marighost

Shameless plug for Scrandle, the daily “dle” game where you choose the superior scran (stadium food) based on the community’s votes.

Anyways, it’s really shown me how awful British food is. And as an American (sorry), just how fucking expensive our own food is.

Who would win: people who call every soda “Coke” or moms who call every console “Nintendo”?

Not sure about Ubuntu, but for your CachyOS attempts, I probably would have avoided the DEs you tried. COSMIC is still under heavy development, and might work better on its “home OS” (being Pop!_OS, but this is complete speculation on my part). Hyprland and Niri seem like advanced DEs to me every time I see them mentioned, so I would have avoided them for a new user.

I’ve been using Cachy for the better part of a year now with KDE Plasma and it’s barely given me any problems. I’d suggest something with KDE, or maybe even GNOME. If you like the Ubuntu environment (apt, flatpaks, etc) you might try Linux Mint. From my experience it’s a very easy and hands-off setup. I did not need to use the terminal at all when I set it up on my wife’s laptop and MIL’s laptop.

ETA: Just read your final paragraph and wanted to add about KDE:

Easy access to the launcher

KDE is reminiscent of Windows. The Launcher is always visible (unless you tell it not to be).

See all background apps at once (next to the network and audio icon)(important for VPN, steam, discord)

Yup.

see date and time in a convenient place (top of the screen)

Yup. Can be placed wherever you want.

working file manager

Dolphin.

good package manager

CachyOS is based on Arch, so it used Pacman and ships with the Arch User Repo helper Paru (and a graphical installer, Octopi). You can easily install Flatpak if that’s your thing too. I don’t know a lot about package managers but Pacman has been good to me.

I agree with your post 100% I think. Removing oneself from big tech/data services like Google and Microsoft is resisting the regime. It’s especially useful for folks that may not be able to get out and protest, meet with their representatives, etc.

As for me, I’m running my *arr/media stack for myself and my close friends and family. Fuck Disney, Netflix, and Paramount. For our household, HomeAssistant keeps the lights on and SyncThing backs up our files to the NAS.