Brilliant.

This is like somebody asking you what you want for breakfast, and you say “Food”.

Manipulated, you say? With propaganda?

Well, clearly this is a bridge too far! The Trump administration can never get away with this!

I love this, because it’s exactly the opposite of the received “wisdom” you’d get from many corners of the Internet. As long as you aren’t mucking around the internals of a Linux install, it’s going to be stable, and it will be adequate for common computing tasks. Arguably, even better than adequate.

Well, if they want to intimidate everybody who says anything anti-Trump…they’re going to be very busy. What I’m worried about are leaders of movements.

You don’t know what either of those words mean, do you.

It’s funny how they’re saying “You need to use Linux” and not “You need to get off Facebook”. How’s Linux going to save you from Facebook spying on you?

If you think this is new, you’re very naive. They just have better tools to spy on you now.

Yeah, the government and corporations would never spy on us. What a ridiculous idea!

Mandrake! It was a fucking disaster! Fortunately, I came back later using Kubuntu and had a much better experience.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

Package managers. Linux had this before Windows. Granted, Linux needed package managers, because of the myriad and complex dependency trees that software can have. I prefer to install software through a package manager because it not only takes care of dependencies for me, it will take care of updates, too. I will only install something downloaded from a website as an absolute last resort. (And then, of course, making sure it’s a trustworthy source.)

How does digital security work on Linux?

It’s rather complex, but you probably won’t have to deal with it unless you have to do some kind of systems administration. On a day-to-day basis, the OS might ask you to enter your password to install software or make an update, and that’s the extent of it.

Basically, every file has 3 categories of permissions: user, group, and others, and each category has 3 permissions: read, write, and execute. This is transparently handled by the system for you, though, and I can’t even remember the last time I had to change permissions on a file. It’s a good thing to be aware of if you have to do troubleshooting, though.

Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?

Just the opposite. Vulnerabilities get spotted sooner because there’s more eyes on the code, and they’re often patched quicker because anybody can submit a patch to an open-source project.

Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

I’ve never heard of any distro shipping with antivirus software, but I’ve also never heard of a Linux virus. Of course, I’m sure they exist, but I’ve just never heard of one. I’ve been using Linux for over two decades, and I’ve never used an antivirus or gotten a virus in all that time, and I’ve never even heard of a Linux user getting a virus. Part of that is due to Linux being more secure and part of that is due to Linux being less popular. If you’re writing a virus, you aren’t going to try to jump through the insane hoops of Linux security when you could target Windows which is A) less secure and B) has a fuckton more users.

Obviously, use common sense, don’t install from untrusted sources, etc. etc., but viruses aren’t the omnipresent threat on Linux like they are on Windows.

I’ve never had those issues with KDE. I use Garuda dr460nized and Mokka. Both are based on Arch and use KDE.

That’s like saying

“Nazism is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil.”

or

“The Transatlantic slave trade is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil.”

What are you talking about? Systems are created by people; they don’t just pop into existence.

Where did you get this laptop from? Did you buy it new or used?

The reason why I ask is because it sounds like you have hardware issues.

Yeah, this was my first thought: test your hardware.

if it truly were a perfect reign I wouldn’t mind at all

You wouldn’t care about somebody else having total control over you?

I’m sorry Biden/Harris didn’t sweep us off our feet,

My sister in Satan…they enabled a genocide.

but we deserve this.

You do. I don’t.

100% of XHTML will work in HTML5.

I remember when XHTML was supposed to replace HTML. Everything was going to be standardized and web designers would run their HTML code against a validator…it was going to be glorious! And of course it never happened, because demanding that all websites conform to the XHTML standard would’ve broken a lot of websites.

So, HTML5 ate XHTML’s lunch because it was much more forgiving, and…oh yeah, you could watch videos and play games in it, too.

It has been for several years now. I rarely use Google now, and when I do, I’m using it out of DuckDuckGo (!g)

A child’s face says a lot. Especially the mouth part of the face.