What are some questions that newbies should ask when deciding on which distro to use as the basis for their system?

Do I want to get rid of windows without too much hassle?

• Yes? → Linux Mint
• No? → Linux Mint

Once you’re used to Linux Mint cinnamon, you can start hopping to other DEs like KDE, Gnome 3, Cosmic or XFCE.
And then once you’re used to that, you can hop to other distros.

During the HTML 4 days.

Do you use vim as your default text editor?

Not just text editor, but also IDE via rocks.nvim.
Ever since I wanted to edit some file that had like 2000 lines and I just wanted to quickly go to line 1164.
Nano wasn’t cut out for that and I hadn’t heard of emacs.
But I use a Typematrix dvorak keyboard, so I had to rearrange all the command.
Now I’m stuck with it and I enjoy it.

If you do not, have you ever been in a situation you could do nothing but use vim?

Yeah, whenever I type git commit -m "message goes here"
Also, I wanted to program on a server, so I ssh’d into it and decided that vim was the way to go as an IDE.

That’s “Les bians” for you.

Never forget to pluralize the nouns if the article is plural. 😛

Debian’s a Debian, but they call it Le Debian.

No, this is a response to the mass adoption of systemd by Linux and the Age Verification Law.

It’s GNU philosophy or owning a compromised OS.

Bad.

Linux will become the new compromised OS
not far removed from Android,
while GNU Hurd will become the new Linux.

[edit]

Go ahead and vote me down!
It doesn’t change the way Ubuntu and Systemd have operated.

The better question asked is:

How do they explain to you that they don’t?

I use XFCE for it’s philosophy of modular being better.

That would be a coincidence since Bitcoin was created by a single college kid.
But I’ve seen SN’s website a few years before 2022 when I figured out his identity and Putin knowing his identity would not be surprising considering what was on his main page.

What stuff is being said about in the Epstein files?

No, they do not.

They are two economic systems predicted by Karl Marx to be superseding capitalism,
with communism superseding socialism.

Socialism is what China currently is.

Communism is thought to be like star trek.
No one needs to use currency for their survival.
There’s no large gap between the rich and the poor.
Government plays a small to non-existent role.

The USian way of viewing socialism is “centre-right liberalism + religious democratics + social liberalism + social democracy + democratic socialism + marxist leninism” = socialism

Welcome to Lemmy, where socialist nations means nations that follow Marxist-Leninism and not a form of modern utopian socialism better known as social democracy that took bits and pieces of Marxist-Leninism under a capitalist umbrella.

So not like Denmark, but like China or Vietnam.

Welcome to capitalism, where stuff like this is only illegal in socialist countries.

Yes and the manual install taught me how to deal with DEs refusing to start without having to do a full reinstall.
It’s such a pleasure to be able to save your setup no matter what the issue, apart from the time I accidentally erased my hard drive with a sudo rm -rf * command that was supposed to wipe a USB drive.

EndeavourOS if you’ve never used Linux before.
Arch if you’ve played around with Linux, but want to learn some more basic terminal stuff so that in case your Desktop Environment breaks down, you know what to do to get it back up again without a full reinstall.

Homework.

College used linux because I did computer science.
Topic: concurrency. College then gave us a programming assignment that required adding a code library, which I had never done before or even heard of, and thus did not understand.
Since this was a library that was platform-specific, they had made one library for linux and one for windows.
Way too late I got the gist of it but still couldn’t install the library.
Since the question contained the linux directory structure I was convinced that the windows library was broken and every other college student finished this task in Linux.
Thus I installed Linux.
Ten years later I understood and finished the assignment.

I went from Sailfish, to Ubuntu phone, back to Sailfish,
then bought a Pinephone due to the war,
not knowing if the Finnish company would survive
before going back to Sailfish.

Pinephone, despite it being the most linux of phones, used up too much battery power.
Ubuntu phones were already miles better.

If it does ship it with UT and Fairphone doesn’t, then yes.

Have had both. Still have Sailfish because the phone is cheaper.
Also I thought Ubuntu Touch would be discontinued and I no longer use Ubuntu on my desktop,
but an Arch-based OS.
Best thing you can do is buy a phone that’s most compatible to the OS.

So Fairphone 5 or Pixel 3a for Ubuntu Touch,
and Jolla 2 for the Sailfish.

Do not buy Pine64.
Pine64 is unusable.