From the article, I wish them the best but this line of thinking is not the Linux way:

The first app I installed on Ubuntu (on both my machines) was Chrome browser. While Chromium, the open source version of the browser, is available in Ubuntu’s App Center (its app store), the official Google version is not.

If you’re wanting to give Linux a try, you gotta be willing to let go of the Windows way. Chrome is not better than chromium because Google. Don’t complain that a specific app is hard to get running if you aren’t willing to try the alternatives, especially if there’s literally a Linux version maintained by the same developer

🤔 I wonder if they’ll hire an American who barely dabbles in self hosting and doesn’t speak 28.35 grams of German. Or would it be 29.6 mL?

I’m not seeing nextcloud mentioned in the article. If they are moving to nextcloud, I wish them the best. It’s great for my personal use, but from my experience it’s lacking in what I would expect in a work environment. With a government entity coming to use them, it would be fantastic to see some improvements on them because they’re almost there.

I upgraded my 7 year old 4tb drives with 14tb drives (both setups raid1). A week later, one of the 14tb drives failed. It was a tense time waiting for a new drive and the 24 hours or so for resilvering. No issues since, but boy was that an experience. I’ve since added some automated backup processes.

Username checks out

Looks to me like Nobara might be what you want, it’s fedora based and is tailored toward gaming. I haven’t used it myself, so I can’t comment on how it’s different from fedora, but Fedora itself is pretty darn solid

What sort of “simple” things did you have trouble with in Mint?

You could try popOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu. But without knowing what you struggled with, Mint should still be the best choice of you’re new. Your troubles could just be the desktop environment you picked, or enabling third party/proprietary repositories. Or they could be a legit issue that is easily fixed using a different distro.

I’ve used Linux for 15+ years.

Install from the repositories, if it isn’t in your “app store” or installed using apt or yum or whatever your distro package manager is, don’t bother with it until you’re more familiar with Linux.

Your system is 99%+ of the time going to be secure as long as you don’t install something sketch. You need to install it, it won’t just happen on it’s own, things can be hidden behind copy paste instructions so be sure you have a good idea of what each step does if you’re doing that (I’ve never come across this in the wild, FYI). The other small percentage is a bug or something in packages (see the xz debacle) which you have little control over. The best thing you can do is just keep packages up to date.

Check if there’s alternatives to what you use in Windows, or if there’s a Linux version. Decide if you need to use the windows program, or if the Linux equivalent will work. There may be a learning curve to using a different program, but I haven’t yet really found anything that doesn’t have an equivalent that isn’t a program paired with hardware that will only work with each other.

If you give me all of YouTube and that includes everyone maintaining it, all the data collection processes from it, and the infrastructure to keep it running. Hell yeah I’ll take it, the data collection alone on users is an information gold mine and companies all over would be salivating to get a piece of that. I can pretty much guarantee that if given the threat of losing the data of everyone in the worlds video watching habits vs paying more to upkeep it, companies will start paying more.

In all actuality, I’d still do it and toss out the data collection. I don’t see anywhere in this mental exercise that I have to keep it running well. Y’all (well, about 5 of y’all at a time) are watching 36p videos from here on out.