Not necessarily. Both have their drawbacks. It takes longer for new hardware to be supported on Debian and setting up a Nvidia grafics card is more complicated

Distro: short for distribution. Linux is not an operating system. It’s a piece of technology (specifically something called a kernel) you can use to create an OS. Those Linux based OSs are referred to as distros. We are usually not calling them “Versions” because the Linux Kernel is also frequently seeing updates and that would just cause confusion.

Debian and Ubuntu: Popular distros. Ubuntu tends to be a bit more user friendly than Debian and was the default recommendation for new user for a long time. In recent years its popularity among enthusiasts declined because of a series of unpopular decisions, mainly the adaptation of something called snaps which is not completely open source and takes a bit more time to launch apps than alternatives. Debian on the other hand really values stability. Updates arrive less frequently than on other distros but undergo really rigorose testing.

You are right. I’ve corrected my comment

There’s also qobuz for your more mainstream music needs. And you can always use a YouTube downloaded like yt-dlp together with a music tagging tool like MusicBrainz Picard.

I could be completely wrong, but the fact, that you stated, that Telegram doesn’t receive messages without the tray icon leads me to believe that they are doing background services wrong. Because the status icon in the tray is supposed to be exactly that. The service itself shouldn’t be tied to that.

Is the new UI broken or are app developers just not implementing it into their apps or what’s wrong with the current situaltion?

Both, kinda. The new UI relies afaik on xdg-portals to get which apps are running in the background. Therefore only flatpaks should show up; but they should show up automatically, without any tweaks by the devs.

Also the UI only displays that an app is running in the background. It can’t communicate any type of status information.

I stand corrected

The Linux support of Snapdragon SOCs for desktops and laptops is unfortunately severely lacking. Qualcomm pledged to provide upstream divers, but then the Windows drivers turned out to be a mess and the Linux version had to wait. It is nowhere near production ready. Most of the hardware enablement work is currently as far as I can tell being done by German OEM Tuxedo Computers because they are working on a Snapdragon powered laptop that ships with Linux. But even their work was impacted by Qualcomm stalling (the linked blog article lists Christmas 2024 as their target release date and that didn’t happen).

There used to be a Kodi/XMBC skin for that but development on that seems to have been abandoned years ago.

Depending on your use case Kodi might be a better fit for your HTPC as it tightly integrates with Jellyfin and also has a Spotify plugin. And some skins work generally the way the xmb used to work - they just look very different

Linux is the third option. As far as many normies are concerned the second option is macOS

One thing to make your girlfriend’s transition easier: you can reconfigure the UI to be more similar to more recent versions of MS office. The first time you open it, there will be a popup that brings you directly to the relevant settings menu. It’s not one to one but the major options are going to be in similar places after you changed the UI.

Would you have been able to create your specific use case on Windows? Because most people don’t try “getting mulvard out of the VM”. That’s the type of thing that’s in my experience usually (I don’t know about this case specifically - that’s why I’m asking) a lot easier on Linux than on Windows (not that it’s easy)

Bazzite:

• Fedora based, so newer libraries
• Atomic updates, therefore doesn’t break on updates
• Steam and Lutris are preinstalled

All the open source alternatives also work on windows. You could try them on your current OS and make the switch to Linux once you’re confident you’ve found a workflow that works for you.

Lightroom: Darktable Photoshop: Gimp (version 3 just released) or Krita Illustrator: Inkscape

One note though: The Windows versions tend to be a bit of an afterthought. Performance can therefore be not as good as the Linux version.

I hate to be the one to break it to you but AIs aren’t actually people. Companies claiming that they are “this close to AGI” doesn’t make it true.

The human brain is an exception to copyright law. Outsourcing your thinking to a machine that doesn’t actually think makes this something different and therefore should be treated differently.

Since you are already familiar with the Steam Deck, I would go with a distro (that’s Linux-speak for version) that uses KDE Plasma, as that’s the desktop environment used by Steam OS. My recommendation therefore is Bazzite or Aurora. Both OSs are developed by the same team using the same core technology. Bazzite is more “gamer focused” (a.k.a. they are pre-installing steam) while Aurora targets more of a developer audience. But I would argue that the differences are, at the end of the day, mainly cosmetic. Aurora is still pretty noob friendly and you could still develop on Bazzite.

Both systems are “Atomic” which basically means that a system update can’t screw up your system. And if you screw something up, then you can “rebase” the system which reinstalls the OS but keeps all your data and installed apps*. It uses flatpak with flathub as its appstore so you have the same apps available as on the Steam Deck.

Now for the downsides: Some apps are a bit harder to install. Mainly apps that need deeper system access such as vpn apps can take a couple more steps to install here than on other distros. There is also no live system. Many distros have a “live mode” where you can test the system before installing. This allows you to check if your hardware is supported. Aurora and bazzite don’t have that.

Lastly the userbase is growing, but other disros such as Mint are still more popular. You therefore might find less specific documentation and tutorials on the internet for it than with other options.

*Technically it’s more complicated than that, there are edgecases of apps that don’t survive a rebase, but don’t worry about that.

GNOME has too. There it’s called nightlight

Budgie might ship with an applet, that enables the functionality as well (not sure, it’s been a while, since I last used this DE)

No Plasma Mobile is not just a mobile mode for Plasma, but it’s own thing(even if it shares a lot of tech with Plasma). You therefore need to choose a distro that explicitly supports it.

Here is a list: https://plasma-mobile.org/get/

The closest you are going to get to Mint is Debian

Looks to me like you are trying to update via fwupd. While this should work via GNOME Software, you can also use the the terminal to do this.

The command is fwupdmgr update