Cornflake

The defaults really do give you everything, from a first glance, one might actually think it is Windows because of how the taskbar is set up exactly the same by default.

Also something to note is that the KDE Plasma desktop environment has a very similar layout to Windows 10/11. It feels incredibly similar, honestly almost 1:1 in some aspects. Tons of distributions use it as their primary DE, or at least give you the option of using it

Hey there, I made the switch a few months ago and my Linux machine has quickly become my primary laptop! I started out with Fedora, using the KDE desktop environment.

I know folks often recommend Ubuntu or Mint but there are reasons you might decide it’s in your best interest to avoid that. Ubuntu’s package manager (a.k.a. app store) pushes something called Snap packages. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with them, but people tend to avoid them simply because it’s a proprietary package system and the Linux community overall favors more open-source solutions. Also, Mint was an easy recommendation years ago and I’m sure it’s still nice now, but Mint really just looks like Windows 7. It feels aged as hell.

When picking a distro, do understand you’re really picking more the assortment of things your Linux will come with and how the OS will lay things out. It sounds awfully convoluted but really you can’t go wrong here, this is such a wide community and there are guides and how tos for just about everything.

I like the DuckDuckGo search engine, but I don’t care much for their browsers (mobile nor desktop). I do keep the browser app on my phone so I can generate alias Duck addresses, I do find that feature pretty handy.

As for how private DDG search is, I feel like the best practice for using any search engine privately is to clear browser data when you’re done searching with it. That’s a hassle though, so it’s smart to have a browser dedicated to temporary browsing sessions that you don’t plan to go back to later. On Android, browsers like Firefox (and forks like Mull) as well as Cromite allow you to set it so browsing data clears when you exit the browser.