Using it since many years on many Pixels and loving it.

Main pros: zero bloat, efficient, highly secure and highly private (about as private and secure as it can get on any smartphone), and it’s an Android without any of Android’s typical weaknesses (privacy issues, bloat, etc.). You get to utilize the advantages of Google (its security) and completely avoid the disadvantages (its many privacy issues). You get to use all the advantages of an Android mobile OS while completely avoiding all of its disadvantages. It’s like getting your cake and eating it too. You’re much better off in terms of security and privacy than almost(?) all other smartphone users. According to leaked documents, Cellebrite for example can’t crack GrapheneOS on Pixels at all. They can crack almost any other smartphone if they have physical access to it. Most smartphones are really easy for them to crack. iPhones may pose some trouble depending on model/OS. And Graphene on Pixel is the literal brick wall. And even on top of that it has tons of great security features, like auto-reboot after X hours of inactivity, charge-only-mode for USB-C when locked, distress/duress PIN entry to immediately wipe the phone, many things like that. On the privacy side it’s looking great as well: Some folks have analyzed Graphene’s network traffic and there’s zero privacy issues from the OS or its built-in apps. And the few connections it does make (for updates and so on) are all documented and work exactly like they documented them, and they only transmit the exact least amount of necessary data without anything beyond that (guess what - that’s super rare). And on top of that there’s even more great privacy features, some of which are invisible but well thought-out, for example any SUPL request goes through a Graphene proxy server first (configurable) which strips all personally-identifiable data from the request and then redirects it to your provider’s SUPL server (which is most likely Google’s SUPL server in the end). I’m seriously impressed by the quality of the GrapheneOS project. Maybe you don’t realize how good and rare such things are nowadays. Also the documentation is very good and actually answers most of your questions and doesn’t contain any marketing blurb. The social media feeds and forums are a great source of info as well. On top of all that it’s even easy to install GrapheneOS.

Main cons: it’s only available on Google Pixel phones, so if you truly despise Google and don’t want to buy or use anything from them, it’s not the right device/OS for you (or maybe buy it used?). However, the reason GrapheneOS is on Pixel is purely a technical one: Pixels do offer very high hardware based security already (probably the most, although iPhones have good hardware-based security as well. As is known, Apple tends to be produce good quality hardware, not quite so good software) as well as a very high degree of “platform neutrality”, i.e. it’s supported by Google to flash a different OS on it or use more advanced tools like adb without any sort of tinkering or unnecessary danger involved. Also you don’t have to register to unlock your phone or anything, you only need to be online once to enable the OEM unlocking feature (I think this is because Google needs your IMEI to check whether the phone is carrier-locked (cannot ever be OEM unlocked) or can be unlocked, and they will immediately receive some device data including the IMEI as soon as you go online with the preinstalled Android OS once [of course they will receive some more device data than just the IMEI]), so it’s best to not insert your SIM yet (and not do anything with the preinstalled OS) before you’ve installed GrapheneOS on your new Pixel. Do the OEM unlocking step on WiFi only, best on a public WiFi so Google has much less of a chance to identify you based on your IP or related data. Then install Graphene, then insert your SIM and start using your new phone. Other cons exist but they’re rare or pretty much irrelevant in daily use. If you have to hear them, read an older post by me about some potential downsides: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/19867254/12069767

You shouldn’t have to sign into any account just to use your operating system. This is wrong regardless of OS. It’s wrong and bad on iOS and proprietary Androids, and it’s wrong and bad on Windows. Also, it wasn’t even a thing on Windows before Win8. Don’t just blindly accept such enshittification. It would be tolerable if it would be opt-in and purely optional, but MS is pretty much enforcing this crap upon their users, and that’s more than a red line being crossed. That’s simply hostility towards their users.

MS noticed that people do this willingly on iOS/proprietary Android and thought hey if we do this on Windows we can harvest even more data from the logged-in users and we have a confirmation of identity and also always get their current IP address and more device data.

To better sell this to the average user, they offer some minor benefits such as settings synchronization across devices, for which they also harvest your settings data, obviously (and even more they’re not telling you directly). Either way, the only real reason they want this is to know who uses their OS, to control access (they could disable your account) and to harvest even more data from the logged-in users. With local user accounts, as it should be, this would not be possible.

Online accounts make sense for online services, not for your OS which should work independently from online services.

Either use a Linux distro (desktop/notebook/server/mobile) or an open-source Android distro such as GrapheneOS, DivestOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS, LineageOS (mobile).

