cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/550905
Basically, which linux distro is the best for a non-power user? Someone who wants to be able to get up and running without having to learn how to manage the OS using the cli.
Quick example: When I install a new OS, the first thing I want to do is install Brave. That should be as easy as “click on this thing, type in brave, select Brave, install.”
Pop os, but don’t install brave, it’s bullshit cryptocurrency spyware.
is it really running crypto in the back ground. When I head people say that I hear it runs some crypto mining in the background
No. You can opt into watching ads for their BAT crypto, but you can also just turn all of that off and have an awesome ad-free browser.
I consider their past behavior to be counter to their stated goal of privacy, and counter to the notion that they deserve to be trusted.
They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also I’d take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn’t the most savory:
… Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.
On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance
In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance. He also spreads COVID misinformation.
As others have pointed out, it’s also Chromium based, and so it is just helping Google destroy the web more than they already have.
Offtopic, but I’d steer clear of brave. They feel scammy, have crypto built in and replace ads with their own. Since it’s built on chromium it just adds to the market share of chromium and towards a Google controlled internet.
Alas, we have reached a point where lots of web stuff already just does not work in non chromium browsers. My father could not use Netflix on Firefox on Linux mint, we called Netflix customer support and they said to install Google chrome. And it then worked. I use opera and it worked for me too. So a chromium browser is needed, for streaming stuff at least. And non googled chromium probably does not have the commercial addons needed.
What would be the least bad chromium family browser then ?
I’m unaware of any streaming services that work in chrome but not Firefox.
You may be unaware, and it may be that it would have been possible to configure something or install something obscure and not noob friendly, but i can tell that in 2022 that situation happened, i tried to re-install firefox, did a quick google search on possible fixes, tried a handful, the netflix error continued, and then I gave up and called netflix, and installed google chrome.
As others have said, Ubuntu is great for non-technical users. The only issue I could forsee is drivers. Apt loves to brick itself after 1 mistake. Since apt lags behind it may not support new hardware, forcing you to download drivers elsewhere, which is a recipe for disaster.
apt doesnt lag behind. The software packagers for whatever software you’re looking for are lagging behind.
Drivers are packaged with the kernel. The kernel doesn’t update between Ubuntu and Debian major releases.
What? Modules (drivers) are absolutely updated all the time. What do you mean between major versions? Of the distro or the kernel? The distros generally choose a specific kernel (lts or otherwise) for their release cycle, but to think it’s static or that backports isn’t a thing isn’t true.
I’m going to go with Arch.
I’m sure you could always “curl | sudo bash” your way to a one click install of practically anything involving Linux.
