Rodneyck

Sounds like you are new to linux? I always recommend newbies start out with Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Ubuntu has a good installer with scripts that detect hardware, particularly older or fringe (wifi, etc) hardware. Is it the best? Not in my opinion, but you want your laptop to work and educate yourself on linux in the beginning. Once you are a moderate to advance user, switch to Arch, it is the best imo.

I use CalyxOS so completely degoogled because everything passes through microG. I have the following;

• Phone (CalyxOS)
• Quik (texting)
• Fennec (Firefox w security)
• Thunderbird
• Google Pixel Camera app, firewalled, and any services go through microG

I think it depends on the distro, some have it as a dependency of their whatever, but should not be a problem on minimal install distro’s or pure Arch itself.

Agree. To its credit, it made the transition smooth.

Agree!

Sadly, Ubuntu. I quickly moved on to debian…and ultimately landed with Arch, my true love for many years. I use Arch, btw.

It is the censoring, from the top down. That is like a brick wall on reddit that will hit anyone in no time.

Hopefully CalyxOS strips this crap out.

When they say ‘piracy’ does he think they are referring to Captain Jack Sparrow?

Copyrights for good or bad, do protect the little guy. I am sure these mega corps would love to blast their lawsuits out to the little guys and bury them. He is a bad faith actor.

Long, LONG, time linux user here, but to answer your question, most general users don’t tinker. They want it to ‘just work,’ which is why Apple, and to a lesser extent Windows, has dumbed everything down and made it proprietary (beyond just the locked in money thing) so users don’t have to think. Plus, support is a big money maker, for the corporations anyway.

EndeavourOS doesn’t add anything to Arch performance, it is basically a minimal install of arch with their theming included, which you can opt out of during install. But, to each his own.

I suggest installing EndeavourOS because it is pretty minimal, you can even select the option to not include EOS’s OS theming during the install process, so basically a bare install. Their installer also allows me to choose ext4 instead of the buggy BTRFS file structure. Then, after install and updating, I add the Chaotic-Aur repos. and do an update. Then I get the Garuda Linux repos installed. Why? Because they have lots of handy tools, gaming, power-daemen for both performance and power-savings (laptops) and a handy app for installing kernels, including the CachyOS kernels and their optimizations in the Garuda Settings Manager. If you don’t want ext4 file structure you can skip EOS/Chaotic-Aur and just download Garuda KDE light edition.

Else, get Garuda repos on your system by downloading ‘Garuda-update’ from here, and install with Octopi or CLI command, and then do a system update, then do ‘garuda-update’ in terminal which should pull in the garuda repos (say ‘yes’ when prompted to all the options to add repos.) Minimal system with lots of options to choose.

Exactly. That is my dilemma. I run CalyxOS, de-googled, but unfortunately pixels are the only phone supported in the US. I will be getting the 9a once it goes on sale.

I use RiMusic which is Google Music without the adds. You can get it via Fdroid with the IzzyOnDroid repos added. There is also Spotube for all platforms, also available on Fdroid. I haven’t had time to try this one out.

It is probably because they are creating their own Linux FireTV OS, moving off Android. Amazon and Google have always been at odds. It is the reason Amazon created their crappy App Store, because Google would not allow their app in their store. I think Amazon is further distancing itself from Google.

Good job everyone!

I did an upgrade from 5.27 to 6.01 or whatever the latest is, and I had to go through themes and setting files and remove a lot of the old plasma 5 files. It is kind of a pain. I recommend doing a complete reinstall. I am sure some settings file from kde 5 is messing with your configuration. It is a pain, but probably the easiest in the long run.

Yeah, they don’t advertise it, but if you are on the forum, the devs let you know, especially if you need help with any GUI…“We don’t support…” Not saying the devs are bad, lovely people, but that is just their thing.

Love both of those distros, Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind. Garuda Gaming edition is the best gaming distro out there imo, handy GUI to configure everything, great privacy controls/browser. Manjaro should never be used, they hold back packages for “testing” which goes against Arch in general and can break AUR packages, thus your system. Another good Arch distro, minimal with optimized kernels, a privacy browser based on Firefox, is CachyOS. Those three I would recommend for Arch, besides Arch itself.