Nah, that would just make me a dick.

At one time I did, and to my surprise, my friend did just that! Unlocked their phone and handed it to me without a word. Welp.

I tried arguing against this, but it’s no use. I tried pointing out how something can be branded illegal retroactively, like 20 years down the line, I tried the “give me your credit card info” approach, nothing took. 90% of the time the counter-argument is usually something to the effect of “big companies know everything about me anyway”, which is just guessing on their part.

I’m just going to take care of my own privacy, because I’m clearly in the minority (present company excluded, of course). Almost everyone I know disregards online privacy completely, so I’m done trying to get a dialogue going with these people; it’s every man for himself. The only way online privacy will become a hot topic among laymen is when something nasty happens and at that point, it will have been too late.

Greek Brain Drain incoming.

Ah. I… honestly hadn’t noticed. Apologies, OP. Removing previous comment.

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I don’t know about reproducible builds, but Telegram has a slew of other problems. For example, they advertise that your messages are “heavily encrypted”, but this feature is restricted to secret chats which is NOT the default method of communication and they use their own weird-ass algorhythm called ProtoMT instead of one of many existing algorhythms which have been audited and verified. Not to mention you need to give them your phone number to use the app.

I’m not sure which distro would work with your laptop. I would suggest experimenting with live USB images. Maybe using something like Ventoy which enables you to try out multiple live images from one USB stick. But as far as applications go:

• GIMP is native to Linux and should work fine. You might also want to give Krita and Inkscape a whirl. Also, massive props for ditching Adobe. I hate that company as much as it hates their customers.
• Blender works on linux.
• So does Davinci. Allegedly. Haven’t used it, but their website says Linux support is available.
• I don’t code so, um, no idea. Sorry. Hopefully someone else will weigh in.
• Good news, Linux has working file explorers!
• No ads, at least for the most part. Ubuntu had Amazon’s search integrated into their search bar a while back, which caused quite a kerfuffle. Later, they added a toggle to turn this off, but this was years ago. Might want to check just in case.

For similar reasons to your own, I tried a few different Discord frontends a while back so I could chat with one of my friends who lives abroad. I never found a winner. They either wouldn’t connect or would be missing tons of features (for example: one of them only let you watch the chat, not participate in it). I also seem to remember reading somewhere that Discord is pretty aggressive when it comes to third party apps. It’s their app or nothing. You might have better luck than I did, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

And as others have mentioned, if you’re looking for privacy, Discord ain’t it. Sorry I couldn’t give you a more helpful response.

Accurate. Bewilderment and confusion is how most users seem to react to Microsoft products. Especially true after Microsoft pushes out a big update.

That’s a good one. True enough, Splatoon doesn’t go boom, it goes splat.

Nope, that goes boom, too.

Okay, then riddle me this: which shooter DOESN’T go boom?

Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up.

NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.

Oh, I’m liking this take. Get ready for “Z Shooters” and “Alpha Shooters”.

Get off my lawn and leave me to my prune juice.

It does roll off the tongue nicely, I have to admit.

It wasn’t? This is what Wikipedia says:

“OK boomer” or “okay boomer” is a catchphrase and internet meme that has been used by members of the Millennial generation and Generation Z (born between the early 1980s and the early 2010s) to dismiss or mock attitudes typically associated with baby boomers – people born in the two decades following World War II.

Who was it targeted at then?

Hey, at least it’s shining.

I would love to see that take place, so sign me up for the Church of the Boomest Shooter. My only real concern is where do we go from boomest?