I use a text/limited voice only plan from https://tello.com/

This is hilarious… after bailing from using the run file a couple months ago and going back to the 550 driver due to instability, I finally decided to install the 570 manually today. Should have waited LOL, the timing…

Michael’s clickbait game is amazing lmao

As someone who has migrated data to new PCs many times, I will say you should always back everything up and sort through it later. I have had many occasions where I’ve forgotten about important files or documents and deleted them because I didn’t know they were in the location I deleted. Storage is relatively cheap, buy a 30$ hard drive dock and a couple TB hard drive (spinning HDD, not an SSD), and use a program like FoxClone to completely clone your current OS drive. Then you can happily wipe it and still have the backup should you need it.

Invidious still works very well, however it is an ongoing battle with YouTube. They ban an instance and the instance’s ban evasion routine tries again, or in the case of IP range bans migrates to another provider and the game goes on. Despite this, it is the only way I know of to access YouTube relatively pain free using a public VPN provider. By now YouTube has blocked a lot of public VPN IPs. To me, this advantage makes it worth it.

The best way to keep up with which instances are currently functional is via the Invidious Matrix room, https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org. You can also check the instances list https://instances.invidious.io/ but it may get out of date sometimes.

Finally, I’ve found the best way to use Invidious is via FreeTube (Linux) or Clipious (Android).

What do you recommend for users coming from Windows?

The ultimate in privacy for YouTube is Invidious https://invidious.io/, which fully proxies your videos from YouTube through an Invidious server. Every once in a while YouTube will get the upper hand and figure out how to fingerprint and block the servers, but so far the community has always figured out how to circumvent it. One advantage is that you can feasibly use a VPN with Invidious; without it, you have to keep hopping from VPN server to VPN server until you find one YouTube hasn’t already blocked, especially on a large public VPN like ProtonVPN. This applies to NewPipe as well, since NewPipe still tries to talk to YouTube directly as far as I understand. On Android I use Clipious as the app to access the Invidious servers.

Agreed of course, just letting them know the choices they have haha… my path was long, from Windows to Ubuntu to Lubuntu on an old PC, then dabbling with Qubes (daily driving was too painful) which introduced me to Debian and Fedora, back to Windows for gaming, dipped my toe back into Linux gaming with Fedora, and finally settled on openSUSE Tumbleweed for all my machines. It was all worth it tho!

Proton, which is the main enabler for Linux gaming given that not many games are released with a native Linux version, is provided via Steam already with no need to install SteamOS. If you are coming into Linux brand new from windows I’d recommend installing a very popular distro like Ubuntu, or Mint. Learn the basics, and make sure to learn how to backup your data on Linux. If you are a) frustrated with missing some feature or software in your current distro or b) just curious about tweaking your system, start learning about how to work in the Linux shell (start with bash). Then come have some fun on a distro like openSUSE Tumbleweed (my current distro), where you always have access to the latest software and can change tons of things about your system in exchange for having to put in some more time to manage it. If that still doesn’t satisfy your needs and you have decided you love Linux and are never going back, then check out Arch Linux or its derivatives where you have nearly unlimited freedom but the highest time investment.

Michael using different language than NVIDIA to describe the state of the driver is confusing. I guess he considers New Feature Branch to be stable, except the first 555 versions released under that designation were (IMO, based on my system and watching the feedback forums and changelogs for 560/565) not very stable from a user perspective… which I suspect is likely why NVIDIA has not released any 555/560/565 to Production Branch for ~6 months now. And it’s still not clear which major version is planned for Production Branch…

Nope, pretty normal. You’ll find that you’ll need frontends and proxies for tons of things. For example Instagram hasn’t ever worked for me with a VPN. I no longer have an account anyway, but for the times someone sends me a link I’ve had to find sites that let you view the content without actually visiting Instagram. Same with reddit, reddit frontends are very good these days (I’d recommend any Redlib instance). Also, sometimes a specific VPN server is IP blocked and you can just connect to a different server to view a web site that blocked you initially. It is a fair amount of work, but honestly its helped me slow down my consumption of random bullshit anyway haha. I use ProtonVPN and pay for premium.

Relax and Recover for bare metal backup of the OS critical components and directories, and Deja Dup (or Gnome Backup) for user files

Best solution I’ve found that allows interacting with google drive files from any application and from the command line: https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse

Invidious, one good instance is https://iv.nowhere.moe/

So… does THIS mean that this doesn’t support explicit sync, right as explicit sync is about to be stable and supported in the NVIDIA 560/565 drivers? As far as I know there are currently other ways to do screen capture outside of this protocol on Wayland so its not like there are no interim solutions, why release this when it is essentially still incomplete?

I wonder how this calculus changes with the dawn of AI built into the OS… will a Linux system that avoids all that nonsense end up being more energy efficient?

My experience so far as a new user, which might be a little redundant but here goes:

• Overall, there is a balance to work out between security, decentralization and FOSS, and anonymity.
• for the average user, using sandboxed google play is pretty much essential. Otherwise you’ll spend days trying to figure out why you aren’t getting notifications, why certain integrations aren’t working, etc. Notifications especially are just painful without google FCM. HOWEVER, I do not believe it is mandatory to sign in to your Google account for notifications to work, so you could in theory avoid signing in at all and still take advantage of FCM.
• multiple profiles don’t make sense for my use case (and possibly most people). Graphene does advertise the use case of having banking apps on a separate profile, but after attempting to do just that I believe it is a very niche use case that would actually benefit from it. Obviously a great tool to have for privacy and security, but not something you’ll went to use everyday.
• For the move away from Imessage, it is indeed kinda painful and still ongoing. The simple fact is that people are super weird about switching from I message, and honestly going straight to Signal was a no-go for many of my contacts. I’ve had to settle for WhatsApp, Telegram, and even Discord… I just have had to accept that the transition will take time. I’ve weighed that privacy issue against the privacy gain of GrapheneOS itself, and the benefits of supporting a 3rd party OS option, and I still believe using Graphene is better overall. And, once people get used to using a 3rd party app vs Imessage, in a couple years the jump to Signal will be no problem at all.
• banking apps are super painful. That being said, here is an opportunity to vote with your wallet… Support apps that don’t require invasive system access for “security”. For me, the biggest eye opener was that there are NO GENERIC THIRD PARTY TAP TO PAY PROVIDERS IN THE US. It is only Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, or Google Wallet. And, as is pointed out on the Graphene user guide, 3rd party apps are allowed to implement their own NFC payment system, but the extremely vast majority simply choose to use Wallet or Apple Pay. This is obviously rather scary as more and more retailers use these systems, and I’ve realized I would gladly support and use any alternative at this point. Without Graphene, I would have never even thought about it.

What are you using for the Unified Push setup? I tried using ntfy and could never get notifications to come through on GrapheneOS

If it works on chromium I’d consider that even if it is a quirk on the bank website, chromium is handling it cleanly and allowing you to use the site. That’s something we probably want incorporated in Firefox. I’d encourage submitting the bug report to Mozilla, and don’t assume too much about what they can/cannot do!

I think the key part here is that it’s a guess on your part whether using Firefox is the cause. Do you get any specific error when using the website? Or does something just “not work”, such as you click a button and it does nothing?

Also, I’ve run into stuff like this before, and my best bet has been to be flexible about using other browsers to work around issues. I would suggest testing the banking website with Chromium (or even Chrome). If it works, file a bug with Mozilla (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla) and just use Chromium/Chrome for only that website until the bug is fixed.

This will allow you to still do business, while still participating in open source via a helpful bug report that could end up benefitting others as well.