My Linux Migration Considerations: Privacy, Security, and Convenience for a Beginner

[Astatine]

@Anon3747594

• Fedora is perfectly fine for beginners. Linux community on the whole is very dogmatic, and hence the post you linked happened - They simply were too used to Ubuntu to feel good about fedora. Since you are just starting out, Fedora will be your first experience, and hence it will be very user friendly for you.

• OpenSUSE Aeon is also fine. Release candidate is not a problem, its merely project management speak for something 99.99% close to release. Lacl of documentation is a real problem, hence I still recommend fedora. Use the default Gnome version if you want a basic UI. Fedora is very similar in UI to Gnome standards.

I wasn’t entirely sure, since I have a risk-averse personality and overthinks things such as this. That is why I wasn’t sure what Linux distribution to proceed with.

For example, some people suggested Linux Mint as one’s first distribution, others Ubuntu, and PrivacyGuides recommended Fedora Workstation.

In this Reddit post, I saw that some were bias to Fedora KDE Plasma, and others to Fedora Workstation. I tried both out, and found Fedora Workstation to be - in my opinon - the better option.

@Anon3747594

I am assuming you are a college student. Most of your activities will probably be exploring PDFs, watching video content, writing documents and presentations, and maybe playing games. Its very easy to do all this with the default applications in fedora (except gaming).

Surprisingly, I am not a college student. I am a student though.

I do schoolwork, research for queries like this, reading posts from forums, and watching content. That is basically what I do. I don’t game at all, so lack of gaming on Linux isn’t a concern for me.

@Anon3747594

Use Only Office, it has perfect compatibility with Microsoft Suite. No need to convince professors to use anything else unless you want to lead that cause.

I found OnlyOffice to not look great on Windows. It may look different though, on Linux, since LibreOffice looked better on Linux; I will need to verify that.

@Anon3747594

I use Brother printers for scanning, they work perfectly. HP also seems well supported (Link)

Thanks for the link. I completely overlooked that.

@Anon3747594

Use Flatpaks. Don’t waste your time with Bubblewrap and firejail. You are a student, don’t fight your own laptop constantly. Flatseal can help you deny any permission you don’t want an application to have.

I was guessing so. Firejail didn’t seem like a good idea, according to this post.

@Anon3747594

Don’t worry about sandboxing, all desktop OSs are terrible. Windows sandbox can be bypassed based on where you install the app from. MacOS sandbox is optional. Flatpaks are decent enough. No desktop OS has proper verified boot, only incomplete implementations that trust vulnerable components.

I was very stressed about the sandboxing and it bothered me because I read posts like this which made me uncertain to whether I should proceed with my migration to Linux or not.

@Anon3747594

Thanks for researching and not just asking stupid unresearched questions. Made me inspired to answer this. Again, don’t waste your time tinkering or after ideologies, just study well.

Thanks for responding as well! There are many queries that have little to no research at all.