Tekdeb

Thanks for the recommendation. Qobuz has lots if things I would appreciate, but the last time I tried it it was missing a lot of the music I regularly listen to. It has only been a few months since then, but I will give it another try to see if it has changed.

True, which is why I don’t think Deezer is a perfect choice for me either, but at the surface level 41.4% US-owned is better than closer to 100% which all the other services are that meets my requirements. Personally I found that number on the Deezer Wikipedia page, but it is marked with “citation needed”, so it could be completely wrong. And that probably is the case if it’s true that Access bought exclusive control.

“The US that you hate” doesn’t exist. I disagree with a lot of decisions and policies and want better for the American people and the rest of the world that is both directly and indirectly affected, but there’s no hate. But you do make an important point that I hadn’t thought deeply enough about and I agree with you. I believe it’s better to support something that’s simply based in the US rather than the specific policies I disagree with even if it’s more money.

Qobuz would be my choice as it would avoid this dilemma, but their catalogue wasn’t good enough for me the last time I tried it. I’ll have to try again to see if it has gotten better since then. But I have changed my mind and will cancel my Deezer subscription regardless and try to find an alternative. Or maybe I’ll just drop streaming services completely for now as most of my active listening is done with my own local collection anyways and I could always set up a Jellyfin instance if needed.

I’m quickly running out of options… Apple Music was honestly really decent, then the US did their thing so I looked for non-US options. One of my requirements is lossless quality, so Spotify is out (regardless of their own ethical issues). Tidal is also out as it has been a US-owned service for a long time. The remaining options are Deezer and Qobuz. Qobuz seems good in terms of ownership and whatnot, but their catalogue is missing things I listen to quite often, or at least it did when I last checked it out a few months ago. I think I’m staying with Deezer for now. It’s not ideal as Access Industries own 41.4% of Deezer whose owner this post is all about, but it’s the least bad of all the options I’ve found. They also don’t have every song I’m interested in, but they’re pretty close.

I think both Bazzite and CachyOS are solid recommendations, but only Bazzite is immutable out of those two.

I would recommend Mint over PopOS if that ends up being the choice, but Bazzite is probably the safest choice here. Both Cinnamon and Plasma should be pretty easy to navigate for someone used to Windows. Nobara is great, but personally I would stay away from distros with so few maintainers (only GE?). GE is an amazing dev and has done some great things for gaming on linux, but the chance of having to switch distros sooner or later is fairly large. If you don’t mind helping them with that, then I don’t think you can go wrong with Nobara either. Personally I currently run CachyOS with KDE Plasma and it’s been super solid for my use case including gaming, but I would not recommend any Arch-based distros to “the kind of person who needs help if their TV is set to the wrong input” even if it is quite beginner friendly and stable. But I also keep Windows around on a separate drive regardless for the times when Linux isn’t the right tool for the job, most notably because a lot of competitive games do not run on linux as they require kernel level anti-cheat (https://areweanticheatyet.com/). If the person you are referring to have no interest in those kinds of games, then that becomes a non-issue, but if their favourite game is something like Valorant or Fortnite then Linux simply isn’t a good choice for them yet. That is also true for some Windows-exclusive applications. Most applications have good alternatives or can run fine through something like Bottles or Lutris, but some don’t.

Otherwise, most games typically work fine (https://protondb.com/). Some work flawlessly without having to do anything. Some only require minor tweaks like setting a launch parameter or selecting a specific proton version. Those I believe would be acceptable, if not perhaps a little frustrating for such a person, but there are also a lot of games that run but can have issues of varying degrees that you can’t do anything about. They are almost always good enough, but sometimes those issues can be significant. What I suspect would be a killer is that some games may stop working after an update which requires further tweaking or simply staying broken until either the game devs or proton devs fixes it.