Don’t let Lemmy mislead you into thinking Linux is a drop-in replacement or easy to switch to. It’s a difficult process that takes learning, but hopefully you’ll find it worthwhile. Good luck with your troubleshooting.

I agree with your comment…except for the part about a small learning curve. The learning curve is steep and difficult. You’ve got to be willing to jump in as an enthusiast and not a casual user. This is not the choice for the vast majority of normies (as you rightly conclude). The saving grace for Linux will be pre-installed systems with extremely polished UI’s (like the Steam Deck).

I’m highly motivated to stay on Linux, but there’s still a list of open issues for me (this is a year and a half after adoption…I’m just living with these limitations now, and there are a couple more I’ve added to my list of unsolvable problems since).

Excellent choice. I did the same last year. I’m still on Tumbleweed.

And this is why Linux is still far from mass adoption. Normie’s will not be able to troubleshoot this stuff right out of the box. If there’s going to be widespread adoption then Linux needs to come pre-installed and set up, and preferably unbreakable (like Steam OS).

You’re going to get a hundred different answers about distros. There are a lot of knowledgeable people who forget what the beginner experience is like.

Mint is universally recommended and well loved. It works well and you can’t go wrong. It uses Cinammon desktop environment and I wanted KDE so I didn’t go for it.

Fredora is also top tier and again you can’t go wrong. This comes in many flavours (including Bazzite which is an immutable Fedora distro pre-set towards gaming, or Nobara).

When you’re wiping your drive anyway and setting up new and fresh, then this is the best time to install different distros and test drive them for a few hours/days. Ultimately this is not a life changing decision; and your choice can always be changed later.

I personally did all this a year ago and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been great and this distro doesn’t get recommended enough. The desktop environment will be your daily use experience. The underlying distro will be your mechanics under the hood. I would suggest you pick something “beginner friendly” unless you really want to take on a steeper learning curve.

Can you handle it? Or do you want the alternative?

Wife approval factor

My wife won’t use it if she can’t see an app for it to click on to start using immediately. Going through browsers is not an option. Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option. Not being able to find something instantly means instant rejection. She refused Plex, but now sometimes uses it and has learnt to find subtitles, etc by herself.

I don’t touch my self hosted apps. If something doesn’t behave properly on the first attempt then it gets rejected from our household. It’s only for us enthusiast nerds to put up with kanky UI and setup issues for the sake of superior functionality. Normie’s won’t tolerate it.

Maybe then it will be the year of Linux.

Where/how do I check or know what impact that has? I think this just further strengthens the point that Lemmy is not welcoming to normal users at all and is just for specialist nerds.

Makes sense once there’s enough of a userbase…but currently there isn’t a huge amount of content of interest on Lemmy and sticking to a local instance just limits this even more. Currently I have to stick to “all” as even areas of subscription can run out of content with a quick scroll session.

I’m pretty techie and I’ve been here for months. I still don’t fully understand why it matters and how a different instance would have changed my experience. The fediverse is so fragmented, it would be dumb to stick to one instance. My app is always set to browse “all”. Everyone commenting seems to be from different instances. I’m certainly not going to start reading about different instances at signup when it presents the fact that you will be able to access all instances anyway. I picked randomly from one of the most popular choices. This whole process of a selection of an instance sounded good to software engineers, and sure this is how the technology fits together…but these are “back end” issues that I (and other normies) don’t care about at all. Users do not want to get into the weeds of how the back end works and it is certainly off putting.

Been with MailBox.org for ages and it’s been absolutely fantastic. Proton had very limited offerings at the time, but even now I haven’t felt the need to move.

I think the most basic email offering is €1/month.

My chart would be even more skewed to the Deck.

The Deck is amazing with young kids around. Desktop gaming sessions are impossible until after their bedtime. Being able to pickup and play and put the console to standby in an instant and move to another room with the kids is amazing. I wouldn’t get any game time if I didn’t have a portability.

It really helps that I almost exclusively play Indies which the Deck is really perfect for.

RIP Apex on Linux

Understandable, but it’s a significant diifculty in migrating fully to Linux when PDFs are used everywhere and there are solutions that work well on Windows. This is one of the few things I will get my wife’s Windows laptop for.

OpenSUSE doesn’t get recommended enough. Great distro I’ve settled with permanently after trying all the popular ones.

I’ve been through a lot of options trying to get the same functionality you mentioned. I’ve never found a single app that works particularly well. I’m surprised the state of PDF apps is so poor in Linux. Others have mentioned a bunch of apps and each fails in some major way. I’ll come back and check this comment section later for new suggestions for my own sake too.

People here are mostly nice compared to mainstream platforms.

Try disagreeing with the hive mind. Anyone can be nice to someone who echo’s their own opinion. The real niceness of a person is revealed when they can show civility to people they disagree with (I’m not talking about LGBTQ oppressors or Nazis…there’s a huge spectrum of opinions that aren’t extreme).

I think this is good advice.

NAS is not a product for normies, so there doesn’t seem to be huge demand on the secondhand market. So that works out better for buyers and you can usually pick up a pretty great deal secondhand.

I think you’d just have to buy another Synology with more bays.

I guess not