It’s not just about the inconvenience though. Windows is paid. It’s at least 100 bucks. It’s not even “free but you are the product” like Google drive or whatever. Yet it still abuses you, controls you and exploits you, and you have to do tons of workarounds for it to not get in your way. Most of them are always temporary, as a new update reenables everything again or directly circumvents the workaround you used.

If you are locked into the ecosystem, then I do agree that it’s annoying that people think moving to Linux is seamless. It wasn’t for me, it even cost me money since I had to buy an AMD gpu for things to work well + another GPU to passthrough to a windows VM and still use Clip Studio. But if someone only uses their computer for things that can be done seamlessly on Linux, and they genuinely dislike and are against all the bullshit Windows always does, it’s worth it to tell them there is a viable alternative, and what they heard about “you have to use the command line for everything meaningful!” or “everything breaks all the time!” hasn’t been true for years.

If you hate being used by Windows so much, you really should try an alternative, unless you’re a professional that uses software that just can’t run on Linux at all, chances are you can get most of what you use a computer for working fine. In return you get freedom, privacy, choice, performance.

Or if you hate it but are too reluctant to change for whatever reason, that’s totally fine, but just say that. Don’t spread misinformation about Linux.

It’s worth it to be FOSS to take three weeks to get your Arch install just the way you like it.

Literally no one ever says this. Just use Fedora. Almost completely seamless. There’s a KDE version if you want to have the same workflow as windows without configuring anything. You don’t have to use firefox, brave or ungoogled chromium are FOSS too.

How stable is Testing for daily use by the way?

Debian is 100% community run, it cannot “have tentacles” in it. There is no leader that takes the choices that can be influenced.

It wouldn’t be for backing up, just for the storage to last longer if one drive fails.

Thank you, that makes sense.

Yeah I’ll always do backups. When I have the money I probably will buy another drive and try to do RAID1 on the two, just to be sure. But I do want them to last as much as possible.

How do you typically recover things on zfs vs btrfs? Also, is the out-of-tree kernel modules thing something you have to deal with or take into account?

Hey, thanks for the help. Can you elaborate on what kind of issues BTRFS gave you? What caused them, too?

I don’t mind needing to be technical or having to read to do things right. I probably wont really do much fancy things, I just don’t want the filesystems dying on me out of nowhere. If they’re stable enough for that, that’s enough for me. Thanks for the help

Thanks for the help. Both of my drives are SSDs, the boot drive is M2 and the storage is SATA. I’ve heard filesystems that support compression would be better for their health and lifespan as they’d have to write less. But yes, no matter what, I will keep constant backups. Snapshots would be appreciated, but since I’ll run Debian I don’t think they’d be that necessary, if to have them there’s a lot of problems to deal with in exchange.

I don’t plan on installing Windows at all. The only thing I’d do in my boot drive is have a separate home partition, I won’t really do anything else though. Did the corruption you experience happened just on its own? Or was it something you did?

I think it’s dishonest to paint that incident as “plenty of drama”. It was a decision most of the community agreed to and those who didn’t made a fork. I don’t think anyone did anything wrong in that. Compare it to Canonical forcing it’s official flavors to break flatpaks and appimages. I think the severity is very different.

Okay I did some research and I was wrong. There is no confirmation Intel specifically removed the IME from NSA’s PCs. It’s just that some reverse engineers found a flag that supposedly disables it, and their theory is that it was meant for the NSA.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Eureka-The-Intel-Management-Engine-can-finally-be-disabled-thanks-to-the-NSA.245922.0.html

I believe this is the switch System76 and Purism turn off, but as I said, since the blob is still there, we can’t be sure that switch actually works or if it’s just a trap.

Coreboot doesn’t disable the IME by the way. It just gets rid of some of it’s functionality blobs and sends a signal to it telling it to please disable itself. No one knows if that signal actually works. Only Intel themselves can actually fully remove it from a processor, like they did with the processors they sold to the NSA.

That’s the thing with 100% community backed distros. There’s never any drama, there’s never any controversial decisions, the most you’ll hear of is some leader figure being replaced or not treating others well. Honestly it’s what Linux should be in the first place.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, it makes sense. Thank you for the nice explanation.

Thank you!

I mean, in my eyes Canonical is already evil. SUSE is pretty nice right now, but like I said, them being nice is nothing but a luxury. There’s no guarantee it wont happen, and you could probably argue it’s fated to happen eventually.

Any tips for when I do switch, by the way?