Budget focused audiophiles tend to have good advice, regular audiophiles can be completely dillusional and spend unbelievable amounts of money for placebo gains.

Migrants that does not want and actively avoid, being part of Swedish society

You’re not going to find many leftists that aren’t vehemently against deporting people for not integrating, especially leftists who believe in abolishing borders.

There is nothing right or left wing about throwing out people who commit murder och rape. That is pretty standard in most parts om the world even, because a nation has no obligation to let non-citizen criminals stay in the country.

You… you do realize Trump got elected on that exact rhetoric? People voted for him because “He would only get rid of the bad ones”.

From what I understand It doesn’t generally need tinkering as long as everything you need is a flatpak. I also read that it can require tinkering to install 3rd party printer drivers.

This is bad advice.

In general, yes, but that’s usually considered bad advice to do from untrusted sources, where as the main Mullvad page would be considered a trusted source, IMO. I understand the sentiment in general isn’t a good idea, though.

I dunno, it’s just frustrating to see I guess.

I think sometimes, depending on what is going on in someone’s life, you simply do not have the energy, time, or inclination to learn the intricacies of how to use a new technology.

As an example, if someone has kids and is fairly stressed out from their job, and thus has limited free time, it would likely not be at all appealing to have to dive through a manual to learn the intricacies of a still niche distro to learn how to install their VPN (as someone would have to do if they were using it on their own, and not just following the commands of an internet stranger without researching it).

While I do think it’s generally good to challenge yourself and be willing to learn new things to avoid learned helplessness, realistically all of us have limited time, and depending on someone’s goals and inclination, learning more in-depth sysadmin skills may not be desirable, and different people have different tolerance levels for troubleshooting; some find it fun, other may find it infuriating.

As an example, a professional musician who wants to switch to linux likely would prefer not to have learn the intricacies of Jack, how it’s replaced by Pipewire, how to configure the kernel to perform best for low-latency tasks, ensuring their user profile in the correct admin group to access the correct permissions, etc. They very likely instead just want to get back to making music so they can do their job without having to divert from their main task just to learn how to go back to doing their main task.

I think it’s quite reasonable that some people may prefer the most direct path to the tasks they normally perform, and may become frustrated at having to learn a totally new skill set to go back to performing their original task.

It’s not the worst recommendation, as it is at least better configured than standard Debian out of the box, and comes with an easy Nvidia driver installer tool, but yeah I probably wouldn’t recommend to most people due to how old and enterprise-y the default app store it comes with looks.

Mint’s interface is very close to Windows 7, it’s the most user-friendly of all the Linux desktop environments, IMHO. It does not handle fractional scaling as well as KDE though, if you use a 4K monitor.

KDE is also quite good, it offers a lot more features and customization, though it can be a bit more buggy than Mint’s Cinnamon.

Standard Debian would be hard for me to recommend to someone new or not interested in tinkering with Linux, or for someone with an Nvidia GPU. I do think Mint’s Debian Edition is a very good Debian option for those without an Nvidia GPU, though, and is what I use myself. It’s basically just standard Debian but preconfigured with sane defaults to minimize tinkering.

They are nationalist racists trying to cloak themselves with populist leftist ideas. This is the leader of that party:

https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
“I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.

One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.

In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said

Remember; the Nazi’s did the same thing by strategically calling their party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, despite them not being socialist nor a working class party. This was chosen because Socialism was gaining popularity, and thus the Nazi’s thought it would help their chances of getting votes and public support.

If you go in with the expectation to never making any compromise or touching anything its not realistic imo.

I agree, but I would argue it doesn’t really make sense for someone to recommend a distro that is more likely to need tinkering and research over one that is more likely to not need much intervention, especially to someone who is averse to needing too much tinkering.

Immutable distros have great promise, and I believe in the future they will become the standard, but right now their potential benefits aren’t likely to be realized by most average users yet, as the ecosystem isn’t quite ready for them to be as easy as a normal distro is currently, IMHO.

Without meaning to offend, I think your experience in both using an immutable distro as well as your general knowledge of how to use Linux from the commandline may be clouding your perception of how intimidating that would look to an inexperienced user.

As an example, despite using Linux for many years, I have never had need to interact with systemd, and thus I wouldn’t have known to start it with systemctl or to use -daemon. I could learn that if needed without any hesitation, but to someone way less experienced in Linux? That would more than likely just reinforce the perception of Linux having a high learning curve or only being good for people who like to tinker and fiddle in the command line.

In contrast on a normal Fedora install, the user can just copy and paste the commands on the Mullvad website without having to research or look through a specific distro’s manual, and at the end the app will be added to their launcher for them to use as normal. That method is likely to give a better impression, especially if they feel like their previous Linux attempts were janky or didn’t go well, as the OP has mentioned.

Needing Ostree is probably not a good newbie experience, and VPN’s in particular should only be installed from secure sources, not an unverified community package.

The average user will not notice any difference between systemd or any other init, nor will they interact with it, know what it is, or likely form a strong opinion about it (and honestly, good for them).

Ubuntu based distros are going to have a very easy Nvidia driver experience (just open the driver tool from the start menu and select the version you want, and bam, done). However, one downside of Ubuntu itself is their pushing of snap packaged apps, which are considered a bit crap, and can cause weirdness (I think Valve officially don’t recommend the Snap version of Steam).

You can avoid the snap stuff with Linux Mint, as they totally strip that out. Only downside of Mint is that it’s still on an older LTS version of Ubuntu, 24.04 (the latest is now 26.04, two years newer). You will need to add an additional PPA (a third party repository) to access the latest 610 Nvidia drivers on it, which some of the very latest games like the James bond require to launch in Proton. That may or may not be an issue for you. Mint also has the best built in app store, IMO.

Fedora is nice, but the Nvidia driver isn’t quite as easy to install, and it doesn’t come with some needed video codecs out of the box, though this script maker can make those pretty easy to get. I’d recommend it if you want more up to date apps in the repos and don’t want to encounter Ubuntu’s snaps.

Nobara is a spin of Fedora with all that stuff included (and has an installer with the Nvidia driver pre-installed, I think), made by the Glorious Eggroll who makes improved versions of Proton.

I personally would suggest choosing between those options, since both Ubuntu and Fedora based distros have a lot of 3rd party support, such as Mullvad, which only supports those two officially, and they have large communities with lots of help.

I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well.

The lack of scaling and even more critically, lack of federation, unfortunately makes this not a viable alternative, at least not for Discord as it is used today. As a smaller self-hosted option that is just for use between a friend group, it’d probably be fine. It just won’t be able to replace the exact use-case of Discord, such as allowing for easily bringing new randos you meet into a call without them having to sign up to your specific server.

The Discord-alternative landscape is filled with people vying to take its place, but I think we would be better served rallying behind Movim and XMPP, IMHO. Or Fluxer, if they eventually can enable federation.