JAdsel

Seconding this. I’m also using Infomaniak here with my own domain, and would definitely recommend it. Their free tier comes with 15GB cloud storage on top of the 20GB mailbox cap, which is better than a lot. I’m more focused on data privacy these days, and haven’t seen anything concerning about their service so far.

Infomaniak offers their own mail app for Android, but the accounts are easy enough to set up over IMAP in whatever client you prefer. I’ve been favoring FairEmail personally. The same developer is behind NetGuard, which you might also find handy if you’re on stock Android. (I’m using GrapheneOS now, which already has app network access control covered.)

I was in a somewhat similar place when I first got a laptop with Windows 11 preinstalled. Decided to dual boot, set Windows up with strictly local accounts, and actually poke around in there out of curiosity.

Tbf, the last time I was regularly doing anything in Windows was during the Vista --> Win 7 era. This did not make 11 any more approachable or easier to get even very basic things accomplished. I didn’t like the UI (still don’t), and kept getting frustrated at those “little” things like the Bluetooth codec issue you mention. Haven’t even tried to do much gaming on that side, to compare, other than a couple I couldn’t get working properly through WINE/Proton. (A couple of other software packages too.) So I ended up rarely playing those, and only booting into there at all once in a blue moon.

I did recognize that a lot of that frustration was on me and my expectations, though. Doesn’t mean that I still don’t want to have more control over basically everything about my system. I probably could make even modern Windows work better for me, but why bother when I’m already happy enough elsewhere. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Same here. I started out on Debian Woody, then decided to try a side install of Mandrake specifically because it was supposed to be the most user-friendly option. I do recall liking the Mandrake experience well enough at the time–but stayed primarily using Debian, because I’m stubborn and rather enjoyed the sense of challenge.

(Also kinda setting the continuing pattern of keeping at least one side distro or OS going to try out. These days, they are more likely to live in VMs though.)

Gotta say, you have a point. Too lost in the privacy sauce to really notice it earlier. ;)

I caught mumps at around 30, during one outbreak thanks to the proliferation of antivax garbage. Only about half of kids in some London boroughs were fully vaccinated, centered around a couple of the wealthiest areas–and that was nearly 20 years ago. (Meanwhile, I was indeed fully vaccinated as a kid. It’s not foolproof, and especially not forever.)

Thankfully recovered just fine without complications, but that really was NOT much fun. Adults are pretty much guaranteed to get sicker, even if they’re otherwise fairly young and healthy–and lucky enough to avoid any of the serious complications which are likelier to occur.

I have found Mozilla’s sync across devices handy, but now I’m in the process of moving over to using Vanadium on my GrapheneOS phone and FireDragon on desktop.

FireDragon started out as a Librewolf fork, but is more recently based on Floorp. They are still keeping in sync with Librewolf’s privacy enhancements, with some of their own thrown in. I like that the default search engine is Garuda’s instance of Searx, with Whoogle as another option if you don’t want to self host. FireDragon will also sync your Firefox account off Garuda’s server instance if you like (which would be more useful if I weren’t going with a Chromium fork on mobile). The Garuda project is certainly looking more trustworthy than Mozilla these days.

You might want to look into Snapper: https://documentation.suse.com/smart/systems-management/html/snapper-basic-concepts/index.html

Booting from snapshots has pulled my chestnuts out of the fire a few times–between using a rolling release distro as my daily driver, and NVIDIA graphics not always behaving well in conjunction with that.

If you install the Linux bootloader on the other drive with Linux, Windows basically just doesn’t know or care that the it exists to bother writing over it. You can use UEFI to choose what to boot, but GRUB works fine with entries across different drives.

That said, it’s not actually that hard to fix with a live USB if Windows does decide to eat GRUB on the same drive. I’ve been taking my chances on laptops particularly for years. So far, the only real problem I’ve run into was doing something stupid while dead tired and managing to nuke the Windows bootloader all on my own–somewhat ironically, while I was setting up another Linux distro to boot off a new drive! Which was also totally fixable, but a bigger pain than reinstalling GRUB would have been. (Especially with not being nearly as comfortable dealing with Windows stuff.)

I haven’t seen anything really discouraging out of Infomaniak, either, for e-mail and drive services. Been using them for a while now.

As already commented, the vast majority of apps are fine with Graphene and its optional sandboxed Play Services. Mainly some banking apps can be tricky, but otherwise you’re good. You can also use alternatives like Aurora Store rather than Google directly to get your existing apps which aren’t on F-Droid; the only real exception there is paid ones.

I got a Pixel and made the switch over about a year ago, and it has been pretty smooth sailing. I also really do appreciate having full control over which permissions to allow each app. I know some people do prefer to run Google’s stock camera app or keyboard, but it’s easy enough to not give those network access to phone home.

Does it work if you launch steam through mangohud? Like:

mangohud steam-native

You would probably want to temporarily remove the per-game launch command while running it that way, for the HUD to actually show up in game (assuming it will load). But that’s another approach to try, at least for troubleshooting purposes.