It depends. It’s viable if you just need a phone with several open source applications (non-Android) and are fine with that. But if you need Android app compatibility it’s probably going to be harder or more inconvenient to do, though I haven’t checked the status in recent time. And then there’s this evil thing called Google Play Integrity (essentially DRM restricting which apps can run on which OS) which is a problem even for non-proprietary Androids, so you probably won’t have any chance if you’re dependent on such an app (thankfully it’s rare but as we all know stupid ideas tend to become annoyingly popular).

Main problem, as usual, is that Android and iOS have become such big and popular “platforms” for mobile apps that establishing a “third” platform for app developers is basically impossible (also remember what happened to Windows Phone OS, they were late to the market and failed spectacularly to catch up. Of course in this case it’s open source so it can grow regardless of user numbers, but still, it’s hard to catch up when lots of great Android apps were already developed specifically for Android). So you can only hope that Android app compatibility grows mature enough to be close to 100% compatible, so that you can also run almost all Android apps on your mainline Linux mobile OS. Then you’re not “limited” anymore. (At least if you consider it “limited” when you can’t run Android apps. Which most probably consider to be “limited”).

So I think it’s less about the hardware and OS/UI (I think they work fine these days) and more about the available apps.

[My main daily driver phone is a GrapheneOS (Android) and I have a Pinephone with Linux for playing around in WiFi at home only]

Use Matrix or any good messenger like Signal or Threema for daily communication with friends.

If you want to see a good table of messenger recommendations, see https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html

E-Mail is not a suitable replacement because it lacks end-to-end encryption (unless you and your friends use PGP or S/MIME for that but since that’s rare and slightly too complicated for the common user to use, I’ll just assume that you don’t). While mails are usually encrypted during transport, they lie in plain text format at their destination servers. Depending on which e-mail host you or your friends use, that means the whole content of your e-mail might be scanned and analyzed automatically. Especially if you or your friends use privacy-disrespecting mail hosts like any big commercial one or Gmail or Outlook or what have you. Then your communication via unencrypted mail to or from that person isn’t private.

Deep Rock Galactic

Before Phantom Liberty / 2.0: average game. Overpromised and underdelivered. Good at first but getting boring fast.

After Phantom Liberty / 2.0: very good game overall, fixes most old problems. PL by itself one of the best DLCs ever made, sad that such high quality was necessary to save the base game. It’s like the game was meant to be from the start.

Still not on W3’s level overall though, but if you can get it at reduced price it’s a really good experience now. Start PL before the meeting at Embers. After PL, resume that main quest.

Just FYI I installed the apk from the github repo (not the google play version) via Obtainium a few days ago and it tried to make a connection to 2 cloudflare IPs during setup of my account. Without prior consent or any mention. So just be aware that there is still some form of telemetry or unwanted connections happening, even though they removed the telemetry flowing to Mozilla’s own telemetry endpoint. K-9 had zero of this, it just spoke with your mail servers and that was it. So be careful and block outgoing app connections by default. I did not analyze the data being sent, just that there were those 2 unwanted connectiins happening.

Don’t use Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive (all privacy nightmares). Instead:

• Self-host https://nextcloud.com/ (this is the gold standard of self-hosting a secure and private cloud storage, you just need your own server with the disk space you need. Open source)
• P2P and/or self-host https://syncthing.net/ (this will automatically sync files in shared folders between several devices. Best if you have one device which is online all the time. Will use the space on your own devices. Open source)
• Storage on a trustworthy 3rd party host: https://proton.me/drive (this is the most similar to Onedrive/etc. where you sync your stuff to their servers, so you don’t need to host anything, but contrary to anything from Google/MS/Dropbox, this is at least a reputable and secure/private host which doesn’t abuse or sell your data. Data is encrypted by default. Also open source)

Furthermore, accessing Onedrive from Linux might be painfully inconvenient because there’s no official proprietary client for it by MS. There are 3rd party clients but I’m not sure how good they are, also MS could at any point change their API or even block unofficial clients, rendering your unofficial client useless at least for a time period.

It’s not the game everyone hoped to be but it’s very good when including the expansion Phantom Liberty. You should give that one a try. It’s probably the best expansion CDPR has made so far, or at least on par with W3 Blood & Wine (I’m still not sure, but I have to give credit for their huge effort with Phantom Liberty). It (alongside the 2.x patches) was CDPRs genuine effort to save the game and their reputation, and I think they succeeded. The base game without the expansion can get very boring in the second half of the game which is why I consider PL to be mandatory. A good time to start Phantom Liberty is just before going to Embers to meet Hanako. If you haven’t played it for a long time, you should play it again with PL, it’s really well made.

