Yes. It’s already grown from ~1% to ~6% within the last couple of years. There are several major external factors at play: Valve helping to push gaming on Linux, the continued and increasingly big enshittification of Windows, and the current deranged US regime (resulting in less trust and less users of US-company-produced proprietary operating systems). Remember that Linux or the open source BSD variants are the only (usable/practical) operating systems you can use if you want to achieve digital sovereignty. Plus, it’s also getting even better over time by itself of course (that’s the internal factor).

There was or is a specific bug with earlier Ryzen CPU generations that causes system freezes when the CPU enters the powersaving c-state #6. If that applies to your machine, try the kernel parameter max_cstate=5 for a while. I had one PC build where this 100% resolved the system freezing after several minutes. Note though that this is ~6 year old info. Issue might have been resolved in the meantime. But worth a try probably if you have an older Ryzen CPU.

Yes. It always pains me when I see how tons of open source projects will not leave Github because of the network effect. Yes, it might be inconvenient… even punishing… but it needs to happen, especially after Microsoft bought Github. The ONLY way to counter the network effect (and contribute to meaningful change over time) is by NOT being part of the network effect. By remaining part of it, you’re only helping Microsoft.

“MS Office with its integrated spyware and other anti-features doesn’t meet basic security and data protection requirements so I use LibreOffice”

I still like Arch the most. Since ~22 years now.

Mint or Fedora(KDE) are great choices. Kubuntu, PopOS or OpenSuSE might also be suitable for beginners. Stay away from Arch-based distributions until you are at least a bit more experienced.

Intel (anything) works without problems on Linux (in fact, Intel is among the most Linux-supportive companies out there and most or all of their drivers are open source and part of the kernel, as it should be in the Linux world).

Nvidia GPUs used to be problematic in the past, it’s better now, still not as great as AMD GPUs are on Linux (they’re literally plug and play these days) but I think when going with the distro mentioned above it’s going to be just as easy Just make sure to enable support for NVidia drivers or “enable 3rd party drivers/repositories” (you’ll be asked during setup) so that those distributions will also install those slightly non-standard Nvidia packages which they might not do otherwise for “purity” reasons.

Yes, and they intentionally want those lines to be as blurry as possible.

I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

And it’s not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they’re spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

“AI PCs” will increase your dependency on MS’ online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that’s a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you’re ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they’re doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It’s just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

I don’t think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They’ve bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they’d have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

I think we’re currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won’t ever exist in the way they describe them, but they’ll claim it will always happen “in the near future”. CEO brains probably extrapolate “Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years”, so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you’d still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it’s not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).

In more or less random order:

• Org-Mode is one of the most amazing packages for Emacs. Some people use Emacs only for that. I personally use it for second-brain style note taking, TODO lists, simple presentations, PIM, Wiki-like articles, writing docs (and then exporting it to other formats), and even some simple integrated spreadsheets/tables including some simple calculations
• Magit is a really good Git frontend. Some people use Emacs only for that.
• Use “use-package” to install/configure packages. Streamlines configuration a lot, compared to the old days.
• Use the “no-littering” package to move a lot of randomly generated files into centralized directories
• Use winner mode to undo/redo window configuration changes
• Use which-key to show a popup of available keybinds when typing something
• Use the integrated “time” package to create a world clock view
• Use the integrated modus-themes for highly configurable themes with a nice contrast (since I’ve spent some time configuring that theme, I’ve stopped using any other theme)
• Use hl-todo package to highlight keywords like “TODO”, “NOTE”, “WARNING” or “DONE”
• Use doom-modeline for a nice modeline
• Use nerd-icons to add nice icons to many views
• Use avy to quickly jump to specific locations, lines or characters using different keystrokes
• Use eshell for a quick shell (which works the same on every Emacs, regardless of the OS) and/or either vterm or eat if you need a full-fledged terminal emulator
• Use embark as a “context menu” when cursor is over anything (bind embark-act to e.g. “C-.”)
• Use editorconfig package to specify/load different editor configs per project
• Use treesitter and eglot (or lsp-mode) for modern syntax parsing using language servers
• Use neotree (or treemacs?) as a file tree viewer, but dired is also cool if configured well
• Use org-modern package to beautify org mode display
• Use org-appear to hide formatting characters unless cursor is directly next to them
• Use Unicode characters to beautify otherwise ugly or bland default characters, e.g. set " ▾" for org-ellipsis
• Use gcmh or similar packages or config settings to improve general Emacs UI responsiveness
• Use packages which improve the minibuffer, buffer switching, completion, and basic things like that. There are several good ones and you can’t really go wrong with any, I just think the newer, more well-integrated ones like consult, vertico, orderless, marginalia, and so on are “nicer” than the older less well-integrated ones like helm, ivy and so on
• Bind “goto-last-change” to a nice keybind
• Bind “quick-calc” to a nice keybind
• Bind “org-agenda” to a nice keybind
• Bind “toggle-truncate-lines” (line wrapping) to a nice keybind
• Bind “kill-this-buffer” and “kill-this-buffer-and-window” to nice keybinds (e.g. C-x k / K)
• Bind “consult-line” (or something similar) to e.g. C-s
• Bind all window and buffer cycling/management related commands to nice keybinds
• If you want an easier entry into Emacs and are already a Vim user, try the Doom Emacs distribution or the much simpler emacs-kick configuration (just a config file which you can use as a starting point for your own edits). If you want to start with Vanilla GNU Emacs but want a decent but very minimal default configuration, try emacs-bedrock.