It’s the same Debian base under the hood, but has:

• A more user-friendly installer (I know Debian’s has improved with Trixie, but Mint’s is still easier IMO).
• A newbie friendly welcome screen that walks them through setting up a snap shot back-up tool, theming, updates, firewall, as well as easily providing a link to help documents, and shows the user the software center exists.
• The excellent Mint Software Centre Appstore (I don’t think that comes with Cinnamon on a standard Debian install, I think it’s just the terminal).

Not the person you responded to, but I also generally prefer Krita for GIMP-y/Photoshop-y tasks, though I am by no means an expert photo-shopper, just an amateur.

Krita has most of the necessary tools for photo editing, especially as it now comes with the G’mic tool pre-installed (it can be added to GIMP as a plugin, too), which is incredibly powerful, and has features such as a fantastic heal/object removal tool called Inpaint (shown here in GIMP, but the same process is used in Krita), as well as a quite good alternative to Adobe’s Magnet Select tool called Extract Foreground.

GIMP has a different heal tool plugin available called Resynthasizer that I think is a little quicker to use, but from what I recall didn’t give quite as good a result compared to the G’mic inpaint (though much better than Krita’s non-G’mic heal tool, which gave the worst results).

There’s more tutorials on different G’mic functions here, which really shows off how capable of a toolset it is.

To become a debian maintainer, you need to have already built up a rapport with Debian by being a sponsored maintainer, which lets you submit packages, but they must be approved by your sponsor. Only after establishing and proving yourself can you become a full Debian package maintainer, which also requires a trusted Debian team member advocates for you to become one based on your previous work in detail. While not impervious to bad actors, this structure creates a pretty solid level of trust in the Debian repos.

In contrast, anyone can create and submit a Flatpak to Flathub, only needing to pass a volunteer review process. Critically, after an app passes the first volunteer review process, the submitter can then push updates to the flatpak without review, meaning they could initially upload a clean version of an app, then push a version with malware in an update. Personally I don’t think that security model is as effective at preventing malware compared to the Debian model of slowly building trust before being given the keys.

Verified flatpaks, on the other hand, require the submitter to verify they are part of the dev team for that application to the Flathub team, which makes them pretty much as trustable as any Debian repo package, which make them a good, safe default to show for an appstore (IMO).

Hm, that could be, I haven’t tried their KDE version. Though I can’t say I’d recommend that to a newbie either, as KDE in particular isn’t a good option for Debian based systems since it uses a pretty old and (at least in my case) buggy version that won’t receive any bug fixes or security updates until the next major Debian release (it’s bad enough that the KDE devs themselves recommend avoiding KDE on Debian)

The older version of discover that comes with Debian is also pretty bad for newbies, IMHO. It is cluttered with non-relevant library files and system themes when searching for apps (I believe this was fixed in newer versions), and has no way to filter out potentially dangerous unverified flatpaks when flathub is enabled, which a newbie wouldn’t know to look for. Mint’s and Gnome’s appstore don’t show unverified flatpaks by default.

Ehhh, I’d recommend against MX if only because they don’t ship with a more approachable app-store like Linux mint does.

MX’s app installer tool is more similar to Aptitude, which is to say, completely functional, but entirely text based (no screenshots, reviews of apps, etc) which isn’t to say it’s wrong or bad, but I’d wager it’d be offputting to the average person compared to the more image-heavy and user-friendly design of app-store that Mint or Gnome-based distros have.

I’m always excited to get a solicitor. I let them do their spiel for a bit about whatever they’re selling, and when they pause, I earnestly ask them if they’d like a bottle of water, and then ask if they think they’re being adequately paid for trudging around all day in the heat.

Those two things happening at once has, without fail, caused them to stop trying to sell me something, and instead make them really curious why I’d ask that, which gives me an opportunity to mention unions and the benefits they bring such as higher wages or commissions.

Most of the solicitors around where I am are quite young, and so far none of them even knew what unions are, and they were genuinely interested in learning more. As the conversation winds down, I offer them a union pamphlet I keep near the door.

Great way to stop people from trying to sell me stuff, while potentially helping seed a union, or at least help spread the idea of them.

The new text tool is huge, since the old one was naff to use. This new one is a game changer for me.

Be the baldness you want to see in the world (I.e, create a bald community here :3)

If you have an Nvidia GPU, it’s hard to beat Linux Mint, unless you have the absolute newest bleeding edge hardware.

If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, Linux Mint Debian edition is great.

Just noticed this myself. Hopefully they get it back online.

It took me a bit to figure out how to make a call (definitely bad UX). What got it working for me was adding the other user as a contact (beyond just messaging them, it’s like a different thing), and then making sure they also added me as contact, and each person accepted that contact request, then the call button seemed to show up, and the call worked fine, even video.

If you’re comfortable with it being a private company that has proprietary software and utilizes a CLA for its own components, then by all means, use them.

Personally I’m at a point where I distrust any essential software that isn’t GPL licensed, as that’s the only way to ensure that it’ll always be in the community’s hands. Otherwise, we’re just hedging that Sailfish won’t someday be sold to a larger publicly traded company, who will then utilize the potential lock-in factor that the proprietary parts of Sailfish and the CLA’d components bring.

PMOS is certainly not in a usable state for the average person yet, which is why I suggest people donate to it so it can become more polished and support more phones.

Exactly, it’s like a corporate wolf in FLOSS clothing, and huge red flag.

Movim in particular is the most suited for a discord replacement in the XMPP space, as the dev implemented discord-like channels with rooms. It also has group video calls and screensharing with audio (must use a chromium browser for now to share the audio).

It is still clunky compared to Discord, but that generally applies to most of the alternatives 😅

From this page, it seems to still have problems, but I’m not sure how up-to-date it is.

Matrix has a lot of problems, some of them inherent to its design, including leaking metadata of encrypted messages to any server that participates in a chat room (this metadata includes the time the message was sent, size, sender and recipients of messages).

I personally think Movim is the better option that’s actively federated, while Fluxer is also promising if it successfully implements federation as well.

No. Use Nostr for that, since it’s already overrun by crypto-bros over there.

If you’d rather avoid registering, you could try Movim instead, which just needs a username and password to use, no email required during sign-up.

It’s open-source and GPL licensed. There are no restrictions if you self-host, the subscription only applies if you use an account on the main server, which pays for development and hosting costs of the main server.

Unfortunately, Sailfish OS uses a proprietary (closed source) android compatibility layer, as well as a closed source UI.

For the parts they have open-sourced, they implementrd a CLA that contributers must sign. It’s the HA-CLA-I-ANY license, which specifically allows them a perpetual Copyright and Patent license, and permission to relicense your code contributions to a more restrictive license which enables them sell or package it into a closed-source proprietary app.

Personally I’d be more comfortable supporting the development of PostmarketOS instead, since it is completely open-source with no CLA, meaning no chance of any rug-pulling in the future.