Para_lyzed

Do you not consider Alpine Linux to fall into the general category of “Linux”, then? It lacks GNU user space utilities, though there is never a world where I would not consider it a “Linux” operating system. You seem to be overgeneralizing here and making assumptions about OP’s intentions that aren’t based in fact. I don’t see the point in drawing meaningless lines, here. What you’re referring to (as described by the GNU project) is GNU/Linux, not “Linux” by itself. The two are often but not always used interchangeably, and treating them as exactly the same leads to major outliers, like Alpine. I’ve heard plenty of people use the term “Linux” in practice to describe software running on embedded devices that don’t contain GNU utilities, so this isn’t exclusive to Alpine. In fact, the only real exception that I see consistently to operating systems that run the Linux kernel is Android, so it makes much more sense to formulate a description of the generic term “Linux” as simply having an exception for Android, though I’d argue that the only reasons that Android isn’t viewed as “Linux” is because it is a mobile operating system, it is developed with the sole intention of including non-free, proprietary software (AOSP by itself isn’t meant to be the full operating system on any device, but rather a framework), and the fact that the structure of the filesystem and the way apps are run differ completely from the ways of traditional “Linux”. It seems to be an exception purely by the fact that it operates in fundamentally different ways than other “Linux” operating systems.

Fedora is what I’d describe as cutting edge, but not bleeding edge. It’s still behind from source, and is semi-rolling release, so it’s further behind than Arch but way ahead of stable/fixed release distros like Debian

Idk, I think Gentoo and Void would be worse for a new user. But yeah, most other distros will be more new user friendly. Bazzite has a great new user experience, for instance

Not sure what the title was before you changed it, but if I see a post in my feed that looks like this (without the “very bad take” part), I wouldn’t even want to open the post to see the description. I’m glad you clarified by editing the title, but without making your stance clear in the title from the very beginning, it would be bound to receive a barrage of downvotes.

This is a bit late, but I just wanted to follow up to let you know that Fedora 40 updated to kernel 6.9 last week.

Fedora has pretty good SELinux configured out of the box, and isn’t focused on opsec. It’s just sane defaults and proper limitations to access. It also switched to Walyand-by-default this release, completely removing X11 from the default packages, which mitigates many of the “app spying on other app” scenarios that a previous user in the thread was talking about. That’s not to say that Fedora is the pinnacle of Linux security or anything, but it comes with pretty good defaults for the average user. You’d have to get into kernel hardening and deep into SELinux to do better as an end user, which is not something that most users are inclined to spend time or energy on.

Is it related to the issue described in the post attached to this comment? The linked comment also links to an issue page with details about the issue the poster experienced. If so, then that issue should actually be fixed in kernel 6.9 (which still has not been added to the Fedora 40 repos), and not caused by it.

An extension of this issue is present in 6.8.9+ before 6.9, which is why I ask if this seems to be related (since the versions are pretty close in time and Fedora doesn’t even have 6.9 yet).

The flowchart is as follows:

LibreOffice or OnlyOffice for desktop apps (no, they are not Microsoft apps, but yes they use Microsoft formats and can edit and save Microsoft documents/spreadsheets/etc). OnlyOffice is the closest of the two to the Windows experience.

If you really aren’t open to using alternative software (which is strange given that you’re using Linux), then the web apps exist. I’ve heard they’re really close to the actual desktop suite, though I don’t have any interest in ever using them as we have very good free and open source alternatives available (see above).

If the web apps don’t cut it for you, then you can run the official apps in a VM, or maybe through WINE. Here’s the WINE DB page for Microsoft Office, which lists various Office versions and their level of compatibility through WINE.

Copilot will likely not be possible to secure on Linux in a standalone desktop app (unless someone somewhere hacked something together through Electron to use a web version). Another user said that Copilot is available inside Microsoft Edge, so I suppose you could install that, though I’d highly discourage that. Reliance on LLMs is quite frankly a plague to society, and often feeds incorrect, biased, or purely fabricated responses, as LLMs merely attempt to predict what word is most likely to occur next based on a set of training data, none of which was vetted for accuracy, racism, zionism, sexism, etc. LLMs like copilot do not have any form of intelligence, and do not understand what they are saying. I highly recommend you just use a search engine in your browser, because it’ll feed you the same info all the LLMs were trained on anyway.

OneDrive recently received native support in GNOME, so I think you should be able to access it in your settings under accounts/connected services (whatever GNOME calls it nowadays)? I’ve never tried to use it, so other people will know better than I will there, but it should be possible to use.

Alpine is much more targeted towards containers, virtual machines, and embedded devices. The most common use is for containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Podman), as it is incredibly small and efficient, and containerized applications can be specifically designed to run in Alpine. It could be used as the main OS of a production server, but isn’t especially common to my knowledge. Its biggest advantage is its incredibly small size, which is what makes it so great with containers and embedded devices. It is not targeted towards desktop use, so desktop support in Alpine is an afterthought more than anything.

Of course, you can feel free to use Linux however you like and choose whatever distro you like, but it’s very likely the problems you’re having are centered around musl.