For my main computers, I’ve moved them all to Arch from Manjaro & EndeavorOS within the past 4 years. Though been meaning to try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed eventually. Haven’t used OpenSUSE in over 10 years.
I have a laptop running Proxmox for my servers, which is debian-based but uses a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel. Great to use to try out other distros in VMs as well.
If you’re a beginner then don’t worry about the encryption. Unless you’re hiding from some three-letter agency or being targeted by hackers or something, LUKS1 encryption is more than good enough (for an average home user).
But just so you’re aware, whilst it’s trivial to convert to LUKS2 using cryptsetup convert, you’ll need to first switch your bootloader to systemd-boot from GRUB, and that may not be a trivial process as there’re multiple variables involved - is your ESP big enough, have you mounted your ESP to /boot, whether you’re using secure boot or not, whether you’re dual-booting or not etc. Plus you’ll also need to manually create a bootloader config file that’s specific to your system, and maybe even add a line to load a CPU microcode file if you’re on Intel… there’s a lot of things to consider here.
Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend EndeavorOS to you as a newbie, because it’s basically Arch, but by making the installation easy, you’re skipping all the knowledge you’d get of your system and how it works. And when it comes to situations like you’re in, you reach a roadblock because you took the easy path.
If you’re really interested in Arch then I’d recommend wiping your system and install Arch manually, the Arch way.
That patch looks promising. But I wouldn’t recommend PBKDF2, I mean if you’re going to go thru the trouble of converting to LUKS2 for stronger encryption, might as well go for Argon2.
Windows 11 finally made me tell my boss “i’m not using that anymore.” I’ve used Linux exclusively at home and Windows at work, but got fed up just like you. I have a VM for testing purposes as the security admin and it’s actually improved my workflow since I can tear down and bring up VMs instead of using my main OS for testing.
Glad to hear you’ve had a positive switch as well.
It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn’t call me obsessed, but I really don’t like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.
JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.
Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.
I believe that it’s always a good idea to support alternatives.
I prefer to use products and services that I actually support.
I do still use Windows occasionally because not everything works or at least has an alternative available but Linux is and will probably always be my primary OS. Even if by some miracle Microsoft, Apple or Google actually start listening to their users and make their OS and business models perfect, I would still use an alternative like Linux as my primary because there would be nothing preventing these companies from reverting their decisions.
Zorin OS for now. Old kernel and stuff, but it’s stable, and I like the looks more than I did PopOS!. Maybe PopOS! is cooler now with their Cosmic thingy.
Jpg at 70% will lose a significant amount of detail. It is a “lossy” format, you cant judt compress data for nothing.
AVIF is significantly more efficient than jpeg, so it loses less image data for higher compression (smaller file sizes).
JXL supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is supposed to be more efficient yet over AVIF. However it’s got proprietary all over it because Google et al. For thst alone I would shy away from JXL and go AVIF.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.