Having spent five years on Linux with an nVidia card on my previous laptop, I can safely say my thrills are exactly nil. Hearing the words “nVidia Optimus” will legit put me in a bad mood.

I’m not sure which distro would work with your laptop. I would suggest experimenting with live USB images. Maybe using something like Ventoy which enables you to try out multiple live images from one USB stick. But as far as applications go:

• GIMP is native to Linux and should work fine. You might also want to give Krita and Inkscape a whirl. Also, massive props for ditching Adobe. I hate that company as much as it hates their customers.
• Blender works on linux.
• So does Davinci. Allegedly. Haven’t used it, but their website says Linux support is available.
• I don’t code so, um, no idea. Sorry. Hopefully someone else will weigh in.
• Good news, Linux has working file explorers!
• No ads, at least for the most part. Ubuntu had Amazon’s search integrated into their search bar a while back, which caused quite a kerfuffle. Later, they added a toggle to turn this off, but this was years ago. Might want to check just in case.

For similar reasons to your own, I tried a few different Discord frontends a while back so I could chat with one of my friends who lives abroad. I never found a winner. They either wouldn’t connect or would be missing tons of features (for example: one of them only let you watch the chat, not participate in it). I also seem to remember reading somewhere that Discord is pretty aggressive when it comes to third party apps. It’s their app or nothing. You might have better luck than I did, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

And as others have mentioned, if you’re looking for privacy, Discord ain’t it. Sorry I couldn’t give you a more helpful response.

True. I would consider another package manager if it integrated into my system nicely and if I had more than a few applications outside my regular package manager. But I only have like two AppImages on my PC anyway, so I don’t mind updating them manually when I need to run them.

Counterpoint: I don’t like having more than one package manager on my system, which means things like Flatpaks and Snaps are out. With AppImages, I just double-click on the executable and off it goes.

“Suggestion #3 will shock you!”

Even RedHat is doing the clickbait thing now. Pitiful.

How about Revolt? It’s open source and it’s pretty much a Discord clone.

Syncthing is nice, but Localsend has a more user-friendly interface.

On average, Vatican has two popes per square kilometer.

EDIT: My bad, wrong thread.

Congratulations to everyone involved! I don’t use Windows anymore, but when I did, NPP was one of the first things to get installed. Super useful.

Agreed. It may look kind of like macOS, but it’s nowhere near as functional. Also: No. Desktop. Icons. Just why.

EU here. I mostly user Organic Maps and navigation works fine, especially so when going hiking. Some kind souls have mapped even the minutest mountain path throughout the country. Seriously, I think I’ve only had one example where the path wasn’t on the map. And that was a wild trail. AND because I noticed in time, I tracked the trail from start to finish and added it to OSM later that day, so that’s no longer a problem. Gotta love it.

Looking up addresses though… That still needs improving.

Let me just check out the window real quick. There may be flying pigs.

Yeah, I only glanced at wikipedia’s e-reader comparison sheet and saw the word “Partial”, so that’s my bad. That said, transfering files to kindle still seems to be a pain. From Amazon’s page:

Upload documents through the web, an authorized email address, the Kindle app for iOS and Android devices, or a Send to Kindle application if available.

So, if I’m understanding this correctly, you can transfer files to your Kindle through:

• a) Send to Kindle webpage
• b) Email
• c) An iOS or Android app
• d) Send to Kindle application

For a) and c) to work, you need an Amazon account. b) seems to be a bit unorthodox, but sure. And for d) needs an application to be installed on your computer. Contrast that to, say, PocketBook, which simply shows up as a USB device and you just drag and drop your e-books into their designated folders. No account, email or app required.

EDIT: formatting

Just go for whichever looks best for you, as long as it supports the EPUB file format, which is by far the most widespread ebook format nowadays. Be warned that the Kindle is particularly bad in this respect, because it only offers partial support for EPUB. You have to go through a whole spiel to get an epub file to your Kindle, whereas with most other e-readers, it’s just a matter of copying a file over to your device.

Here’s a comparison table for e-readers on Wikipedia. It may not be comprehensive, but it should give you an idea of what functions and/or features you’re looking for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-readers

Windows Media Player wrecked its own dumb self. It was good right up to Windows 2000 and Windows ME (which is a whole other kettle of fish), and then it got bloated, unintuitive and it kept nagging you for random shit. VLC is a great app, don’t get me wrong, the bar was not all that high is what I’m saying.

Agreed. I too like LibreOffice, but it still has a ways to go. I’ve shown it to a couple of people and they didn’t like it at all. Specifically, they mentioned the cluttered interface and unresponsiveness in some applications like Calc when dealing with massive spreadsheets. And dealing with massive spreadsheets is like half their job.