourself.

Now, I use Arch^BTW with KDE, and I would never recommend arch to a new user (KDE is a good choice tho), meaning I normally recommend Mint (from experience I know noobs love it), so I am in this awkward situation where I have to provide tech support to mint users usually (tho TBF so far only 1 person and the real issue is that his laptop is dying but he hasn’t come to terms with it) and it is sometimes annoying because I don’t know the settings layout and all that stupid GUI shit (I love using the CLI a lot if you couldn’t tell)

Make her install Gentoo in her own and make sure to berate her at every step /s

Personally I would go with something that has KDE so she gets fancy animations and stuff, but Mint is a perfectly valid choice too (cinnamon also has some cool stuff to toy around with but not as much imo). Just make sure to show her how to install stuff, and put adblockers and shit in the browser. Also highly recommend installing some of the linux games.

Tech worker and enthusiast vs slopper

you don’t have to memorize the commands, just use tldr command and apropos to your advantage.

Everything will seem difficult when you’re not used to it and are changing habit, it’s not just a GUI to CLI thing.

Pardon my ignorance but what does P&CI stand for?

Edit: nvm got it I think it’s Point & Click Interface

Just cause you opt out of those features doesn’t mean the car doesn’t have other mandatory shit that connects to the internet to, say, sell data like the exact times and locations of when you have sex.

Inb4 “but I don’t have to worry about it cause I don’t have sex” we know, but that’s not the only thing they gather data on.

Both of my statements are correct. Cars shouldn’t have internet and there should be less cars. In total absence of offline cars (meaning no used cars, nothing at all), use bikes and public transportation if you can.

I mean you literally asked for an alternative and I gave you one.

Public transit/bikes are (or should be) a good alternative if you can’t find normal, used, dumb cars anymore

And this is another reason why putting internet on cars is a bad idea

Besides, the real command is rm -fr ~

Use an easy to use immutable distro like Fedora silverblue

Tbf not letting the average windows user turn off windows defender is a good idea

1. There’s data-sharing agreements with more than just the N eyes countries
2. If there’s an international warrant for that data the company is obliged to comply regardless

The only countries in which n° 2 doesn’t apply for the US are countries you really don’t want your data in either.

In short, however: if a government really wants your data it will find a way to get it no matter where you store that data, so the best thing is to simply not store that data at all, Mullvad and Signal don’t do that.

I mean maybe but you could also just say “we did some whacky shit here help us fix it please” and let the community help you in the effort. That’s the beauty of open source. Then again they may have their reasons and frankly I’m not even interested in a TikTok like social media so w/e as long as they don’t eat up their word it’s fine.

Jurisdiction is not that important. Even if it was in Switzerland it’d have to comply with international law enforcement and warrants. The key is that sure Signal is obliged to give out whatever data it has, but the point is that it doesn’t have much useful data to give. It’s the same as Mullvad, and a far smarter approach than “lol we just gonna ignore the warrant huhuhu look at us we host somewhere in Shitzerfuck” (oh btw “We are in X country which is not in N eyes” is just marketing).

Oh and btw the same goes for instances of the fediverse (which are ran by volunteers you need to trust), and if they don’t comply and the US government really wants to break into them they probably will find a way. Doesn’t even need some complicated backdoors or anything it just needs to find an OPSEC slip-up, do some social engineering, arrest someone or at worst find a bug to exploit, and I can guarantee that unless you have some serious security wizards running your instance you’re not beating the FBI there and if the FBI is really persistent and focused on you for some reason then the wizards won’t be enough you need state actors.

If your threat model actually includes the US government (aka you’re actually in danger and not some paranoia or just-in-case situation, be realistic with yourself) and there’s credible threats you may be targeted by it or other governments then you’re probably going to be using tor, briar, all that jazz, and wouldn’t be on lemmy. If you’re just some guy who just needs to message your family and shit Signal is perfectly fine, I can tell you that unless you’re a serious threat to the government they won’t waste resources cracking down ways to capture you via signal or whatever you use that is even somewhat secure (so no telegram, no WhatsApp, no messenger, etc), even if you’re a minority or activist, if not because you’re not important enough then because they have other easier ways to do it.

Edit: oh and btw Signal was banned in Ruzzia (a country way more authoritarian than the US currently is) because the FSB couldn’t crack it so that goes to show it is pretty secure.

I mean, Lemmy isn’t exactly a representative sample of the population