Have you tried changing what the applets do when you click? Most of the time you can set whether it should create a new instance, cycle windows or raise or lower existing ones from the applet settings. See if changing that could help?

I use XFCE/Budgie (flick between the two) so not too familiar with cinnamon.

Satire, the stereotypical “Arch just breaks after some time” trope. I’m saying that trope is correct if you don’t fix it.

Pretty much everything in the General Recommendations section.

XFCE doesn’t support Wayland yet, however a lot of the components will run under it. They’ve got a tracker on their site.

Arch installs aren’t too bad, it’s the post-install setup that’ll get you though since a fresh install is guaranteed to detonate if you don’t disarm it.

It doesn’t even have to be complex anymore thanks to archinstall.

To be fair, most users are just gonna go the new user route. Download the Fedora media writer, set it to download and flash Fedora, boot to the stick and install.

I was a decent ways into my Linux experience before I learnt about Ventoy, but I don’t use it as I prefer flashing a whole ISO. There’s no hand-holding once you leave Mac or Windows, so you have to count points of failure yourself, Ventoy wasn’t worth it.

I suggest you take the normal new user path, and after that start trying things. Learn to walk before you try running :)

Piped?

Well at least a Local account doesn’t require internet access.

At least you can use Windows without an account, on MacOS you can’t even install an app without one I don’t think.

Just to be clear, I hate both of them, I’m a Linux user.

Really depends on what you want your system to be, if you want a lightweight system choose a barebones distro like Arch, Gentoo, Void or any server spin such as Fedora Server. Then, during installation you only get what you need. If you are going lightweight you’d probably want something like Sway WM, Hyprland or XFCE.

If you don’t care for minimalism, then choosing a distro focused on a graphical interface such as Fedora Workstation will be much better for you, since that distro will be maintained with the idea of users using whatever DE it is, the distro maintainers probably contribute to upstream of the DE too. Support will also be easier since you’ll find that these distros, while maybe having smaller communities, those communities ask more questions and get more solutions due to the Linux inexperience.

You’d better hope that be pretty close to zero before attempting repairs.

From the one time I tried MacOS in a VM, setup is similar to Windows with somehow even fewer options and stronger 1984 vibes.

I’m a Proton slave, all my eggs are in their basket so I’ll go ahead and provide some free marketing for them. ProtonVPN is pretty good since it’s ran by a good company that cares about you, getting Port Forwarding setup on Linux is a bit of a chore but I believe they’re working on automating it, the Windows app does have it automated already by the way.

I do worry about the long-term practicality of ProtonVPN because of this manual process, since as far as I can tell there’s no way to automatically hand your assigned port to the torrent client…

Every OS requires setup.

Linux is not a prerequisite nor is it a required side effect of digital privacy, sure the two go hand-in-hand thanks to FOSS but you can have one without the other.

Red Star is a Linux distro, but it’s the embodiment of the antithesis of privacy.

Oh wow, that’s pretty awesome.

I use Hetzner exclusively and have just one complaint. You don’t get much choice as to where your VPS is hosted country-wise nor the OS it runs. You do get the standard list of options, as you would with any other provider, except that list is quite small on Hetzner. It’s good enough, I use Fedora everywhere and they support that so I’m good. Anyway, it’s obviously free to create an account so there’s no risk in case your setup isn’t supported.

Apart from that, they’re brilliant. The web console is nice, clean and well-designed, great value (1TB of storage clocks in at a few euros/month), room to scale and a decent company. Can’t comment on customer support since I’ve never needed it.

For the services you’ve specified, that’ll run you maybe 3 - 4 euros a month (that’s with automatic backups of your entire server + tax) since you can run all of that under one server.

I’m not an expert with this stuff, I just do whatever works. This works, so I do it and when people ask me or just in general how to do it this is what I tell them. Most of the guides I’ve come across, including one from DigitalOcean, recommends doing this.

I think so.