i had an annoying proprietary vpn for work that was unwittingly compatible with the openvpn client

That really depends on you, keep in mind a lot of distro’s like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux are based off of Debian just using different repositories and with system files in different locations.

I personally went with Debian and have had little to no complaints, definitely BASH/Shell/Terminal heavy so if you’re not willing to learn BASH I would probably use an immutable distro that you can’t easily break like Bazzite.

I have a little bit to do left before I tell Microsoft to kiss my ass. But I will.

Another reason to switch to the Linux.

Glad I ditched Windows entirely on my personal devices and went to Linux. No ragrets. Games still work wonderfully.

Any absolutely required usage of Windows on a personal device is provided by a VM running a stripped-down version of W10 LTSC, activated by massgrave scripts.

I’m mostly into protecting my data

Debian. Not Ubuntu - just Debian. Or Linux Mint Debian Edition (Debian with Cinnamon on top).

My, uh, friend needs an explanation

Bad JavaScript code will create this text when a type conversion error occurs. A developer glancing at data in a production database will see it as evidence of an insidious bug in their code.

Break. Up. Windows.

Monopolies. That’s what happens when you’re allowed to patent software.

Nix isn't just for reproduction. It has immutability so if you break your system configuration you can revert to a previous profile, and the way installations are managed allows you to install software that uses incompatible versions of the same dependencies at the same time.

Weird that they started pushing bad updates after they fired all those people

Must be a coincidence

Classic recommendations are Linux Mint and Ubuntu, I think Zorin as well, but there are many others. For starters which one you use won't matter too much, because more likely than not you're gonna switch again.

I started with Ubuntu because it's easy to use and I was new. One can argue over the pros and cons. I'm looking at Manjaro at the minute, an easy to install and beginner friendly Arch distro. Really, you can just try most of them out online though. Check out DistroSea and you can actually emulate the OSs with several desktop environments right in your browser.

Linux is free open source mate.

This kind of shit happens with a similar frequency... on Arch Linux. It's rolling release, shit happens sometimes. archlinux.org's homepage actually lists past major packaging issues.

Debian however is rock-fucking-solid. But so is Windows Server, I hear. The problem is that Microsoft is treating Windows Home/Pro like a rolling release distro, and the users are guinea pigs. I guess Microsoft is right though, their users will eat it up 'till shit is spilling out from both ends, so why bother?

There have definitely been some disastrous Linux updates. There are so many distros being managed in different ways by different people in different sized teams, bad releases are going to happen all the time. A better comparison with windows might be how many bad kernel updates have there been, and those are usually vetted by distro maintainers before they get to users. I do remember one MESA driver update caused damage to display panels on certain laptops with intel iris graphics.

Any reason to not just run windows server for desktop use?