Varia is a download manager written using GTK4. Simple, easy, and best of all speeds up downloads significantly on most sites. There also is a extension for Chromium and Firefox, but I haven’t tried them.

Website’s style breaks without 3rd party scripts permission. Not that that’s indicative of the quality of the distro, but I don’t like websites that depend heavily on Google, Cloudflare, and external CDNs for scripts since it makes the website less secure.

Very cool, love Incus. Wish it had better security options, such as supporting GVisor application kernel.

I’d pick openSUSE Slowroll. Easy, monthly updates, comes with YaST system tooling.

It will have some challenges but the documentation is decent. If security matters to you, it has better protections than any other Linux distro (Qubes OS isn’t technically a distro). If you have a problem, first check to see if it is a Secureblue issue then check if it is an upstream Fedora atomic issue.

Secureblue eliminates many attack vectors. It is also recommended by PrivacyGuides. Worth trying if you can find davinci resolve as a Flatpak or Fedora RPM.

I did a fresh install of fedora in a VM given 4 cores, 16gb ram, and storage on an NVME SSD. Finally I am getting a reasonable boot time of 6.5 seconds. But on bare metal I can’t get anywhere close to that. Firmware alone takes 15 seconds. Either way, now I know that it isn’t a “Systemd problem”, just that only Systemd gives me this problem.

Idk what is wrong but every fresh install on any Systemd distro (Arch, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE) has the same slow boot on every device I have tried. I have never seen a 5 second boot on anything else but dinit.

Oh, and my disk is a modern M.2 SSD for my workstation.

I have tried. Nothing worked. I also experience the same slow booting on every machine+systemd, with the same resulting slow boot up. Even friends have mentioned to me the slow boot times compared to Windows.

I personally like GNOME/GTK. I think it is easy, but I recommend deviating from the default. The extension “Dash to Dock” is good for a former Mac user because it makes all the pinned apps viewable without pressing the super key.

What I will say about KDE is it can be whatever you want it to be. It is feature rich and its customization is unparalleled. You can customize it into looking like MacOS. I personally think Qt apps look ugly, which is why I go GNOME. KDE also has there ‘K’ naming scheme for apps, which can be confusing to new users who are looking for “Text Editor” when they should be search for “KWrite”.

Both are good. Maybe set up two VMs, one with KDE customized a little to look familiar to a Mac user, and the other GNOME. See whether she has a preference for the look and feel of each, especially the default apps because she will end up interacting with them a lot.

The big reason I personally dislike Systemd is bloat. It takes me 6 seconds to boot a windows 11 VM, it takes 20+ with Systemd, and it takes 6 seconds with dinit. On real machines I frequently hit 40 seconds with systemd. Now is that enough of a problem that I am going to switch to Windows (ugh) or Chimera/Artix, probably no. I still find it very annoying.

Yes, that is how fingerprint test sites end up working because so many privacy users will test out the most secure options. Not indicative of real worlds values for commonness of browser fingerprint.

Plus packages are manually inspected to ensure they meet Flathubs packaging requirements.

Legit goals

Appimages use the deprecated fuse2 dependency, never integrate well on the system, and run unsandboxed. I personally hate them.

openSUSE Slowroll and Secureblue are my favorites ATM. Slowroll for gaming, Secureblue for mobile device. Both are hardened for security because that matters to me.

Storms

Alienware should be Dell I think. Is there a security tab in the BIOS?

Secure Boot settings should be under the Security tab in the BIOS.

You should be able to enroll the Secure Boot key for Bazzite and keep it enabled. Instructions: https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide/secure_boot/