When i first researched Linux distros and learned that Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, etc were all derivatives of Debian I knew it was the distro I wanted to learn.

Granted the package manager does tend to fall behind and the Linux kernel is quite outdated on Debian 12 however, it works great for 99% of tasks (including gaming!).

Is there any point of logging in with a different account?

When you edit & save a file as root, root takes ownership of that file. I personally don’t like having to run chmod or chown every time I make minor changes to something.

Not nearly as user friendly for the non-networking types hence why I recommend one with a fancy GUI.

Edit: Also, I suspect Microsoft will do Microsoft things and hide/prevent their telemetry from being blocked, ultimately I don’t know the state of Windows right now as I’ve made the switched to Linux many years ago.

Ah I figured Portmaster was only for Linux, I dabbled around their software and found it quite good!

I think the reason I stopped using it in lieu of OpenSnitch was because 1) most features were locked behind a subscription and 2) already had PiHole running so the firewall wasn’t something I really needed.

Regardless thanks for letting me know it works for Windows, I’ll started recommending it over Glasswire!

Quick way of accomplishing the “de-bloating” of windows is by 1) managing your own DNS and blocking telemetry connections network wide (quite easy to do with PiHole + Docker Engine) or 2) installing Glasswire and blocking connections on the specific device however, I believe Glasswires Firewall is subscription based so this may be a turn-off for people.

Either work and are more efficient than digging around your Windows install and finding all the different variants of the same bloatware.

And lying isn’t the answer either.

drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux

I dunno man, Debian makes it pretty easy.

1. Prerequisites

x64 Kernel headers:

sudo apt install linux-headers-amd64

2. Debian 12 Installation

Disable secure boot & add ‘Contrib’ repository to sources list:

sudo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

Install Nvidia driver

sudo apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree

Restart system.

Bonus points for optimal performance follow CUDA doc & OptiX doc for Ray-Tracing & utilization of Nvidia cuda cores.

Late to the conversation but maybe consider https://invidious.io/ or https://docs.piped.video/ - also for an easy to use desktop client there is https://freetubeapp.io/ which utilizes invidious/piped API’s.

Personally I host an invidious instance on a separate machine and route that machine to a VPN my other devices do not use.

If ProtonDB says that it’s working then it’s working, most likely something ain’t right with your setup.

Unless you’re an Israel citizen then why does it matter? Chances are you passed data through an Israel server at some point in time whether it be directly or not.