Inter.

There is so much Windows software that is dependant on the NT kernel. It is not an inferior kernel by any means either.

I just use the “Just perfection” extension to hide to top bar and only make it visible in overview. It may sound annoying to have to use overwiew each time you want to see or interact with the top bar, but honestly for me it’s not that often to make that 1 or 2 extra keypresses annoying. When you get used to it it saves a lot of space.

JetBrains Mono.

I though many distros setup zram automatically? I know Fedora does. I would expect Ubuntu to do the same.

This. It doesn’t make sense for the eye to be minimalistic and the hand to be very detailed. Either they are both detailed or both minimalistic.

There’s a constant barrage of notifications, and by the time you have dealt with them, chances are you have forgotten what you wanted to do in the first place.

There’s a notification permission since Android 13 and you can always disable any apps notifications since I don’t know when. If you download a ton of shitty social media applications and games and then click “allow” on every notification permission prompt don’t be surprised then.

Then there is Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence bot, which won’t leave you alone. Press the home (middle) button for half a second too long, and it pops up, offering to “assist” you.

Change the default assistant settings. You can disable the assistant feature altogether.

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I will be honest that I don’t know what exact shit are we discussing here I rather wanted to point out that Apple might not be as much privacy first company as they like to present themselves.

I can’t. Everything they release is proprietary and locked down, so let’s just trust their narrative.

I can only recommend well researched eyeopener from Techaltar: https://youtu.be/JHnBOUNxHsw

On some BIOSes you have to set and enable master password for some advanced options to show up.

The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.

When we get to the manufacturer’s custom Android skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer’s bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.

I stoped using yt-dlp frontends the moment I saw youtube actually serving upscaled opus media files (very visible line on a spectrogram). Also their metadata is totally fucked-up and not very well organized and full of shit (comments with huge spaces and non useful metadata…).

Wow really? Are you sure it applies to all audio files? YouTube gathers music records from different companies so they could be of varying quality. To me the opus quality from YouTube was always decent and personally I cannot hear any compression in the audio. The metada is not perfect, but I usually use some tag editor to complete what’s missing. YTDLnis on Android does a great job of scraping as much usable metada from YouTube Music as possible.

Cromite 🤓

Cannot speak for other schools in other countries (and I guess this question was targeted at colleges in USA), but I am currently studying Open informatics at Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech technical university in Prague and all the courses I have that are not mathematical, but require to use a computer do take into account that you may not be using only Windows, but also MacOS or Linux. I haven’t yet encounterered a software that we would be required to use and wouldn’t work on Linux, nor did I have to go through any more hassle because I use Linux, but rather contrary to that. In some cases using Linux made things easier and more straightforward for me.

Chrome or Chromium project?

Honestly what you are describing here would bother me too. For example on my notebook I rely on configuring grub to use kernel argument amdgpu.abmlevel=0 which fixes the screen colors getting washed out when in battery saving mode, but I doubt I would be able to configure grub on an atomic distro.

Do the “right” thing.

Why don’t you explain your arguments or make counter arguments instead of attacking your opponent personally. How do I matter here?

I am not a Zorin OS fanboy or anything, but honestly I don’t see anything scummy about requiring payment from the user to get access to certain features of the product. It’s just shareware. It’s their product FOSS or not. I think they make it clear about what you get for free and what you don’t. If you don’t like that you don’t have to use their product and you can use an alternative instead. It’s not like they were a monopoly in the world of Linux distros and you have no other option. I see nothing scummy about this. It would be scummy if they would do some kind of false advertising (adverties features you actually don’t get or adverties features in a misleading way) or if they started moving features from the free to the pro version that used to be free, because some people may have relyed on these features.

Can you elaborate? Because to me this feels like saying that the local grocery shop is scummy because it wants people to pay instead of relying on donations. If the whole OS was paid like RedHat Linux is than it would be OK or you consider that to be also a case of taking advantage of users who don’t know any better.