Generally, the one is right who builds his argument on verifiable facts coming from trustworthy sources, or at least tries to as best as possible. There are police statistics about crime rates. In Germany for example, crime is actually going down. It’s very likely that Harris is right and Trump is not. This is usually the case, without even looking at anything specific. Trump lies and does baseless/unverifiable claims about pretty much anything, all the time. His followers then think he’s somehow right because he’s anti-establishment or they think that it’s all a giant conspiracy and Trump is the only one who knows the truth, again without any kind of verifiable facts behind it. This can then spiral into pure fact-free lunacy or high fantasy thinking, or cult-like thinking.

That crime is going down, is of course a fact that doesn’t fit at all into the right-wing world view or rhetoric of blaming and demonizing immigrants. So they usually then claim that those facts come from untrustworthy sources or are generally fake news or whatever, again without any verifiable evidence. Because they don’t want facts but easy solutions to complex problems, like minorities to blame for whatever problems they currently believe in. If they radicalize themselves enough, and this can happen fast on today’s internet within their own echo chambers, they might become so far removed that they become lunatic and/or violent, and then they become dangerous. Fascism is very similar to a cult.

I don’t think this will help much, even if the outcome is what most think it will be. There are already lots of radicalized people within the right-wing fascist bubble who will not believe anything that scientists, doctors, journalists, intellectuals, or people from a different political spectrum say. They only believe what their own bubble and their own media/leaders say. They are unfortunately already so far removed from any sort of objective fact-based reality that re-education will take a long time (maybe for the rest of their lives) and will not happen in time for the current elections in USA. Also, their rhetoric has already become quite 1930s Nazi-like. They are already using various dehumanizing or demonizing terms for their perceived “enemies”, like vermin or low-lifes. It will probably become worse over time, and since the rhetoric is already bad, it’s likely that violence will be the next step for them.

Probably because Google is actively and frequently banning many Piped or Invidious hosts, and is generally currently at war with “alternative frontends” to YouTube in an effort to make users browse YouTube directly and consume ads there, or buy YouTube Premium. This is in line with their current fight for more ad revenues across their products and services. You probably have to either search for another public instance which isn’t banned (yet) from accessing YouTube, or host your own instance.

Well it should be, because anyone who votes for Trump is voting to regress the country into an eventually authoritarian, fascist regime. It shouldn’t be a close race. It should be the majority voting to prevent that.

I’ll do a (simplified) Windows analogy, if you’re already familiar with Windows.

Microsoft Windows is closed-source/proprietary, which means only Microsoft has the source code for it, and only Microsoft is legally allowed to create or distribute copies of Windows. “Windows 11” for example is a “distribution” of Windows containing the “Windows NT kernel” (core of the OS) alongside other important software to make the OS usable, like a boot loader, service layer, graphical interface, desktop environment, and lots of included “system” applications like a file explorer, a web browser, apps to adjust settings, apps to display menus and task bars, and so on.

“Linux” by itself is just the kernel, the core of the OS. Which is by itself not a “usable” operating system yet, just like holding a CPU in your hand doesn’t allow you to use it yet. More components are needed for that. Since Linux is open source and under a permissive license, anyone (even you) can go ahead and create an operating system made with the Linux kernel. If you do that, this is called a distribution or “distro” of Linux. Since there’s not just one company allowed to do that, many distributions exist. They all made their own operating system on top of the Linux kernel. Even though hundreds of distros exist, only a handful of them are actually popular, stable, secure and recommended for general use. They all use similar, but sometimes different software to include in the distribution. Like the Linux kernel, most of that software is open source so it can also be modified or extended.

Since “Linux distribution” is rather long to write, people often just write “Linux” but mean the whole distribution, not just the kernel. These are just common inaccuracies in communication, but what the person meant should be obvious from the context.

Common and recommendable Linux distributions (= full, usable operating systems) include: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch, Debian. These are full operating systems and they all include the Linux kernel at their core. Of course, the similarities go further than that. Most distros are similar enough that if you’ve learned one, you can also use any other with little additional things to learn. However, some distros are deliberately a bit more different or tailored to more specific users or use-cases, for example Arch targets more experienced Linux users because it’s a very minimalistic distro, it expects the user to know which packages he wants to install. It pre-installs almost nothing. You can think of this like “Windows Server Core” where it just boots into a minimalistic terminal by default, no usable GUI yet, but you can of course install the desktop environment and everything if you need it and make a full-featured desktop out of it. The distro just doesn’t want to preinstall anything which you later might not like, which is why it gives you the choice, but that makes it a minimalistic distro and it’s harder for beginners to use that way. Other distros like Mint are much more similar to the client editions of MS Windows in that they preinstall everything the user needs for a desktop OS and more, so that the user can boot into and use the desktop as quickly and easily as possible.

