Distros that don’t respect your privacy are hard to find, so privacy isn’t really a factor here. You’re just going to get everyone’s favourite distro here, regardless of whether it fits your other requirements.
What kind of hardware do you use?
How stable or fresh would you like your distro to be?
What wind of desktop experience do you prefer?
Also note that the apps you use (on your PC or in the browser) usually far outshadow the OS w.r.t. privacy intrusion.
Nice to hear, that privacy is less of a problem with linux!
I'm using a "middle-class gaming tower" I think. (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB VRAM, 16 GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 5 2400G).
Isn't fresher always better?
I already found out, that it's possible to change the desktop environment, which is great I guess. So I think at first, I'd like to maybe stick to the "windows-style".
Due to the nature as a community of tech enthusiasts, normal end-users can easily get software that is a bit too fresh. You probably don’t want to be a beta-tester unless you don’t mind updates frequently breaking your system.
Usually, default settings put you a few levels down from that, depending on which distro you go for. This doesn’t keep you completely save from some developers doing stupid shit (Manjaro), but this shouldn’t be a concern for any distro I’ve seen recommended here.
Open source software usually doesn’t do any kind of tracking or telemetry. Sometimes it is there but then it’s usually opt-in (off by default unless you change it). Most Linux distros contain a huge amount of open source software. So all the code is in the open (which means usually no shady things going on, because a lot of eyes are looking at that code) and there’s often not even an incentive for the developers to gain money directly from the users, except through donations. So if you really like some open source project, please do contribute or donate to it.
So in the end it doesn’t really matter which distro, they all will be MASSIVELY more privacy friendly than any closed source OS like Windows, OSX iOS, or proprietary Android, although to maximize your “chances” so to speak you can go for a purely community-run distro not backed by any company (Ubuntu is backed by Canonical, Fedora is backed by Red Hat, OpenSuSE is backed by SuSE, these are the three big distros with a commercial background. I’m not saying they do violate your privacy currently, but they at least have a greater tendency to do so, because data gathered can be sold, so it might be a business incentive for them. Ubuntu sent users’ search queries to Amazon in the past to gain some more money, but the community outrage caused them to remove this anti-feature afterwards again. Fedora is currently proposing to introduce opt-out (on-by-default) telemetry, it’s not decided yet, but it’s a bit worrying still. So you see, such distros might not be the best choice for “maximum” privacy. But compared to Windows or OSX they’re still magnitutes of miles ahead.
For community-run distros, you can check out e.g. Debian or Arch Linux, or any distro based upon them. For Debian specifially, I recommend running its “testing” branch, because it’s more up to date. Don’t worry about the label - it’s still rock solid stable, because Debian has very rigid testing requirements. They test more and longer than probably any other distro, which means Debian “stable” is very well tested, but also quite outdated. To alleviate that a bit, you can use the “testing” branch. You could even use the “unstable” branch for even more up to date packages, but there’s at least a chance that you get some package dependency problems every once in a while or so, so not recommended for a beginner. Debian is also quite easy to get into nowadays, though maybe not as easy as some of the Ubuntu-based distros. Linux Mint (normally Ubuntu-based) also has a Debian-based edition these days, and Linux Mint is a great distro for beginners. Arch is hard to get into but great for modern desktop usage or gaming because it’s always super up to date. You can also check out EndeavourOS, an Arch-based clone with easier installation. Or just use any distro, really, it’s not that big of a deal currently. They all behave quite well. Mint, Kubuntu or Fedora are good starting points for beginners.
If you have to use a public computer temporarily, there’s really only one choice for a private usage in that scenario: Tails. Put it on a USB stick and use it whenever you’re on an “unsafe” computer. Tails ensures that ALL traffic will be routed through Tor so no one on the local network (or the web, for that matter) can sniff out your data transfers, among other things it does to enable anonymous computer usage (e.g. it leaves behind no logs, doesn’t save any info about your previous sessions, and so on).
It’s a bad idea to recommend Debian Testing for people who have never run Linux before. Obviously people can do whatever they want, but the whole point of Debian stable is that it is stable, and the whole point of Testing is that it’s not.
Based on the ~2 videos I’ve seen, the newly released Debian 12 stable might actually be good for newbies without being noticeably out-of-date. Thanks to Flatpak etc, new software versions can be installed / updated easily without compromising stability.
A living proof how typing a full, punctuated sentence and then pressing enter without reading the warning prompt after getting an error from the GUI store can be dangerous. So don't do drugs kids.
The dsektop environment really doesn't have anything to do with it. That's up to the video drivers and display server, be it X11 or Wayland. I haven't any idea which desktop might offer you the best tools for configuring those things though. Just as a rough guess, I'd guess KDE Plasma, perhaps XFCE?
I very recently (like last week!) stuck a new drive in my PC to run Pop!_OS, with the aim of switching over from Windows entirely if it pans out. So far I've only tested Steam for games, but it's worked flawlessly for the games I've tried using Proton.
I've had a Steam Deck for some time which convinced me to make the jump. My desktop was my only Windows machine and I'd love to properly switch it to Linux.
I am currently running KDE Neon 5.27 which is Ubuntu based, on an Inspiron 3551 with an Intel N3540 @ 2.16GHz which is a 4 core Atom,
and 4 GiB of RAM. With this 1 tab of Firefox open, the system is using 2GB of the RAM. I have had no issues running Neon on such a slow system with little RAM, but I don't usually have many tabs or programs running at the same time. Pretty much all the desktop interfaces for Linux run with far less resources and bloat than Windows, I would start by finding which desktop environment you prefer. I have been a fan of KDE for many years now, but try different bootable distros to get a feel for which interface you would like.
As far as a Desktop Environment goes take a look at XFCE. It's gtk based so will run all the Gnome style apps and look pretty, it's super lightweight, and infinitely customizable.
If you're keen on an Ubuntu flavor, the Xubuntu comes with it bundled. You can get it on any other distro, too, though.
One thing that annoys me about discord is the screenshare popout, ideally I’d like to pop each screen out individual instead of only being able to popout the entire block. For example I’d like to keep webcams on my left monitor and have someone’s shared screen in full screen on the right. I get round this by having two accounts but would be good to have a native solution
The Devs had also upgraded a lot of Electron stuff and security problems that the official Discord client doesn't do, as well as fix a lot of bugs and issues that Discord haven't bothered with.
Oh, and if you're using KDE Plasma, it uses the Qt file picker and not the GTK one.
AppImage is a lot better than Flatpak because it isn't a walking security nightmare (http://flatkill.org).
But yeah, I got a build working with the PR. I'm not on my computer right now, but it's a pinned PR in the GitHub issues for the WebCord project. You go to the fork with the branch, you run a couple of quick npm commands and then you can do a build.
I did have to remove a few of the package makers because they'd set it up to do a .deb build, and I haven't used apt in years. I vaguely think they had a Flatpak or a Snapcraft package maker in there too, but I don't use those.
You run the make and package commands which you can find in the package.json file, then it outputs a built application for you.
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