Ubuntu 8.10 in early 2009, after Windows Vista otherwise bricked my laptop. I’ve distro-hopped on a few occasions but most of my 16 years of Linux have been on Ubuntu. That said, I moved away from Ubuntu after a failed upgrade to 22.04 LTS, to OpenSUSE and then to KDE Neon, now I’m on Nobara and couldn’t be happier.

You should be able to add the LibreWolf repository on Ubuntu, if they don’t have an Ubuntu one the Debian one should work. It’s how I got it on a Fedora based distro (using the Fedora repo).

My local team (the Minnesota Twins) is using Twins.TV as their primary platform this year after the Diamond Sports cable debacle. No blackouts! Though that also means I’ll probably be able to watch directly on my TV, so I’ll likely be doing that for most games, which will be one less reason to keep Firefox around.

Mull development has been abandoned. You might want to switch to IronFox, the community’s fork to continue its legacy.

I keep Firefox around only for those very few sites I encounter, such as MLB.TV and my student loan servicer’s site, that will rarely if ever function properly in privacy respecting browsers. But 90+ percent of my browsing is done on LibreWolf.

It has a repo you can add to F-Droid. I forgot I added the separate repo.

• KDE Connect
• IronFox: fork/successor to the defunct Mull browser
• OSMAnd~
• AntennaPod
• Transistor: for internet radio
• Any music app, they’re all good; I’m currently using Symphony
• Jerboa: for Lemmy

Only S/V battle I lost was the Eri boss battle in the fighting type Team Star base, which took several tries due to a similar assumption of level scaling. Didn’t lose a single battle in Sword/Shield or Legends Arceus. Hardest Switch game for me was BDSP, just from needing two tries at the Elite Four due to the difficulty spike, and I barely beat them on the second try.

Overall, in a general difficulty sense I think the most “challenging” core game I played was Ultra Sun. The totem pokemon provided a few surprises that made me have to resort to a few “plan B” options during battle, even if I didn’t lose to any of them, and trainers sometimes actually showed a modicum of intelligence. I was also at around opponent level or even underleveled throughout the game.

I personally vastly prefer mutable distros for my own system, but I understand the appeal for those who like them. As long as mutable distros remain an option I don’t mind immutable distros.

Mint or Pop_OS are likely the most widely recommended distros I know of for beginners. I haven’t tried either of them myself, but from what I hear about them I’m inclined to agree. Personally I would NOT recommend a rolling release distro to beginners. Too much potential to break things way too easily and way too often, which would likely require digging into the terminal to fix. Terminal-averse beginners wouldn’t be served well by that at all.

Even given that, I’d still think there would be an uptick in Linux market share, but only a small one. Certainly no “year of the Linux desktop” levels.

I definitely do the Firefox to LibreWolf (and also install Brave as a backup). I also replace the default video player with Haruna and VLC (but default to Haruna). I change music players all the time so I just replace the default with whatever I feel like using at the time. In the past I’ve replaced Thunderbird with KMail, but on my latest install I left Thunderbird alone since I like having available RAM.

I don’t remember if I went with the official or the pure KDE version. Either one should work. You can always try both out in a live USB before installing. The gaming focus refers to some modifications made to some drivers/software for the purpose of improving gaming performance. When you update your software you have to use Nobara’s update program in order to ensure that those mods are applied and preserved.

That’s a thing with Neon. It’s the “testing ground” for new KDE releases so they won’t guarantee stability. It literally is just Ubuntu LTS with a KDE repo thrown on top, and the Neon devs themselves only maintain that repo, with just a short delay after the new Ubuntu LTS release comes out. In Neon, the users are the quality control for KDE releases. I was using it for a little over a year until the rebase to Ubintu 24.04 broke my install. I went to Nobara, a gaming focused distro based on Fedora that uses a custom version of KDE as the default. I just upgraded to the newest version not realizing it wasn’t official yet, and it must have been the smoothest major version upgrade I’ve ever had in a non-rolling distro. It’s maintained by GloriousEggroll, who also builds/maintains the customized GE versions of Proton on Steam. I’m finding it’s not just a good gaming distro but a solid and stable distro overall. GloriousEggroll puts a lot of work into ensuring that on top of the Proton work he does. If you don’t want the gaming performance customizations he makes, try Fedora KDE spin, it’s likely to be pretty similar and I rarely ever hear someone have a problem with Fedora.

On your other question, next time you reinstall you can create a separate Home partition on your drive that should allow you to do what you’re looking for. So you have your boot and swap partitions and the one you install your distro to, and then your home partition, so you just install the new distro over the old distro and it should leave your home partition alone.

Combination of software availability and the perception that Linux is only for developers/servers and you have to be a computer genius to use it. Even if you can convince someone that just running Linux isn’t rocket science, there’s still commonly used software like the Adobe suite and MS Office that just don’t have feature-parity level alternatives, even if those alternatives are almost there. I can do most of the stuff I used to do at work on LibreOffice compared to MS Office, but not everything. And while compatibility with the MS Office file types has really improved leaps and bounds over time, there’s still some noticeable issues when opening those documents with one program after making changes with the other. People mention Photoshop a lot as a deal-breaker, but especially with GIMP 3.0 coming, GIMP will be a lot closer to Photoshop than most Linux PDF editors are to Acrobat. The only one I can find that has even close to Acrobat’s features is Master PDF Editor, a piece of paid software (if you want all those features without an annoying watermark) that I don’t think the free version of is in many repos. People say to use LibreOffice Draw, but that’s drawing software meant for entirely different file types and is really not good for any PDF with any type of formatting in it because Draw isn’t designed to handle it. I don’t need those features on my own home PC, so I’ve been running Linux on my personal machines since 2009, but for those who do need those things, it might be a hard sell.

I’ve used GNOME in the past but currently use KDE Plasma. Both are good, but as for recommendations most Linux people I know of say for new users that if you’re coming from Windows start with Plasma and if you’re coming from Mac OS start with GNOME since those are the closer desktops to what you used before and will make things a bit easier. Depending on the distro you choose you may also have access to other desktops like Cinnamon, which I haven’t used but have heard is even easier than Plasma for new users coming from Windows. It’s not ready for daily use yet, but the upcoming Cosmic desktop may also be quite good for that.

I used Sabayon for a bit too. It was basically “Gentoo made easy” with a simpler installer and as you said a binarypackage manager rather than compiling packages from source. It’s wasn’t 100% completely dead after dropping the Sabayon branding, it morphed into Mocaccino Linux, but when they did so they re-based it on Funtoo, which is also now dead.

Ditto here. NewPipe + VPN works fine on my tablet I use as a YouTube machine. The only problems have been when YT messes with stuff to try to block them, and then NewPipe will have it fixed usually within a day. And that doesn’t happen as often as people think.

Armarouge is the last non-legendary/paradox I need to finish the Paldea dex. Hopefully I can get a team around me that’s actually strong enough to beat it in a raid one of these times.

Every browser’s marketing will say they’re “privacy focused”. Only Brave, LibreWolf and Mullvad really mean it.