These days i cant recommend Windows to anybody. Even gamers should move to linux.

Some say "i do nothing illegal" "have nothing to hide". You dont do anything illegal in your point of view. AI tracking you might think otherwise.

A sudden knock on your door might happen because of an ambigious search/propmt.

There's a huge number of gamers moving to things like CachyOS. Some are stuck because of Valorant, LoL or Battlefield DRM, but it's a big move lately.

I'd never play one of those games but the excuse for the kernel modules spying on you is usually anti-cheat not DRM as they are online games.

There are droves of people petitioning Valve to add kernel anti–cheat to CS2.

Others say

"I need it to work on a random Thursday, not wait for fsck after ever reboot"

https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS/issues/1104

I have the same issue on Windows 11. It's been bugging me to press a button or "check my drive" on every startup for at least half a year, no matter how often I let it run the check...

Same thing happened to me recently

Why have you linked a bug report for a niche userland application that may be causing disk corruption as evidence against linux reliability? That seems like a pretty uninformed conclusion.

This isn't a one-off niche user. Just look for more of these. You will find them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1cvwo93/arch_run...

This supports my initial reply. This was an f2fs bug in a bleeding edge kernel released only seven days earlier. The thread suggests perfectly reasonable mitigations, especially for an arch user: use the lts kernel or downgrade to 6.8.9.

If you're not familiar with linux and/or don't want to deal with trivial issues periodically, don't hang out at the bleeding edge. There are plenty of boring and/or beginner friendly choices out there.

I'm not saying linux is perfect, but your conclusions in this instance appear to be uninformed rather than supported by the facts.

> Some say "i do nothing illegal" "have nothing to hide".

I hate how pervasive this argument is. I'm so tired. Sometimes I wish they'd get the total panopticon they want so much. I'm sure the government will be able to find some crimes to hang them with.

The best response is always:

"That's not up to you."

When people claim they have nothing to hide, always point out that's not up to their determination. That freaks them out, it disarms their shrink-from-confrontation move.

And you can point it out super fast, in a plain six word statement. No need to launch into a deep discussion unless prompted.

Alternatively, simply respond with: yes you do. When they reply: "what?" - "every single thing you have ever done wrong across your entire life." Everybody has done something they would prefer to keep hidden, the cowards just lie about it.

Just because I have nothing to hide doesn't mean I have anything I want you to see.

People are entitled to privacy because they enjoy it. No further justification is needed.

Anyone got tips or guides to starting a linux OS that protects privacy without sacrificing utility?

Considering putting linux on a 2nd PC

Essentially any Linux distro protects privacy. You'd kinda have to go out of your way to find one that doesn't, because there's no online account connected to your install for any of them.

If you're reasonably technical, you can make nearly any use-case work on nearly any distro, but if you have choice paralysis, my top recommendations would be CachyOS if you plan to play games, and Mint otherwise.

Personally I'm happy with EndeavourOS. I picked it to find a general purpose distro similar to the Steam Deck (KDE and arch based) but with a more user-friendly installer.

omarchy.org

many games work flawlessly on Linux now. enough to make the switch anyways. a lot more than on mac.

Genuine question: does Linux have an AI image editor as easy to use as the win11 paint/photos?