Sure, blame the user… This is why we have distros with ads like the OP. It’s our fault for seeing the propaganda you shove down our throats. Give me a break.

Yes, using an adblocker would be a way for me to not see ads.

But I'm not using one because I usually don't mind seeing ads as it's the main income for most sites.

In this case the ad to content ratio is just too much for my taste. Too many ads and not enough distinction between ads and content.

BTW I tried to add more constructive criticism in another reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653500 as the parent is flagged dead by now it might not be easily visible

Are you old enough to remember Lindows? in like 2000/2001 it was a straight Windows ripoff, even used the old Win 9x/2k theme iirc, and had WINE built in, preconfigured and would intercept windows programs automatically and run them via that. It was blatant enough MS actually took them to court, ended up settling by buying the Lindows trademark from them for 20 million and getting a pinky promise they wouldn't be so confusing to consumers by trying to pass it off as a Windows equivalent. The product was eventually renamed Linspire and continued as a noob-friendly distro with less 'Hey, we're actually Windows!'.

After being a GNOME fanboy for decades, v3.0 and beyond left me disillusioned. I took to ElementaryOS and Mate, which was alright. Then I discovered KDE Plasma (thanks to Steam Deck) and absolutely fell in love with it. Well, well, well…how the turn tables[1].

1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=How%20the%20...

I thought ElementaryOS was dead due to infighting between the two cofounders, but it still seems to be going: https://elementary.io/

(I had installed it on one box a few years ago and liked it, but moved back to Ubuntu once I learned about its conflict in the team.)

Obligatory reminder that elementaryOS, "the easiest to use Linux distro" made as a knockoff of macOS, expects users to format and reinstall every year when a new version is released.

I can't recommend it.

> ElementaryOS

One person project…

Of course no security team…

mx linux is fast!

It's not about having ads or not. As I explained elsewhere it is the ad to content ratio.

There are so many ads and they sometimes blend with the content that it's hard to find information. That was my experience. YMMV

Some ads - fine. Selected and appropriate ads - fine.

Let me explain via my experience of THIS website on an iPhone.

A banner ad appears at the very top, covering most of the cookie notice. I would be surprised if this doesn’t violate EU law.

Upon collapsing it and agreeing to give my soul to the Cookie Monster, another ad takes up most of the screen. This ad, ON A SOFTWARE SITE, says “download now! Start downloading. Download your copy now [green arrow]”, with a small logo at the bottom left saying “learning lab”. ON A SOFTWARE SITE.

I scroll down half a page. Another banner ad appears.

Then I see a tiny amount of information in an infographic followed by a form to donate in US $ or EU $ (not € - they’re asking for euros in $…).

Below that, another Download Now ad, this time from The Books Master. It takes up half the screen.

Then a bit more content. Some testimonials too. Then… another half screen ad. Then the page footer and another half screen ad.

From my estimation, 50% of the page is ads, two of which are deliberately misleading (on behalf of the advertiser).

I have absolutely nothing against ads, but this takes the biscuit. I would absolutely not be surprised if this was done in prep for posting to hacker news, knowing the views it’s going to get - but Id also not be surprised if it’s just designed by someone who doesn’t understand the dreadful public image that this has.

I’ve never heard of the distro. It doesn’t look like it’s designed for the likes of me anyway (clue’s in my username). But I could never direct someone to a site like this.

Not illogical at all. It gives you information about the creators and is atypical for open source folks to commercialize in user-hostile ways. It's like a moral version of code smell.

The examples aren't very good analogies.

I wouldn't trust any of those things you list with my data, so I think it in fact seems logical.

Blue text color and underline are two things that universally help people recognize links – so no matter how custom your CSS is, using any of these traits for other purposes is a bad idea.

Of course, nowadays links can be any color and without underline, and we're getting used to it too. This only means that using any color to emphasise words in a text is a bad idea, as more and more people would see that as a link and get confused.

Just stick to the good old italics.

Would it? Because the answer is probably “most of them”. There’s hundreds of distros. I very much doubt they care about Secure Boot, or, even if they do, have the resources to support it. Some are even outright opposed to Secure Boot for a variety of reasons.

Can you enable it anyway on any distro? Yes, but it may require non-trivial steps to do so.

Debian is community maintained. Funny to recommend OpenSUSE but pretend debian could do the same as RHEL.

True but in Debian's case I believe their 'social contract' forbids such a move, plus there is no central for-profit entity controlling the source code.

> Trying to stay closer to Debian and further away from Conical.

My thoughts are similar, therefore LMDE is the best choice!

Canonical's policy for several years goes into a bad side and reminds Microsoft more and more:

- He pushes to users with his sick ideas ONLY because of a business, for example many violations of privacy, spying for Amazon, Unity, obsessive forcing snaps (because they completely control the repository) ... etc. Here read more: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Host_Operating_System_Selection#...

- Ubuntu with every new version is getting worse and has more and more bugs, And with them all Ubuntu derivatives

- The publishing cycle issuing new versions using the force method at a fixed time limit, even when it is not fully ready and has full of unprotected errors (only marketing counts)

- LTS promises support and fixing errors, but does not keep the word and there are security errors never fixed

- Additional broker between Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint increases the surface of attacks and errors in comparison to Debian -> Mint.

- Debian has been a bigger reputation from Ubuntu for many years. after all, Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian, only broken along the way!

- The LMDE team makes a fantastic job, but LMDE is poorly visible in the galaxy and is very underestimated.

LMDE = All the best of Debian + all the best from Mint!

https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php they have that covered :)

If you throw some money at the project so the dev team can drink a couple of beers on you, that's donation.

If you throw some money at the project because they imply that otherwise development and software availability stops, that's paying for software.

Not saying that either one is bad, or worse than the other. But this doesn't look like the first case.