I both agree and disagree. I agree that people are often unswayed by pro-privacy arguments. I disagree that it is the fault of the arguments themselves. The problem is that people are uneducated regarding the repercussions of abdicating their privacy to a government or corporation. They don’t want their neighbors to be able to see in to their bedroom, but they find no issue with allowing Google (or any data-miner/government) to create complex and nuanced profiles of their habits, tastes and psychological tendencies that is full of identity rich data. It’s tantamount to handing over your fingerprints “because why not.”

Man’s reach has excedded his grasp with technology, and most of us in the general public have no real understanding of how it all works. Perhaps a bit like the north American Natives not understanding the significance of selling their land to european settlers until it was to late.

From an informed perspective, it isn’t logically consistent to be ok with Google having unfettered access to your phone’s data but not so with your neighbor. One is a person, someone you may even have real reason to trust, and the other is a profit driven corporation that has repeatedly shown that it will violate civil rights in their pursuit of dominance in their field. People have lost their ability to value the right to privacy because the corporations have conditioned them to do so. The book 1984 has many good depictions of what it is like to symbolically “live a life with no curtains,” and it’s a hellscape. However I think people are just not informed or educated enough in the significance of privacy to see this clearly in our current setting. That’s not really something we can address in the short span of a conversation. It’s just beginning to dawn on some of my family members after almost a decade of me sharing info with them, and usually it comes after they see some piece of media that dramatizes the invasion of digital privacy on TV. Sad that our world view is so dependant on media like that.

There’s some good answers in the other replies, but basically asking them questions like “Why do you have curtains on your windows?” Is generally pretty effective. People just don’t seem to realize that our digital lives are as personal as our physical lives, and just because we’re not breaking a law doesn’t mean we don’t still have a need to hold a private life.

I don’t know man, those are some strange behaviors. Can’t say I’ve experienced any of them. There does seem to be a common theme of slow and delayed responses, that is almost certainly a hardware issue from my experience, but that doesn’t line up with the specs you mention.

Regarding the privilege issues, running a general user without superuser privileges is a standard practice for Linux. You can change your user to a superuser though, there are plenty of walkthroughs available to accomplish that. That will keep you from having to run sudo, doas or enter your password as often. Some things will always require a passcode though, as that’s just what the best practices of the tech landscape indicate.

I second LinuxMint. When I first got in to linux I was (shamefully 😅) looking for something that was as close as possible to Windows and a turn key experience with both installation and app compatibility. Linux mint was what I settled on personally.