This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.

So, a bookmarks list basically.

Prediction: you’ll never actually read most of what ends up on this to-read list.

Blah blah blah. Unencrypted data is the wrong default in 2025 for any OS. Linux should not be a poor man’s OS.

This is a case where Windows-bashing is hypocritical. Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).

It’s dumb and inexcusable IMO. Whatever the out-of-touch techies around here seem to think, normies do not have lumbering desktop computers any more. They have have mobile devices - at best laptops, mostly not even that.

If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.

Yep. Pathetic and embarrassing.

to open PDFs

mupdf

for selecting the text and stuff

This is what is slowing things down.

This is the only answer you need to read. It’s a non-problem if you just do this, and there’s no reason not to do it.

Bro doesn’t need DE to watch videos. Bro doesn’t need DE to do anything.

Most laptops will be more or less fully compatible

If by “most” you mean only the ones over 500 bucks. Chromebooks have almost completely taken over the bottom end of the market (which is more than adequate if you’re not gaming) and Chromebooks are not compatible with Linux unless you enjoy getting your hands very dirty.

Desktop environment? Who needs a desktop environment?

The government does not “own” Meta. Words have meanings.

Immutable distros like NixOS don’t stop you from tweaking stuff, they just record every tweak centrally, so that you can undo them and do rollbacks.

Others can confirm that I’ve got that right. Haven’t tried it but the idea sounds great.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Well said. And I think there’s more. In the Anglosphere and the USA in particular, government and state are often conflated, but they really are two different things. The former is the cockpit, the latter is the airplane.

Things are different in European cultures. In Latin languages, for example, the government is understood to be the body of politicians in control right now, whereas the state is a sort of expression of the people’s will and therefore has much wider legitimacy. Two very different things. I believe it’s similar in German.

I sometimes wonder if this semantic quirk has exacerbated the general skepticism of English-speakers towards collective action.

I was waiting for this! Debian is great. I used it for years. But IMO it’s not polished enough for normies. The website is fugly and the onboarding funnel assumes too much knowledge. The installer, last time I tried it, was glitchy and unintuitive. I think that techies underestimate how offputting even ostensibly minor issues like this will be to ordinary users. Also, Debian has a ton of unmaintained packages (altho I gather that something is being done about this). Debian is fundamentally amateur in the best and unfortunately worst senses. I think a Linux flagship distro needs to be more pro and systematically thought out. For that, it’s always going to help to have a big company or organization behind it.

Exactly. But I would go further. I think Linux needs flagship distros with big solid institutions behind them, and it needs us to support those distros by using them. I know this is not an popular opinion here.

I see those flagship distros precisely as Fedora and Ubuntu.

Well then you haven’t been following it closely. As someone else said, the reason is simple: the Snap version is more recent (like it or not) and in Ubuntu apt is configured to take into account Snap packages.

Exactly. Enough with the inane conspiracism.

Because not everyone wants to spend their time babysitting an OS and Ubuntu has a 20-year track record of dependability.