Andromxda

Basically everyone in the community agrees that Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora are the best choices for new users. Mint and Ubuntu are pretty similar, so they don't require separate maintenance effort, and supporting Fedora is not that hard, if you already support RHEL, CentOS or another rpm-based distro (which are pretty common in the enterprise space). For all the desktop applications, Flatpak exists and is agreed on as the standard format by most of the desktop Linux community.

Of course not. They wouldn’t have had any reason to switch.

Of course they would? Millions of euros of tax revenue sounds like a pretty compelling reason to me. This is why Micro$oft's "lobby efforts" should be labeled as what they are: Nothing more and nothing less than corruption.

It takes more maintenance than Windows.

If you create your own distro, yes. But there are countless noob-friendly distros like Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora that they could use with practically 0 maintenance required. Also, compare the 2004 desktop Linux experience to now. Having used Gentoo Linux compiled from a stage 1 tarball back in 2002, I can tell you: the differences are tremendous. Many of the issues they had can be directly attributed to OpenOffice and it's bad compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, which has long been replaced by LibreOffice. It still worked out pretty well for them, over a period of 13 years. And it saved the tax payer millions of euros of Microsoft's stupid licensing fee for their crappy proprietary garbage.

From memory, Germany did this many years ago, and ended up rolling it back?

The city of Munich deployed their own custom Linux systems many years ago. But since it wasn't really maintained and updated, the user experience was pretty bad and the city's employees were unhappy. Then Micro$oft lobbyists also came in and made them switch - by threatening to move their German headquarters out of Munich, which would cost the city lots of tax revenue.

https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/

Most of the Windows malware gets deployed by some user downloading and executing random files they downloaded on the web. Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector. Running random scripts from the internet by downloading them using curl and piping them into sudo bash is a whole nother issue though. Noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu should IMO have some safeguards in place to block these actions.

Except they couldn't keep the Micro$oft ~~criminals~~ lobbyists out

Are you implying that macOS is the best OS, because its arrow is the highest in the graph?

...Don't vote for Trump then?!??

If you're at this point still upset or surprised about anything the orange moron does, you're part of the problem.

Bazzite + Lutris works really well

You can also play around with things like ProtonGE-custom, there's a very useful tool called ProtonUp-Qt that helps you install it, among with other useful stuff

Some people also reported that running (pirated, Windows-exclusive) games in the Heroic launcher works pretty well

It's not constructive criticism, I never claimed that it was. It's just my personal opinion. I find paying for a social media site ridiculous. Donating to a Lemmy/Mastodon/(insert any Fediverse service) instance is absolutely fine, donating to FLOSS software projects or open data projects is totally fine, but paying a monthly fee for some random feature just feels weird to me. And the fact that Elon Musk popularized it, makes it even more ridiculous for me.

A subscription for a social media site. The 21th century is ridiculous. And the fact that Twitter (under Elon the scumbag Musk) introduced it first, and they're presenting themselves as a Twitter alternative, makes it much worse. No thanks, I'm definitely staying on the fediverse.

I'm just waiting for Bluesky to introduce ads.