As far as I’ve heard, they don’t even have any blueprints or permits.

Sure, but there’s Linux features that use TPM too, although you probably don’t need them in a home environment.

Depends on if you use any security features that require a TPM. If not, the older chips are fine, or some motherboards allow a separate TPM chip to be added.

For example, my employer requires TPM 2.0 for both Windows and Linux systems, since they store most encryption keys and certificates on it - including WPA2-Enterprise key for wifi, 802.1x key for wired Ethernet, SSH keys (in some cases), LUKS key for full-disk encryption on Linux, Bitlocker key on Windows, etc.

For home use, if you don’t use any of those features (or require strong encryption for them), the main thing you’ll miss out on is support for Windows 11, which is fine if you’re using Linux.

it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.

How old is it? TPM 2.0 has been standard equipment for nearly ten years now. It’s disabled by default on some systems.

Intel Core 8th gen and above, and Ryzen 2000 series and above, should all have TPM 2.0 built into the CPU (fTPM)

I haven’t seen any bloat on it, no ads in winkey menu

If you’re in the EU, that’s probably why. I think the bloat is only for non-EU users.

Dual-booting works fine. You can even have more than two OSes - for a while I was running Windows 10, Fedora, and Debian. Ended up sticking with Fedora.

base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range)

A base Debian system (minimal netinstall with nothing selected in the tasksel step) doesn’t use much more than this, or at least it didn’t in the last stable release. For https://dnstools.ws/ I have a few VPSes with 256MB RAM that run Debian and the DNSTools worker. They run fine.

I can’t even get push notifications working.

Which browser? Safari is notorious for having a lot of bugs around push notifications, but Chrome and Firefox should both work.

I don’t have any knowledge about this in particular, but as someone with experience working at big tech companies, you’re missing the most likely reason:

4. Everyone who worked on it was reorged to higher priority teams, and nobody is left to maintain the apps

A lot of teams are only 3-6 developers, an engineering manager, a project manager, and a designer. Other roles like content design and QA are often shared across lots of teams. Developers with experience building native apps might be needed on other projects.

And they harm platform consistency, etc.

Unfortunately, a lot of major apps aren’t consistent any more. Each app uses its own design language and its own UI widgets, rather than using proper native ones. Often they’re no better than web apps. I hate it and would rather just use a web app instead.

IIRC the WhatsApp app is a native Windows app using C++ and XAML, while the Messenger app is a React Native app.

You can still use the web version.

WhatsApp and Messenger are the #1 and #3 most used messaging apps in the world. (#2 is WeChat)

In Australia where I’m from, Messenger is the most popular by far.

You can still use the website. This is just talking about the native apps.

Pika is a GUI for Borg.

Rsync is doable, but it’s not great since you essentially only have one backup set. If a file gets corrupted and you don’t notice before the next backup is done, you won’t be able to restore it. Borg’s deduping is good enough to keep lots of history - I do daily backups and keep every day for the past two weeks, every week for the past three months, and every month indefinitely (until I run out of space and need to prune it). Borgmatic handles pruning the backups that are out of retention.

I’m using Fedora KDE and haven’t set up backups on my desktop PC yet, but on Linux servers (both at home and “in the cloud”) I usually use Borgbackup with Borgmatic. All my systems have two backup destinations: My home server and a storage VPS, both via SSH.

Looks like Pika Backup is a GUI for Borgbackup, so it should be a good choice. Vorta is also popular. GNOME apps tend to focus on simple, easy to use GUIs with minimal customization, so it’s possible Vorta is more configurable. I haven’t tried either.

Don’t forget the 3-2-1 policy: you should have at least three copies of your data, in at least two different mediums (hard drives, “cloud”, Blu-rays, tape, etc), one of which is off-site (cloud, a NAS at a friend’s or family member’s house, etc). If you’re looking for cloud storage, Hetzner storage boxes are great value. Some VPS providers have good sales (less than $3/TB/month) during Black Friday.

Good; hopefully other universities follow.

Is Guix a Linux distro? I’ve never heard of it before.