now that you mention, i have plenty of addons on all browsers i use. Maybe i could have made it work by testing one by one, though the chromium browsers all worked out-of-the-box even with largely the same addons. I just do not have the patience for it now, and settled on using Vivaldi for chromium stuff when really needed, which should not be often.

i can live with that 👍

You may be unaware, and it may be that it would have been possible to configure something or install something obscure and not noob friendly, but i can tell that in 2022 that situation happened, i tried to re-install firefox, did a quick google search on possible fixes, tried a handful, the netflix error continued, and then I gave up and called netflix, and installed google chrome.

Alas, we have reached a point where lots of web stuff already just does not work in non chromium browsers. My father could not use Netflix on Firefox on Linux mint, we called Netflix customer support and they said to install Google chrome. And it then worked. I use opera and it worked for me too. So a chromium browser is needed, for streaming stuff at least. And non googled chromium probably does not have the commercial addons needed.

What would be the least bad chromium family browser then ?

I am a non-power and non-technical user, and after trying Linux Mint (liked it) i tried a relatively obscure distro that i ended up loving: BigLinux

• see their site here → https://www.biglinux.com.br , there is a translation button on bottom right

• It is a brazilian distro semi-famous here, continuously developed by more or less a small team since 20 years, but with support for 29 languages including english.

• they use a base of Manjaro Linux KDE, which is based on Arch. They install via Calamares, and you select the desktop configuration (windows-like, macoss-like, etc of 6 options).

• The motto for the distro is : “In search of the perfect system”, and their goal is more or less to make a linux distro the MOST complete and beginner-friendly possible, sort of going in a Maximalist, anti-gnome philosophy. For this, they have:

1. Pre-packaged lots and lots of programs out-of-the-box (like rustdesk, both brave and firefox, steam, lutris, jdownloader, corestats, a printscreen program, image sound video converters, etc and 2 whole sections of Webbapps (including all of google stuff - docs, slides, maps - , almost all social media sites, microsoft office, all music streaming and television streaming sites → and you can disable them on the webbapp hub).

2. The only linux distro i found that out-of-the-box installs ALL packaging methods (i.e. ALL OF THEM). They natively have BigLinux and Manjaro repositories, AUR, Flatpak and Snap (snap is activated by the user clicking in a button, so you can have it or not). They have integration for .appimage, automatic converter for .deb and .rpm installation, java installed and ready to run .jar programs, and Waydroid (for android apps). I know it is possible to do this on mostly any distro, but trying doing that as a noob was unsuccesful for me, i did not know the names of all little programs (or that they existed) , and is a lot of time and pain, this way it really just works.

3. The software store is great (Big Store), it is completely visual interface, you just type the name of the program, click a button, write the password, and it instals, and again, it has BigLinux and Manjaro repositories, AUR, Flatpak and Snap to search. You can just search on the internet for the other packages, download the .deb .rpm .appimage .apk file, and just click, and it converts and instals them. I never have to worry about linux apps not being compatible for instalation on my distro, ever.

All in all, a truly graphical user interface, out-of-the-box functionality and beginner friendly distro. With the security of manjaro, and the bleedging edge of Arch. Negative point is that it both uses KDE and has a ton of programs pre-installed , so it leans heavy. I could not install it on a 2006 toshiba laptop even the light version, but a 2011 Macbook with ssd runs great. I use it on a Sony vaio 8gb ram 2013 all in one and have no complaints.