This somehow assumes that your fingerprint is going to vary, and be unique, every time you interact with a tracker. That’s basically not ever going to be the case for casual use.

If Cloudflare fails the tick-box Captcha and I need to tell it what squares contain motorcycles, that would suggest that I currently have a unique fingerprint that they do not have yet enough history on to tie to a person. How often do you get to do the square puzzle nowadays?

The scariest part is how the general population just accepts how bad Windows is, because they don’t have a concept of what a decent piece of software looks like. They just assume that they hate computers but are simply forced to tolerate it to do their job.

Imagine they removed the oil, engine and fuel lamps, and then while driving:

Car Malfunctioning. Attempt Repair?

Isn’t it a bad thing to be unique in this context? If my browser is 1 in a million, that means that a tracker can pick me out of a lineup of a million users, no? That’s why a captcha can verify you as human simply by checking a box, because it can identify your unique browser as associated with human activity.

If I’m not mistaken, we want the opposite. We want our browsers to be as generic as possible if we don’t want to be tracked.

So KDE Plasma is just a graphical environment that you can use on any distro. It’s my preferred desktop environment, but Gnome and XFCE are famous ones, and lots of nerds/programmers love i3 (a tiling graphical environment which encourages you to use keyboard only).

So when choosing a distro, we’re looking at other qualities.

A Linux distro is basically a collection of tools that constitute your OS. The most notable difference between distros is package managrment – how do you install new packages?

This might sound weird but the reason is that open source software comes with tons of different options that can be toggled before compiling to binaries, and at the same time we need our ecosystem of software to play nice accross different packages. They often depend on each other! So that’s why different philosophies split the community into so many different distros.

When installing new software, you essentially run a specific command from the terminal. Your package manager (which is a core part of your distro) then downloads and installs all dependencies. There are graphical tools to help beginners with this, but in fairness I think you should be prepared to learn to use the command line to search for applications and install them. You won’t avoid the terminal as a Linux user.

A really common distro is Debian. It’s the basis for tons of other popular distros, including Ubuntu. My problem with Debian is that they are a bit conservative, which means that they’re often slow with rolling out updates for KDE.

Since I’m also a KDE Plasma person, I run Neon https://neon.kde.org/ which is based on Debian but focuses on rolling out stable updates for KDE packages.

I do not recommend starting with a hobbyist distro like Gentoo, Nix or even Arch if your focus is productivity or gaming. If you want to learn about computers, then those distros can be incredibly rewarding, but they are time-consuming. Go with something Debian-based, or alternatively OpenSUSE or Fedora.

Regarding your other questions, you likely do not need to swap out hardware. But some graphics cards have poor support for Linux, so research your model in advance. You can also try running a distro of your choice live from a USB stick (most distros support this). It’s slower than running from hard drive, but you can get a feeling for what works out of the box and what may need further configuration.

Many games will not work properly on Linux, at least not without extensive tinkering. If you’re serious about certain games, I’d say Windows is unavoidable. I detest dual-booting but if you only have one computer then it may be your only option. However games that work on Deck should work fine on any Linux machine.

Hope this helps.

This is not true. I’ve helped lots of people install Linux on their old laptops, they used them until the hardware stopped working and I rarely if ever got any questions or requests for help.

Because it just worked.

He’s saying that cheaters who probably play on Windows, used hooks dedicated for Linux/Proton to bypass anti-cheat code.

It’s great that smart people are working on this, but I don’t think we can expect hobbyists to make a useful OSS implementation of smartphones. Especially since there is so much dependence on the hardware. We either need a company that can throw some weight behind it, or just straight up governments that value it (e.g. from a sovereignty point of view).

The best thing to do is just start with whatever you already have. An old gaming rig, laptop or Raspberry Pi, doesn’t matter. Each will present some technical obstacle that you need to overcome (for example keeping the laptop going when the lid is closed). That’s part of learning.

Self-hosting is a hobby where we gradually learn more. Experimentation is just as important as reading the docs.

Gentoo is fun and a nice way to learn more about computers. Their wiki and their community was really good when I was into it, I’m sure it still is. But compiling everything from scratch is quite demanding of your CPU and your time, so it’s not really something that you run as your daily driver for long.

Also lots of killers seek psychiatric help voluntarily (and are often sadly ignored). For a sane, moderately competent person it’s easy to plan the perfect murder or terror attack – it’s a different thing to carry it through because a sane person also has mental guardrails.

Mossad is effective because Israelis are ruthlessly trained to dehumanize anyone who’s an obstacle to their goals.