Begs the question what’s the point in all of this? In 20 or so years of using Linux (usually maintaining multiple systems at once) I’ve had a kernel panic maybe about 4 times for different reasons, and on those occasions the console debug info was fine. I don’t really understand the excitement around making error messages look more like Windows. It can’t be around being more newbie friendly since if you’re having kernel panics you probably need to be an expert or have expert advice anyway.

What about Linux distribution repos? (in terms of where they fall in the known/unknown category)

OnlyOffice is nowhere near as full-featured as LO, as well as having huge performance issues especially when dealing with large spreadsheets. I have no idea why it keeps getting recommended.

Nobody sane wants to “use” it, but sometimes someone will inconsiderately link something on there.

It hasn’t had a meaningful update in ~10 years, and the problem is it still has the brand recognition which keeps potential users away from LibreOffice. It’s an embarrassment to Apache if you ask me.

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/

I love Gnome but I think KDE’s Dolphin beats them all. Fortunately being Linux you can always use Dolphin with Gnome.

I can confirm it’s greatly improved in terms of reliability in the last couple of years.

Well FreeTube never claimed to be a platform, it’s a fantastic front-end for browsing YouTube videos without having to deal with Google’s crap, but you’re still using YouTube.

I find keeping a calendar is useful for remembering routine tasks.

This is basically the method I use:

https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-snapshots-backup-incremental/

I don’t know anything about Minecraft but if Minetest is an appropriate replacement without that minor annoyance I would suggest that’s solicited advice.

On self-reflection I’ll admit that there’s a bias experienced by people, like me, who live in the Linux bubble, surrounded by people who are happy Linux users, to overestimate the eagerness of other people to be on board. It’s also easy to forget when you’re on a general Technology community like this one, where a lot of people are talking about Linux, that it’s not everyone is a Linux person.

In fact I don’t even really detect much of a “Lemmy buzz” around it mainly because I participated in Linux-y parts of Reddit, and other places, before now. If anything from my point of view there seems to be more resistance to it on Lemmy.

It could be that having used it for nearly 20 years I’ve lost my ability to fathom why it would be difficult. But that said, both my parents use Linux and are non-technical users - they were fed up with windows crap like in OP so they asked me to set it up for them and it’s been 5 years now trouble free. So even if you do need to be an enthusiast-level user to make it work, you only have to know one. What I still stand by is that it’s good advice for most users.

These days I use Btrfs snapshots to do incremental backups to an external drive each week, it’s manual but it takes less than 5 minutes a week, the most I risk losing is a week of data and I trust it a lot more than relying on some external service that might go down at any time or randomly decide to delete my account. For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough, I feel like anything else is just over-engineered.

Just do backups, isn’t that easier than using a cloud service?

I’m used to hearing about how a lot of people are put off of Lemmy because of all the “Linux” people on it, “people pushing Linux”, “elitists”, etc.

And yet I see something like this and think “are we not supposed to give good advice?”.

If is the kind of thing you want for your computing then go for it.

I strongly believe nuisance advertising should be fought separately from privacy concerns. Both are valid concerns but need a different approach. Advertising based on website visits that collect user data is privacy intrusive, but an ad baked into a YouTube video is probably not (regardless of whether it’s annoying or not).

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

No, I’m not having that! That’s rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this “weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista” but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.

Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.

As much as I try to encourage alternatives, most people where I’m from use WhatsApp for everything these days and has been that way for the last ~5 years. I might get about 10 SMS messages a year but possibly thousands of WhatsApp messages.

It’s an unnecessary layer of abstraction that solves a problem that never existed. If you have a lot of podcasts it’s nice to be able to organise them in a directory structure that makes sense to you, not necessarily what the app wants. Also podcast file names aren’t always easily sortable or even human-readable so you’ll want to rename them as you save them.

I’m not changing folder structure constantly, I just want it somewhere sensible where I can find it.