Why the pain of Arch? You probably fell in love with the rolling release, wiki, and the AUR.

If their computer can handle running a windows vm on virtualbox, I’d recommend that over dual boot. Windows update will almost certainly cause issues on boot…eventually.

Jump into Linux with both feet. Use the vm as a crutch or a bridge to windows only software.

Follow the advice below… backup everything. If you have a 2nd hd, this makes it easier to keep files and is separated.

If you’re prepared to reinstall, it’s easy to nuke it and try again. It’s part of learning and sometimes easier to troubleshoot.

Bard on my experience, Mint is probably the best gateway distro into Linux from windows. Debian and Ubuntu forums are relevant and useful. My wife and I are both IT professionals, and mint was just “natural”. She couldn’t care less what os, de, or wm is in use as long as it gets it done. She’s got mint on one laptop and Debian with gnome on another.

Once they decide they want something different they can find what meets those needs nice they have their bearings and a “need”.

Ubuntu never really hit home for me for some reason.

I wanted to move off mint, because I wanted the gnome DE. Yes, I did successfully slam gnome on top of mint, more as a can I do it vs should I do it exercise. Then I wanted something further upstream and went to Debian.

Then, I started tinkering with Endeavouros. This has allowed me to learn more about how things really work and WHY they work the way they do. Documentation on arch to me is second to none. Until I had daily driver Linux experience and spent some time tinkering, this was just overwhelming.

Do you know how to install without a helper? Go through the wiki and build the package for a couple apps and then uninstall if you like. I don’t know everything that’s going on, but I can somewhat tell if it doesn’t seem crazy. If you get a component that looks strange, just look it up on the AUR or official repos.

Yes, there’s more risk in the AUR than “official”, but the AUR is one of the greatest parts of arch. I’d the app you’re installing seems active with comments and users, I bet you’re fine.

There’s a lot of people out there doing this waaaaay smarter than me. If it got past all of them too, then I probably never stood a chance to avoid whatever it was. I also understand malware on the AUR to be very uncommon. I happened 1x in something like the last 5-10 years and was discovered and down in under day. (I could be remembering wrong).

I’d also say think a bit. If you find “the official Firefox” first posted today with no comments and a link to some Eastern European language wish-looking version of Git….i mean download that shit. Add to root users group and save the password! * if you don’t know where the last part got sketchy and sarcastic, you may want an os with more guardrails.

I for one welcome our new overlords. May you be fair and just; never making infamy in yepowertrippin’ bastards!

Thank you for your contributions!

It might be that I’m looking at this from a US perspective. Craig’s list has been a bit rough when I’ve tried it. Scammy and shadier people. I hope you’ve had better experiences here than me.

I found cash converters out of the UK. Is that correct? It seemed comparable to a pawn shop at first glance.

Ok, I feel old. The only reason facebook has any relevance to me is the market place. What’s the best alternative?

Thanks, I’ll dig into that one sometime!

In my experience, not much, but I’m a marginally functional newbie. Mint manages things for you fairly nicely and has been the best, it just works with out messing with much/anything. (At least for my hardware)

I managed to get gnome working smoothly on mint and have been happy with it. I started and returned here since I last ditched windows as a native OS.

The only thing that has made me consider distro hopping from mint is AUR on arch and gnome, though I’ve been successful so far.

Part of trying the distros that are more advanced and give you more explicit control and configuration is the sense of accomplishment and it makes you figure out how and why things work the way they do. It holistically builds your velocity in your understanding of Linux. (Or gnu whatever that nuance is).

If your machine has enough resources it is super easy to host VMs of anything you want to try. You can try them all, and it won’t cost you anything but time!

Completely agree. I understood WebKit to be a different browse engine than chromium or Firefox.

While chromium and Firefox have wider platform options, there’s “kind of” a 3rd runner even though locked to apple.

I agree Linux and open source is king.

I was thinking WebKit was closer to Netscape in origin.

You made me go look it up. 😉 and I think we’re both wrong…. (Here’s my edit…. Poster above is right. I read it wrong, so only I am wrong on the origin of WebKit)

Below from Wikipedia:

WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS software libraries from KDE.

On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome

I think there’s kind of a 3rd choice, WebKit.

Chrome was great, till it wasn’t. IE always was bad. Edge is chromium.

Firefox has stayed closer to “don’t be evil” than many companies. Is say far more than the other options.

Sounds like you need to write an app to do this. It seems you want to aggregate data from multiple sources, keep secret, then send.

I’m tech inclined, but not a developer, lots of low/no code solutions should let you get pretty close fairly easily.

I’ll bet you could use a jobs site to “rent a developer” and it wouldn’t be too expensive.

Or find a 3rd party to collect and schedule the email.

I think my email service does something like this, though I don’t use it.

https://proton.me/support/schedule-email-send

There’s also the xbrowsersync extension if you just want to save and sync bookmarks.

I may be a lost lemming though based on the community…