Is it not possible to require Proton, Mullvad, etc. to verify your age before doing business with you?

There already is a big, thriving black market for cigarettes in the EU country I’m in, simply due to high tobacco taxes. I can only assume the same will be true for other places that tax similarly. Are you really saying that an outright ban won’t result in a greater unmet demand, and thus more customers shopping at the black markets? It sounds unlikely to me that black market dealers will close up shop, because of a ban on the legal sale of cigarettes. The black market is already banned, but that’s not exactly stopping them.

Many, many places. It’s so strongly regulated here, I think they even have to call it goat drink, too! The cow lobby is bullish, I tell you.

I had that problem, so then I started using https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ - it works well.

I bought my secondhand OnePlus 6T only last year. Installed Linux on it, and I love it. I’m using it as my daily driver.

Sent from my OnePlus 6T and from my bed

Try taking a break from this post for the rest of today. Come back tomorrow, and read your own comments while genuinely pretending they were written by someone else. Take stock of the impression you end up with.

Try to honestly ask yourself, if you were a random person passing by, Linux user or otherwise, with as busy a life as anyone, would you feel particularly encouraged to engage with this commenter?

Avoid Ubuntu - it’s made by the Microsoft of the Linux world. If you want an easy transition from Windows specifically, then you really ought to run KDE Plasma as your desktop environment, as that is by far the most similar to Windows in terms of look, layout and workflow, and it is very flexible in what can be changed and adjusted. GNOME is the other big one, but it feels more Mac-like or tablet-like.

It’s preferable to pick one of those two, as they support the modern Wayland protocol, whereas other desktop environments still only support X11 or only partially support Wayland - I don’t want to infodump on you right now, but suffice to say that Wayland is more secure, and is widely regarded as the future of Linux, while the old X11 has security issues, and is only in maintenance mode now.

Mint, for whatever reason, and unlike almost every other distro, doesn’t come with KDE Plasma as an option. I would recommend Fedora - it’s very solid and well developed, an all purposes workhorse that can do anything you need it to, and it’s a first class citizen anywhere, since it is one of the most commonly used distros by far. My runner-up would be OpenSUSE. If you’re dead set on something Ubuntu-based, then I would take a look at Tuxedo OS, or perhaps just going back to the roots, and install Debian.