Mull development has been abandoned. You might want to switch to IronFox, the community’s fork to continue its legacy.

I personally vastly prefer mutable distros for my own system, but I understand the appeal for those who like them. As long as mutable distros remain an option I don’t mind immutable distros.

Mint or Pop_OS are likely the most widely recommended distros I know of for beginners. I haven’t tried either of them myself, but from what I hear about them I’m inclined to agree. Personally I would NOT recommend a rolling release distro to beginners. Too much potential to break things way too easily and way too often, which would likely require digging into the terminal to fix. Terminal-averse beginners wouldn’t be served well by that at all.

Even given that, I’d still think there would be an uptick in Linux market share, but only a small one. Certainly no “year of the Linux desktop” levels.

I don’t remember if I went with the official or the pure KDE version. Either one should work. You can always try both out in a live USB before installing. The gaming focus refers to some modifications made to some drivers/software for the purpose of improving gaming performance. When you update your software you have to use Nobara’s update program in order to ensure that those mods are applied and preserved.

That’s a thing with Neon. It’s the “testing ground” for new KDE releases so they won’t guarantee stability. It literally is just Ubuntu LTS with a KDE repo thrown on top, and the Neon devs themselves only maintain that repo, with just a short delay after the new Ubuntu LTS release comes out. In Neon, the users are the quality control for KDE releases. I was using it for a little over a year until the rebase to Ubintu 24.04 broke my install. I went to Nobara, a gaming focused distro based on Fedora that uses a custom version of KDE as the default. I just upgraded to the newest version not realizing it wasn’t official yet, and it must have been the smoothest major version upgrade I’ve ever had in a non-rolling distro. It’s maintained by GloriousEggroll, who also builds/maintains the customized GE versions of Proton on Steam. I’m finding it’s not just a good gaming distro but a solid and stable distro overall. GloriousEggroll puts a lot of work into ensuring that on top of the Proton work he does. If you don’t want the gaming performance customizations he makes, try Fedora KDE spin, it’s likely to be pretty similar and I rarely ever hear someone have a problem with Fedora.

On your other question, next time you reinstall you can create a separate Home partition on your drive that should allow you to do what you’re looking for. So you have your boot and swap partitions and the one you install your distro to, and then your home partition, so you just install the new distro over the old distro and it should leave your home partition alone.

Combination of software availability and the perception that Linux is only for developers/servers and you have to be a computer genius to use it. Even if you can convince someone that just running Linux isn’t rocket science, there’s still commonly used software like the Adobe suite and MS Office that just don’t have feature-parity level alternatives, even if those alternatives are almost there. I can do most of the stuff I used to do at work on LibreOffice compared to MS Office, but not everything. And while compatibility with the MS Office file types has really improved leaps and bounds over time, there’s still some noticeable issues when opening those documents with one program after making changes with the other. People mention Photoshop a lot as a deal-breaker, but especially with GIMP 3.0 coming, GIMP will be a lot closer to Photoshop than most Linux PDF editors are to Acrobat. The only one I can find that has even close to Acrobat’s features is Master PDF Editor, a piece of paid software (if you want all those features without an annoying watermark) that I don’t think the free version of is in many repos. People say to use LibreOffice Draw, but that’s drawing software meant for entirely different file types and is really not good for any PDF with any type of formatting in it because Draw isn’t designed to handle it. I don’t need those features on my own home PC, so I’ve been running Linux on my personal machines since 2009, but for those who do need those things, it might be a hard sell.

I’ve used GNOME in the past but currently use KDE Plasma. Both are good, but as for recommendations most Linux people I know of say for new users that if you’re coming from Windows start with Plasma and if you’re coming from Mac OS start with GNOME since those are the closer desktops to what you used before and will make things a bit easier. Depending on the distro you choose you may also have access to other desktops like Cinnamon, which I haven’t used but have heard is even easier than Plasma for new users coming from Windows. It’s not ready for daily use yet, but the upcoming Cosmic desktop may also be quite good for that.

Ditto here. NewPipe + VPN works fine on my tablet I use as a YouTube machine. The only problems have been when YT messes with stuff to try to block them, and then NewPipe will have it fixed usually within a day. And that doesn’t happen as often as people think.

If you’re already thinking of extracting/attempting to run a desktop version of Office, you may as well save yourself the effort if you can and give the free online version a try. You’ll be using a proprietary piece of software either way.

Servers are the one thing I’ve generally heard people agree that snaps are good for, so given its history it’s a bit of a strange thing to hear of Ubuntu being a better server distro than desktop distro nowadays.

I’m a centrist but I lean slightly right, and I’ve used Linux for 15 years. There are plenty of conservatives who use Linux for the privacy and security advantages it offers. At least one of the Linux YouTubers I watch is quite conservative. That said, Linux dev communities don’t tend to take kindly to conservative members voicing opinions while many allow left-wing opinions free rein, and some distro devs have openly stated they don’t want conservatives using their software. They should either allow political opinions from everyone or nobody, IMO. I’d say preferably just leave politics out of it altogether, FOSS should be open to be used by anyone regardless of politics or any other factors.

GNOME is more different from Windows, which means that users will have to put more effort in to get used to the UI, but it doesn’t have as many complicated settings or customizability for EVERYTHING that Plasma does, so it can be less confusing in that sense. I switched to primarily using Plasma a couple years ago and I’m probably with Plasma to stay, but personally I think GNOME might be better for Linux beginners. Though if you really want a beginner-friendly DE, go for Cinnamon.

Definitely, XP was by far the best version of Windows. (Telling that I switched to Linux in the Vista era).

Temple OS returns!

It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

In addition to the perception that you have to be “good at computers” (aka a programmer) to use Linux, in my experience a lot of Linux media outlets (websites, YT channels, podcasts, etc) tend to be heavy on advanced features and tools without much explanation in layman’s terms and tend to be geared towards an IT professional/hobbyist audience, which can reinforce that stereotype among those (like me) who are not.

IMO the title of “worst computer tech company” is essentially a tie between MS and Google right now, with the two constantly one-upping the other back and forth on stupid ideas and corporate practices.

Advertising costs money to produce, and the vast majority of paid Linux distro users, such as Red Hat, SUSE, etc., are business/enterprise users, who usually wouldn’t rely on advertising through TV, YouTube, and so on to find enterprise computing solutions. It would be a disconnect between the ad platform and the primary target market.