And then there are even more special-purpose distributions like Kali Linux which includes things like penetration testing tools (i.e. “hacker tools”), which makes it a distribution for IT security people, so they can boot into it and have access to most needed tools right away without installing much else (also good on a bootable USB stick). But usually, in general threads like this one, people don’t talk about specific-use distros, but about generalist distros which you can install and use as a regular desktop OS.

Desktop environments also exist on Windows but there’s basically only one, made by Microsoft. In the Linux world there are several to choose from. The most common ones are: KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE. These desktop environments contain window managers or compositors, task bars or panels, menus, various tools like file managers, process viewers and text editors, and various background programs. This is all needed for the user to have what is commonly known as “a desktop environment”, because if you didn’t have one, you’d be basically staring at a screen containing at most a cursor and a wallpaper, with no way for you to interact with anything. Of course, these can look and feel different from each other (just like Windows looks and feels different than MacOS), and they have different features and strengths and weaknesses, but their goal is always the same. And as usual in the open source world, there’s not just one project but multiple, and out of those multiple a couple are popular, viable and stable enough so that they are usually included in most Linux distributions. Which is why most distros also give the user the choice to have a specific variant of the distribution with a specific desktop preinstalled. For example, Ubuntu also has Kubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled KDE Plasma) or Xubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled XFCE). These can have various names but in the end it’s just the base distribution (“Ubuntu”) with a different preinstalled “face” so to say (and you can change those faces or desktops from within the same distro, of course). Most other things are exactly the same between those distribution variants.

As a new user, you don’t need to learn about everything. Just pick an easy to use generalist desktop distro like Linux Mint and use the default desktop environment or variant which they provide or recommend by default. You can start experimenting with more choices later on if you want, but you also don’t need to. If you have something you’re comfortable using, then you can just stick with that.

Won’t be like that much longer. Windows continues to become worse, Linux (desktop) is on a steep upwards trend. I’ve been using desktop Linux since 1998 and desktop Linux has always been at or around 1% market share, for 15-20 years it was just flat basically, which tells the story that only geeks and nerds used it, which is the story that everyone’s familiar with.

But these days? It’s approaching 5%, and most of that climb was just in the recent 5 years. That’s insane. At the same time, Windows continues regressing from about 95% market share in 2009 or so to something like 70% these days. And this tells the story that people are growing increasingly fed up with Windows (and rightfully so).

In all other areas, Linux is already the dominant OS. It dominates servers, supercomputers, mobiles and embedded systems. Since Microsoft doesn’t appear to get their sh!t together, it’ll soon dominate the desktop as well.

Default recommendation for new ex-Windows users is to use Linux Mint, it’s very simple and includes most things you need. Mint also has great documentation and community resources (forums, etc.), especially for beginners. It’s also based upon the most popular distro, which is Ubuntu. So there’s a high degree of Ubuntu compatibility, which is a plus.

After the distribution choice, there’s the desktop environment choice. Here, I’d recommend either the default one from Mint, which is called Cinnamon (use this if you don’t have a preference), or KDE Plasma as an alternative. Both are very similar to Windows, but more powerful in terms of customization and features. (Well, of course anything on Linux is very customizable already due to the open source nature, but these 2 already offer a lot of GUI customization options without any tinkering). It’s not recommended for a beginner to switch desktop environments, you can do that later on when you’re more comfortable with Linux. If you’re curious about the other desktop choices, try them out in a VM or separate system. At the beginning, always use the preinstalled desktop environment.

Only slight downside of Mint is that it still ships with X11 by default, which is the older graphical subsystem as the foundation of each desktop environment. Wayland is the new one [actually it’s just a set of protocols which the compositor implements, but that doesn’t matter here]. Many distros already use Wayland, but it’s still experimental on Mint. For many users, this will not make a difference in practice, which is good, but Wayland is more advanced and has more advanced features which will never land in X11, and also higher security. If you have any non-standard needs regarding things like HDR, adaptive VRR, different per-monitor refresh rates, no tearing, per-monitor scaling, good touch support, and other “advanced” things like that, chances are you’re better off with Wayland. Most users probably don’t need to care that much though.

