Hey folks,
I hope this question fits here well.
Since I’ve started to care more about my digital fingerprint, I came to the conclusion, that I need to change my OS.
All my life I’ve been using Windows operating systems, but at this point I’m kind of fed up about the big amount of telemetry data which is being sent out by default. So maybe Linux is the solution?
I’m looking for a beginner friendly Linux-Distro, which respects my privacy. It should also be possible to play some games on it without too much effort.
What can you recommend?
Thank you so much!
Edit:
System specs: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB VRAM, 16 GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 5 2400G (tower pc)
Pretty much all of them, as they’re almost all open source and use similar components (drivers, kernel, userspace). I’d recommend Fedora or Debian just because they are relatively easy to set up, but check out other options on https://distrowatch.com/
Beginner-friendly would be Fedora or Ubuntu.
Then check out Surveillance Self-Defense at EFF (https://ssd.eff.org/) to learn more about privacy
Potentially a somewhat unsatisfying response, but it doesn’t really matter.
Most Linux distros are similarly excellent when it comes to privacy and similarly not-necessarily-excellent for gaming.
Obviously, they do have their nuances, but you’ll only start caring about that, as you understand more of the details.
What’s kind of more important, is the choice of desktop environment. It determines the look and feel of the whole OS.
Distros generally come with a default desktop environment, so your choice of desktop may ultimately play into that.
You can just look at a few videos to determine what desktop environment you like. Popular desktop environments (along with a reasonable distro shipping them):
- KDE: very feature-rich, very customizable, rather Windows-like out of the box (Distro: Kubuntu)
- Cinnamon: reasonably feature-rich, reasonably customizable, quite Windows-like (Distro: Linux Mint)
- GNOME: rather feature-rich, not as customizable, more macOS-like (Distro: Ubuntu)
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”.
Isn’t fresher always better?
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.