What is known as servers on Discord also exists on Matrix. They are called spaces and you don’t need to self-host a Matrix server to create a space. There’s also no significant learning curve, you just download Element (the most popular Matrix client), create an account and you ready to go. You can join spaces or groups from any Matrix server or message anyone on the network. Chats also make use of end-to-end encryption by default and it can even be activated for groups (wouldn’t make much sense for public groups though).

it must be doing something right in terms of being sustainable

They’re basically living off of investor money and selling user data. The former is not an indefinite solution though. And Discord Nitro is a fucking joke, the revenue generated from it will never cover the operational costs.

Matrix is a much better solution, it uses peer-to-peer technology (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/) to reduce the burden of operational costs on the team. It’s also federated, just like Lemmy, meaning anyone can host their own Matrix server and communicate with users on other servers. Running Matrix at home or on a VPS is even easier than self-hosting Lemmy. It’s also completely free and open-source and allows everyone to write their own clients. Discord on the other side is a piece of proprietary garbage/spyware and bans everyone who attempts to use a custom client. I will never understand why so many people like Discord.

Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it’s not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don’t understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it’s spyware. The company doesn’t have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that’s not economically sustainable at all. I don’t understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that’s wrong with Discord: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU

Switch to Revolt or Matrix

misinformation that people ever owned that media

Obviously you don’t own the rights to a movie you buy on Blu Ray, but you own a copy of it. And you are free to do with it whatever you want. No one can take your Blue Ray away because you are the sole owner of that copy of the movie. When buying movies online, this is not the case. Practically, you don’t own anything as it can be taken away from you at any time.

The arguments you provided earlier are the exact same arguments a media corporation would make. I know that technically you own a restrictive af license to watch the content, but in reality, it’s pretty hard to call this ownership. Corporations hate the concept of people owning stuff. If they can sell this restrictive garbage as ownership, they can set a new standard and use it to further destroy ownership of media. The saddest part is that it works. Best Buy already plans to stop selling Blu Rays. This is the beginning of the destruction of freedom and media ownership. We really shouldn’t be arguing over this minor BS, instead, we should all agree that piracy is absolutely justified when media corporations keep getting greedier and greedier.

(Media) corporations want to screw you over and extract as much money as possible out of you, it’s not a hard concept to understand.

Am I seeing Reddit there?

That’s not real ownership. If they can come in and take the stuff you bought away at any time, you don’t own it. If you own something, you should be allowed to make a copy of it and share it with your friends.

Israeli government = war criminals

2023, the year of Big Tech companies restricting their users in every single possible way. But why is 2023 not the year of users finally waking up and switching away from this proprietary garbage?

Yeah, why not?

KDE Plasma 6

Well, based Terry absolutely makes me want to move to TempleOS

My desktop is running a nearly 10 year old install.

Oh wow! That’s truly impressive.

Another thing that helped me: Get comfortable in the Terminal. Obviously you have to learn some commands and how they work, but just configure your shell and commonly used CLI tools. It makes the experience so much more pleasant. Install a nice shell prompt, set up some aliases for frequently used commands, learn the basics of shell scripting and write your own useful little scripts for things you often have to do, maybe start using Vim and configure it the way you like it. Also explore other shells. Bash is the default shell, but there are better options like zsh or fish. You can watch this video to get some inspiration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KKxhf50FIPI. This is actually pretty close to my shell setup. If you want to start customizing bash, check this out: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3W7Ky_aaaY.

To continue learning, maybe subscribe to some Linux-oriented YouTube channels. DistroTube makes great videos about Linux, tiling window managers, how to use various commands, how to configure your shell environment, etc. He also reviews many Linux distros or explains why free software is important. If you search any Linux-related topic on YouTube, chances are that DT already made a great video about it.

openSUSE is rather small, not everything is packaged for it. Arch is the best in terms of software availability, thanks to the AUR.

The only distro that even comes close is NixOS, but I really wouldn’t recommend it for beginners. You can explore it in a VM though or maybe at some point actually try it out. It’s very very different than other distros though.

I thought a more advanced distro, that is still stable, would be good overall. However, not getting new software for a long time sounds quite annoying.

Arch is actually not as bad as many say. It’s pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues. It gives you the benefits that you can basically find any package in the AUR and everything is up-to-date. Try it out, if you don’t like it, you can still switch to something else.

I’m wanting to challenge myself to get much better with Linux, partitioning, CLI, CLI tools

The best way to learn the CLI is to use it. Try not to use your graphical file manager for a while and only interact with the file system through the terminal, that teaches you a lot.

I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general?

Yes.

I always hear good things about the Arch Wiki.

It is truly fantastic.

Is there any other tips someone can give me, to sharpen my Linux skills?

Use the system, don’t be shy, try different things out. If you are scared that you might break something, try it out in a VM. Break your VM and try to fix it. That teaches you a lot.

I was even considering trying out Gentoo on my X220, but the compiling times sound painful.

I would not recommend that, updating packages will take ages, it’s not a great experience.

I’d rather avoid a Linux distro that’s implementing something like ads or telemetry…if that’s even a thing that’s happening?

Fedora has some telemetry, but as far as I know, you can turn it off during the installation. Some desktop environments like KDE Plasma also have options for telemetry but it’s disabled by default. If you want it, you manually have to enable it in the settings.

Should I avoid OpenSUSE

Some software might not be available on openSUSE

or KDE Plasma

Not really, Plasma has a shitload of features and customization options, if many options tend to overwhelm you, you might be better of with a different desktop environment, if you are fine with customization options, Plasma is great for you.

Are there any ‘10 things to do first when installing Linux for the first time’ recommendations?

Since you said that you want to install openSUSE, I recommend this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ajVqJ1nl9bM

Mission Control looks pretty nice, it tries to resemble the Windows Task Manager really closely so it’s great if you are switching from Windows