Well it’s open-source now! Good for them. If you want more examples, you have a bunch of the self-hosted stuff (particularly Immich and Nextcloud, there’s plenty of great Jellyfin clients, loads of neat Navidrome/Subsonic clients, etc), LibreOffice/OnlyOffice (depending on whether you want separate office apps or integrated), you’ve got the Linux desktop environments (GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.), etc.

Fortunately, there are plenty of foss projects with nice and intuitive UIs! (Okular, the PDF reader, Lutris, Firefox and its derivatives, Thunderbird, all the various Material You Android apps like Breezy Weather and AntennaPod, all the various SwiftUI Apple apps that are open-source like mLem and NetNewsWire, the bazillion apps that use libadwaita, all the Qt-based apps that fit really well with KDE Plasma, but work well in other DEs, Prism Launcher is nice to use, super easy to install Fabric mods, i could go on…)

I believe that the world would be better if more things were named after cute animals

Personally, I’m using Debian in my little laptop server thing and it runs pretty great. There’s a bunch of help, guides, tutorials, etc. online about Debian (and lots for Ubuntu, most of which will work on Debian) meaning it was really easy for me to get set up!

I think a decent alternative would be to use yt-dlp to download the songs you listen/watch on loop most often, then use a basic video editor to cut out the start and end bits you don’t want. Plus, that means you can listen/watch to them offline using your preferred video player of choice! This, however, isn’t as good if you’re the kind of person who likes listening to new songs, and it won’t count how many times you’ve played each song.

Will do that.

If you create your own server you can add whatever image you want as custom emoji/sticker. Someone probably uploaded an image of Tux as a custom emoji for their community

The “Linux” emoji, as the other person said, is likely from a different community (“server”)

Discord pays for their own infrastructure, so their “Nitro” subscription pays for additional features, which off the top of my head include:

• larger attachment sizes
• higher video quality when screen sharing in a call
• higher audio quality in calls
• using custom emojis and stickers from other “servers” (they aren’t actual self hosted servers, that’s just the name of discord communities, they have a collection of text+voice channels that you can talk in)
• built in themes with discord client

Yep Fedora is great, it’s what I run too. I’m going with that then.

I feel like just getting Fedora KDE would be fine. Maybe I will try Bazzite first and see if the atomic-ness is too limiting.

Fedora it is then

fair enough

Actually, he isn’t coming from Windows. He only has an iPad, I think this is his first PC

The Bazzite docs really recommend against rpm-ostree, saying it could break stuff and such

He will be doing some gaming (mostly single player stuff, like Minecraft) and will also be doing your normal everyday stuff (schoolwork, internet things, and probably a bit of programming since he is doing CS)

I guess I will install Fedora for him then. What’s wrong with the atomic distros?

I heard that Linux Mint doesn’t play nice with newer hardware? Or is that only an Nvidia thing

Because he heard that Windows 11 is very stinky, and Windows 10 is no longer supported.

You are able to install a new desktop environment (or “DE”), I used to use Fedora Workstation, which is GNOME, and I was able to install KDE and had the option of switch to it from the login screen. Technically, you are able to run with two, or more, DEs at once and switch between them on restart, which is fun, but the downside is that there are extra default apps from each DE (e.g. file managers, media viewers) which can make things confusing, and if you want to replace a DE, like I did when I switched to KDE, I was advised to be a bit careful to install the new DE before uninstalling the old one, as otherwise I would be stuck with no DE at all. You don’t want to pull a Linus and accidentally uninstall your desktop environment and blame Linux for your troubles!

Generally, it’s better to just install a distro with your preferred DE (Fedora Workstation for vanilla GNOME, Ubuntu for their flavour of GNOME, Fedora KDE/Kubuntu/Bazzite for KDE, Mint for Cinnamon, etc. Some distros like Debian and EndeavourOS let you pick whatever DE you want on install which is nice) and learn to get comfortable with using Linux and hopefully the “scary” terminal (it’s not scary at all, it’s just another tool in the toolbox!)