A Web browser is a complex piece of SW that needs to provide many, many, features and work with great performance. Therefore you need a large team of experienced developers (full-time and maybe volunteers) collaborating on the development and testing. This is cost in labor and infrastructures (servers, storage, internet connection, hosting of platforms, etc)
One such feature that is a must-have is playing videos, from YouTube, Netflix, Prime, Twitch and what have you. Most widely spread video codecs are proprietary, you need a license to implement the decoder and these licenses are expensive. H.264 is one such codec, very widely spread across many content and platforms. You wouldn't want a web browser that lacks the ability to decode H.264 videos. There are many such codecs that are considered essential, and this cost a lot of money in total.
In conclusion, this is an argument as why developing a web browser costs money and requires a sustainable financial plan, even though it is open-source and developed mostly by volunteers.
My personal opinion: advertisement sucks. I don't want it anywhere in my life. I would prefer to pay upfront for my web browser if it come to this.
✅ open-source drivers for CPU and GPU are included in the Linux Kernel and work very well. If you have bleeding edge news hardware, check online in which Kernel version they are supposed and choose Linux distro accordingly
Web Browser
✅ Chrome/chromium, ✅ Firefox. All are commonly available in your distro software repository by default, or otherwise with Flatpak
Web-based email
✅ not dependent on OS. Local Email client software are available, one exemple is Thunderbird.
Office suite
✅ LibreOffice, or anything web-based such as Google Docs will work independently of the OS
Itunes
Many music players/library managers are available on Linux, I don't have any specific recommendations here, I am self-hosting Jellyfin for my music needs
JBL
not sure what you mean here ? Your headset/speakers ? Don't see why it wouldn't work
Music score reader/editor
✅ MuseScore, I also use Guitar Pro (7, 8) inside Bottle (wine) and it works with some tweaks needed for fixing font bug
Antivirus
✅ ClamAV, arguable if you need an antivirus at all
Python
✅ many IDEs are available, a scary amount of Linux distribution rely on Python under the hood 😅
✅ Steam, ✅ Heroic Games Launcher (for Epic and GOG), ✅ Lutris
VPN
✅ OpenVPN and ✅ Wireguard protocols are supported (maybe others), you can find many providers using these protocols. Most ask you to use their app, but digging a little you often have options to configure the VPN connection without installing anything extra. I know Nord on client works on Linux, I haven't tried other. Mulldav is a very frequent recommendation in Linux communities
Windows games compatibility
✅ Wine/Proton via Steam, Lutris, Heroic and Bottles. The only thing that will block you is competitive multiplayer games with Anti-Cheat
Google calendar at works gives statistics about the invitations and events. A normal work week for me is 35~40% meetings. I am in a management position in an international company with most of my teammates abroad in different countries.
Not sure what you mean by "collaboration". If your are talking about working on documents, spreadsheets, calendar, slides, with your coworkers, sharing, manage access, etc. Google does that pretty well. My company uses everything Google for many years and it's very good from this perspective. It works absolutely the same from any operating system, Google Chrome is the OS at this point. I am not saying that Google is better than Microsoft as a corporation, just saying that Microsoft has legitimate competitors on the office collaboration market.
I recommend you to use a regular Linux distro for your PC, SteamOS is always going to focus on handheld devices which may not provide de best possible experience for desktop. Bazzite seems to be the hot Linux gaming distro at the moment, it's based on Fedora (my personal favorite, also a good option for gaming IMO). Maybe, give this one a try ?
This is not new. Other distro have this too. In Gnome you will have a tick box in the Shutdown/reboot dialogue and you can opt-out of this offline update. If you update yourself with package manager, you will not need to go through the offline update.
Personally, I like it. It's predictable, reboots once, updates, shuts off. Unlike Windows which will update, reboot, Update some more, get stuck for 30 minutes, reboot another time, finishing the updates and finally shuts down. And if you have encrypted (bitlocker or such) you have to attend the whole process and miss your fucking train and stay in the office 30 minutes more because of this BS. Sorry, I got carried away a little bit.
200% tariff on Champagne? How is this going to help US ? How is this going to hurt France ? Pretty sure champagne will sell no matter the price. This cannot favor US producers since Champagne can only come from Champagne in France. If you make the same sparkling wine in US it cannot be called Champagne and it will sell at a much much lower price and rich people will not be interested to buy it.
kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml is supporting your argument.