Most of the time, you don't really have to worry about hardware compatibility, especially if you are using desktop. There are some things that work better than others (like AMD GPU as opposed to Nvidia) but in most cases both are fine. As others already suggested, probably the easiest way to get started is to just grab a USB drive and put Linux on it. You can then boot onto it and play around in that installation, also with this you can check that your hardware is compatible.

Other than that, I would recommend just trying it. Look into distros already there are some good suggestion with Mint, PopOS, Fedora. Try different Desktop Environments (basically how everything looks) there are two major ones KDE and GNOME and some other ones. Try them and see what works best for you. Overall, I wouldn't worry about it too much, especially with your usage any distro should work for you.

Thank you for posting that, it has been a while since I laughed like this.

Not sure if this will be useful, but the thing that broke the China bad programming was actually the Huawei ban. Looking back at it, I realized how ridiculous it all was and didn't make any sense. This was even before I considered myself a Marxists. But not really sure if that will help with convincing many people, especially if they are not into tech.

I would say that especially leftist Linux users are against every corporation. But there are reasons why Linux users prefer AMD to Nvidia. They are more FOSS friendly. If you want to argue for free hardware, I 100% agree, but unfortunately that is basically impossible nowadays.

If you want to be alarmed about what your computer is doing, I would much more worry about things like Intel management engine and AMDs version of that. Or the binary-blobs that you load just to use these devices. Those are actual issues that we should be focused on.

I mean, sure, but that is true for literally every single info on your computer. If you can read data from these modules, you can read data from anything else. You can read entire memory, query your file system, do basically anything you want. At that point, the issue of whether someone can query the capabilities of your intel CPU is not something I would worry about.

Who says the distribution of glibc 2.3.4 you and I have are the same? It only depends on where you got it from. And even then we can build it with different flags etc. Not really sure how rust is worse in that one. On the contrary, usually when you build software in C/C++ you dynamically link. So you have no idea what version of libraries someone is using or where they got it. In that sense, Rust's approach is actually safer.

Basically no one uses rust with dependencies from git. Except in some cases when you are working with very unstable software. Everyone just uses versions that are published to crates.io. If you are concerned about reproducibility that is a valid concern but for that cargo is pretty good, or you can use things like nix.

The fact that it has word telemetry in it doesn't mean it spies on you. CONFIG_WILCO_EC_TELEMETRY -> allows you to read telemetry from some chrome specific hardware CONFIG_INTEL_PMT_TELEMETRY -> allows you to access telemetry that intel platform monitoring provides CONFIG_INTEL_TELEMETRY -> allows you to configure telemetry and query some events from intel hardware.

None of these options spy on you or do anything nefarious. It just means that you can have an application that queries some data from them, nothing more.

Again, not sure what your issue with Rust is.

And with IFS it is same as above, someone here already linked you an article on it.

Most of the code written nowadays isn't self-contained. And basically it is impossible to do so. I mean, I guess you have some exceptions like the Linux Kernel itself and some low level utilities, but you use libraries and others people code everywhere. In that way, Rust is much better than most other options because it at least lets you pin your dependencies really easily. The idea that everyone who uses some code is auditing it is just ridiculous. You should be able to sure, and in some cases it might be a good idea to do so, at least for parts of your code. But if you are using Linux, did you audit the entire Linux source code? What about C standard libraries. Even just that would take a ridiculous amount of time.

I would also argue that rust isn't pushed everywhere, people just like it because it is a wonderful language. There are much more people who use it in their own projects than do it professionally for example.

I could understand your argument if it was based on how Rust is run, what licenses it uses etc. But this is rather baffling to me. Basically the only thing you mention is the issue of statically linked vs. dynamically linked.

With zstd again not really sure what you are even trying to say. That Facebook had impact on what is used? Ok, so? Zstd is completely open source and if someone decided to use it, that is up to them. I am pretty sure that every software I used that uses zstd also let me use another compression algorithms. And from what I found zstd in some cases is superior to alternatives, but feel free to provide sources, I am sure that I could be incorrect.

I don't really get the point of this post. If you want to say that quite a lot of FOSS code is funded by huge corporations, then yeah, sure. Most people I would assume know that. But not really sure what that has to do with title, even if Linux is mostly run by corporations it is still much better than alternatives.

Also, not really sure what you mean by traps like Rust and telemetry. There is no telemetry on Linux and the only reason why I can think of you included it is recent Go telemetry, which I don't really get how it is relevant. With Rust, I also don't get it, Rust wasn't added because some company wanted it or whatever, it was added because it is a popular (and extremely loved) language that is suitable for kernel development. Not many people nowadays want to code in C.

So far just contributing to other projects whenever I find something, missing. My main project that I am currently starting to work on is a Wayland Tiling Compositor written in Rust, but so far I am still in very early stages. I really like how Wayland works but so far all the compositors are lacking something I want, closest to what I want is DWL, but it still lacks some things I want.

Sure they are much more notorious, but as it turns out most of the time there is absolutely no reason for that. Just take current hysteria around TikTok, even if it was correct (which I would argue it isn't) no one cares about all the other apps that we know for sure spy on you and give info to US government (and others).