BlackLaZoR

For example, I could pay off my mortgage if I wanted to - but I won’t, because the average yearly return from stocks is around 7%, whereas the interest on my mortgage is 4.452%. The returns from my investments outweigh the cost of my debt.

I wonder why bank lends you mortgage money, if they could just buy stocks?

One reason is that maybe your friend has a large stable income, and bank expects to be able to collect from that.

Other reason is that maybe he has an assets he can borrow against, like stocks, land, home, and so on.

And then they store it in plain text anyway…

Back in the early days Mozilla redesigned Firefox interface. It was so incomprehensively moronic that I moved to Chrome.

I think I need to pick a “distro”, right? Based on the above, which distro may work best for me?

Noone will tell you the major differences, so I’ll do it:

Debian: So called “Stable distribution” They have twisted concept of “Stability” which is “If it’s broken it stays broken” - their libraries tend to be extremely outdated causing issues for normal users.

Ubuntu: Debian based distro. Somewhat less outdated. Had bad experience with it. Very popular for some reason. Ubuntu LTS basically follows the debian philosophy - broken stuff stays broken, only security fixes are applied.

PopOS: Debian based, but optimised for gaming. Graphics drivers are updated more often + other tweaks

Arch Linux: Power user oriented rolling distro, meaning Everything is updated to the most recent version as quickly as reasonably possible. Rolling distros are recommended if you update your hardware often. Patches tend to be huge

Manjaro: Arch based rolling distro (using it since few years myself), tuned more towards mainstream user - less terminal more GUI.

Gentoo: Compile everything from source code. EVREYTHING

Fedora: Linux by large corpo - REDhat. Well supported and sane maintenance schedule.

Now, while in Windows you get always the same user interface, in linux you can install whatever you want - systems are modular, and usually distro intaller will ask what desktop environment you want.

Two most popular ones are KDE and GNOME. I Really, really recommend KDE because it follows user experience philosophy from windows 7. Gnome reinvented the wheel, and you’ll have a bad time readjusting to it coming from windows.

Two more tips at the end:

• Almost none of linux distros mount non system drives by default at the system startup. Which is stupid as fuck, you can change it via KDE settings without editing config files or terminal (look for drives and cameras in settings)
• Remove Plymouth package. it provides pretty loading screen during system startup but on some configurations it interferes with display detection - the issue surfaces gradually over the years and noone will ever help you fix it. It’s unfixed bug since many years. Save yourself time, life and frustration

Also, if you’re looking for file explorer to open your drive and look at the files, it’s called “Dolphin” or “Nautilus”. Obviously… /s

What if they convert you into right wing ideology?