Anyway, should you need a Wayland-based distro alternative, or generally a second distribution recommendation, I’d say Fedora. It’s also rather easy distro, maybe not as easy as Mint is, but also very user friendly and more ahead of the curve in comparison to Mint (newer kernel, newer packages, more frequent updates).

Most users will be fine using Mint as their first distro, though. Mint will also soon be updated to Wayland as well, it’s just a matter of time. Be sure to keep your system updated.

Gaming is actually easy on Linux but since most games are specifically written for Windows and the Windows stack (DirectX, etc.) and also primarily tested on Windows and many game devs don’t test on Linux, there are sometimes things that might not work out of the box or you might need to try different options or compatibility tool versions (e.g. experimental version of Proton, or GE-Proton, or things like that). But Valve and lots of other individuals are constantly improving the situation and fixing compatibility issues should any come up. Compatibility is generally super high these days (like around 90%) so most users will not have any problems, especially not if they are playing any kind of recent or popular games where there’s a lot of focus to get them to run well, but some specific things or titles still might not work. For example some unethical game studios (most notably Epic Games, Bungie, EA, Riot) utilize integrated anti-cheat tools in their games (most notably Fortnite, Valorant, LoL, Destiny 2, Battlefield) which deliberately block all Linux users, even though the games would technically run on Linux as well. You can and should check protondb.com for general Linux compatibility reports of a Steam game, and areweanticheatyet.com for Linux compatibility of games which include anti-cheat components. If you’re not sure, check both sites. An anti-cheat component often only exists for the multiplayer part of a game, not for the single-player part. Most single-player games do not have or need any anti-cheat components. Generally, do not install games on an NTFS partition or re-use your Windows-based NTFS partition for games. This can and will cause problems. Always install your games on Linux partitions like ext4, btrfs or xfs.

If you use dual-boot (Linux being installed on another partition alongside Windows), be sure to disable the “fast startup” option in Windows (somewhere in the power management settings). And if you have an issue of the clock being wrong after you boot the other OS, then you maybe want to configure Linux to write the time back into the hardware clock in your local time format, which is what Windows expects to find there. But you can also reconfigure Windows to write its time back in UTC format (registry setting), which might be the format Linux expects to read from the hardware clock. Not sure what Mint does by default. I’d say only look into this if you have problems of the clock being wrong after you boot from Windows to Linux or from Linux to Windows. If the clock is always right, then you don’t need to reconfigure anything. Just keep in mind that Windows by default writes back its time in local format, Linux in UTC format.

If you want to install additional software: If you come from Windows, you might be familiar with visiting websites of software then downloading a setup.exe/msi from there. That’s NOT how you install software on Linux. On Linux, you first look if there’s a package available for your distribution (use the preinstalled programs/tools for that). The primary place for this is your distro’s package repositories. Then you might check Flathub (the default Flatpak (distribution independent) package repository). You will find most software there already. If you don’t find it there, check any Mint community repositories. Afterwards, check if there’s an AppImage available (those are basically one file which contains all files needed for the program, no installation). If you still don’t find anything, ask on a Mint forum. You usually DO NOT install a software from its source code form or any installer/setup scripts, especially not as a beginner. This is an easy way to make it either too complicated or to break your system. Always try to find existing packages for your distro first (use the preinstalled programs/tools for that), then try the distro independent Flatpaks, then AppImages. You should find everything you need like that. When you think of installing software on Linux, think of how you’d install software on Android or iOS, you use an “App Store” or install an existing package (similar to .apk / .ipa) directly. Any other method is NOT recommended for a beginner. On Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, software package files have the .deb extension.

Experience with relatives who had no prior experience with Windows or Linux: installing Linux for them was great, painless and also facilitates troubleshooting for me. No problems here. Mostly using Linux Mint for those purposes, it’s a great distro for non-techy people.

Experience with relatives with prior Windows experience (but no Linux experience): a mixed bag. Some use Linux happily now (thankfully), some returned to Windows because they couldn’t change their habits or have weird specific incompatibility issues with niche hardware which they also don’t want to solve in a different way. I’ve kind of stopped giving support to those, since I don’t want to give Windows support in my free time. I sometimes have to do it work-related, that’s more than enough Windows contact for me. I also refuse to give buying advice on any products by Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon or Google, with only very few exceptions (e.g. Pixel phones, because they’re very secure and with GrapheneOS installed they’re the best general mobile phone option). It’s a bit of an ethical dilemma because I’d like to help the people but also don’t want to directly or indirectly support those companies. I always offer them help if they use Linux or the things I recommend.

Flameshot is great, I use it every day at work and home. The integrated editing/annoation/drawing functions are superb.