As Ftumch said, winget is really the way to go these days. No browser, just:

Terminal > winget install mozilla.firefox > Done.

You’ll find a lot of differing opinions, so I will give you mine.

I’m currently running openSUSE Tumbleweed for over a year now, and I can say I am somewhat happier than on Windows. There were (and on my install still are) issues that I have to sort out sometimes. These issues can vary, but the most important thing to me (and I assume you) is gaming.

Gaming was excellent at the start of my journey. Games ran just as well, if not better, on my Linux machine than on Windows. I was amazed, truly! Then, I finally upgraded my 10xx series NVIDIA GPU to a 50xx series GPU, and it was quite a bad experience.

Drivers for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux can be iffy and problematic at times. I’d be fully prepared to read up on or risk asking the community (I’ve never had a good experience talking with the Linux crowd, personally) about any suggestions. The problem with those suggestions is you will get plenty of “Works great on my distro!” (Distro here means the Linux “flavor” you choose to go with i.e. openSUSE for me, Mint for others, and Bazzite for others).

Recently, I did an upgrade for my distro, and it made my RustDesk stop booting on computer start, and I can’t use GE-Proton versions that I downloaded through ProtonUp-Qt and that is pretty problematic for someone like me who is trying to get as much oomph as possible from their machines for gaming. Steam’s Proton works just fine though, so sometimes you might need to fiddle with the Steam Compatibility settings and try different Proton versions.

I won’t try to drown you in any longer of a text wall, but here is what I will end off on.

Linux feels like home, while Windows feels like someone else’s home. As for a distro recommendation for someone wanting to dip their toes into Linux and have a much better time than I did, I’d recommend either SteamOS (Valve’s distro they use on the Steam Deck, which is what got me interested in Linux gaming capabilities in the first place!) or Bazzite (a community distro I believe is based on SteamOS?) for gaming, and Fedora for a more general purpose computer usage. Just make sure you really gear yourself up for what may turn out to be an adventure you weren’t expecting to go down!

Exactly the reason I set up mine. Couldn’t be more important at this time!

Sorry, buddy. I’ll burn down your fucking offices and data centers before I go back to manual labor.

I didn’t do 15 years of manual labor just to go back to that shit after I finally got out.

“I like looking at AI generated kiddie porn, actually!”

• Tim Sweeney

I can see why so many options would make someone just shake their head and close the settings app.

I think you should go through them when you have the time, if you’re still interested in the other things KDE brings to the table. I went through all of the settings when I moved over to openSUSE Tumbleweed last December, and I’m still here today. KDE to me is what operating systems should do. Give me the power to change every single thing I can, while still having presets for people who don’t.

Anyway, I see your point though! The options are great for making the OS feel like mine!

Orion browser allows this on iPhone! You can use Firefox or Chrome add ons.

I’m always a little shocked at what my browsing habits prevent from these types of things. Thanks for sharing! I feel a little better about my browsing usage!

I left last year around December because I realized how well my Steam Deck ran games. I’ve dabbled with Linux over 10 years now, but gaming really is the only thing I bought my desktop computer for. It has an NVIDIA GPU in it, so I was a little wary of messing my stuff up by installing openSUSE Tumbleweed, but I had a spare SSD from a laptop that finally gave out on me, and installed that into the desktop.

Color me surprised when I find out just how much better Linux is that day (and even today!) than it was all those years I had tentatively tried distros like PopOS/Manjaro/Fedora/Debian/ElementaryOS/etc!

I say this every time I talk about Linux now, but I actually love my computer and being on it again. With Windows, I just wanted it to get the hell out of my way and let me play my damn games (I have a very limited amount of time when I get home from work to do anything I want to do, babysitting my OS is not something I want to do with that limited time)! With openSUSE, I feel totally in control and have my system set up the way I want it to.

There were some things I definitely had to get used to, seeing as I never had to research issues I was having with Windows (never had a problem in the 20 years I’ve been using them, EXCEPT for Windows 8. That was a big piece of flaming garbage, as is Windows 11. 7 and 10 were okay for me though).

Since last year, I have had to login to Windows only to mod my games and move them back over to my Linux SSD (which Linux allows me to pull files from my Windows drive, and is SICK by the way!) and I think maybe play ONE single game because of those mods or A mod. Totally worth it, all said and done!

With Windows, it feels like I’m stepping into someone else’s home. With Linux, it feels like MY home. :-)

KDE is the best desktop environment I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. So much better than Windows at everything I want out of my desktop!

Very true. When I first ever installed Linux, it was on an old laptop that I wasn’t using for anything serious anyway, so the install process was simple for someone like me, even as a kid. That doesn’t mean I knew what I was doing by any means, but that was something that made me pause to try and decipher what all these words meant on the screen. lol

No problem! I just wanted to see if I might be helpful in some way! Cheers!

Hi there! I have a tiny11 ISO that I always use to install Windows on stuff when needed. I’ve never encountered this issue before. Have you tried using Rufus to put the ISO on the USB? It has options for stuff like that. I can’t say how successful they are, as I guess tiny11 does a lot of that itself?

Hey there! What I do on Linux is use the Thorium browser to make the Apple Music an app in the OS. It works really well, but does have some weird visual glitches every now and then. I chalk that up to me having an NVIDIA GPU and using Wayland though, so it could work better for you!

As for lossless, I am not sure on that as I don’t have ears that can tell the difference so it has never been something I focused on!

Cider also went from an open source project to a closed source project. I stopped using them after that.

You can try Neocities!

Could not have said it better myself. After my trial ended, I realized I was just going to pony up for it. It has probably saved me so much time when I’m doing my own little rabbit hole shenanigans at 2 in the morning when I should have been sleeping 4 hours ago.

You’re the reason I started using Kagi. I was skeptical, but you made me interested. Thanks for that! Nothing else could compete when I was on a search engine tryout marathon!

Cheers!

Same here.

Finding actual answers or at least able to point me in the right direction is way better than any of the other search engines I’ve tried.

DDG, Google, Bing, SearchNX, Ecosia, Brave, and probably some more, they just aren’t even in the same ball field for the things I look up personally.

I got a Dell computer that was headed for the dump from someone, installed TrueNAS Scale on it, and it has actually replaced my Synology for everything other than straight up storage. Now the Synology does the storage, and everything else is in TrueNAS. It did take me a few lookups to understand the permissions on TrueNAS, as Synology is much easier to set up in that regard. I like the fine grain permissions controls, sure, but it was definitely not user friendly to a complete noob like Synology was.