I've been using it as my main for months. Even as an Alpha, it's very stable. That being said, it's missing quite a few features that a lot of people would consider a requirement. So "ready" will heavily depend on your requirements

I've had installations hang a long while before eventually succeeding. I would also ensure Windows has hibernate turned off and quick boot disabled.

This should add the flathub remote to the system and then install all the existing user packages into the system level. Then removes all the user level packages.

flatpak --system remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak --system install $(flatpak list --columns=application)
flatpak --user remove $(flatpak list --columns=application)

Personally I would just pick all the ones you'd like to be global (system level) and leave the rest at the user level.

Now that apple has their own silicon, all the older intel based MacBooks are pretty cheap. I just replaced my wife's 2013 MacBook Airs battery, upgraded the drive, and installed Linux. It's been a solid little laptop. Not the fastest but there's probably a few pro models within your price range. Just make sure to get at least a 16gb model since the ram is soldered. Might have issues with the webcam, but the wifi drivers are pretty good.

Even though I don't typically recommend an immutable distro to people with minimal Linux experience, as a dev and a gamer I've been pretty happy with the various uBlue images. Bluefin is a great out of the box image for devs and the uBlue images have a lot of compatability improvements over the Fedora ostree image their based off of. Bazzite is another good one specifically built for gaming.

My personal definition of "the year of the Linux desktop" is when we hit a market share % that starts to convince companies to take Linux support seriously. I don't think we're that far off from that happening and if Microsoft keeps adding in these terrible "features" to windows, more people will move over. Is 2024 the year for that? Probably not but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens before 2030.

It's not redrawing the frame, it's more related to aligning the monitors refresh rate to the frame rate of the content being displayed. Alignment means your monitor doesn't refresh the screen when the frame is only partially rendered (aka screen tearing).

I don't know this particular project but honestly having your government documents and policies made available on Codeberg/GitLab/Github and available for PRs is actually an interesting idea. The government would still need to be the owners and ultimately decide on what gets merged, but the transparency and opportunity for accessible civic engagement would be kinda sweet.

Taxes contribute to providing services and infrastructure to the people. This takes money from the people and deposits it into the bank accounts of the wealthy. I see two very different things.

While I agree with you that some software isn't capable of running on Linux (even through wine), there is another aspect that's important to remember. Want and choice. The software that doesnt run on Linux is developed only for Windows because of market share. If more people used Linux, and more importantly, demanded Linux support, more software would support it. I WANT to use Linux instead of windows, so in order for that to become a reality, I push companies to support it and I talk to people and encourage trying Linux out. Can everyone make the switch? No, but some can; and the more that do the more Linux will be supported.

Your voice and opinion and choice matters. Don't let a big corporation steal that from you. Even if you want to use Windows, you should still have the choice.

Signal provides a backup option. The auto backup for SMS on android is provided by google and likely uses google drive. I don't know for certain but I would guess the encryption options and security of that route would be impossible to guarantee and the public backlash of signal users knowing their data was being sent to Google's servers would be massive.

I've setup my signal backups to a local folder on my phone. I then have SyncThing running on my phone and home computer so it automatically gets sent once it's created.

True. Unfortunately Google's intention isn't to protect the user experience by keeping the OEMs in line, it's to control and profit off of that control.

Is Android heavily associated to Google? Of course. Should it be? I would say no. Hence the original comment.