In my opinion, users who already use vim are not the primary target audience of Helix. I see the target group more among users who want to switch from a "normal" editor to a modal editor. The selection → action model and the easier shortcuts probably make the switch easier for many. I personally don't like vim at all because of the handling (purely subjective view). Helix will definitely not be my default editor but I get along much better with it than with vim or neovim.
I think it depends on the individual user. Many prefer a solution that simply works. But some prefer to look behind the scenes and tweak everything.
When it comes to cars, it's the same. There are people who only want to drive from A to B with their car. I am one of those people. Others, on the other hand, want to repair their car themselves as much as possible. Which I understand in principle, but I prefer to leave that to a workshop.
I use Claws Mail. For this email client there are plugins for encryption / signing (https://www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=gpg). Regarding the visual appearance, however, one should not expect much. Claws Mail is first and foremost a functional client.
My question is, which among these is considered to be hardest and thus by mastering it, one can master linux to atleast some part?
It does not matter which distribution you use. For example, I am using Arch for over 10 years. Have I gained any new knowledge since then? Sure. But not because I use Arch but because I had to do certain tasks. Or because I was interested in certain things. I even go so far as to say that I got a lot of my Linux knowledge under Mandrake / Mandriva (comparable to Ubuntu) because that was the distribution I used initially.
From my point of view, it is therefore only important that you want to learn something. Whether you use Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Arch or Gentoo for this is basically irrelevant.
Apart from that, I don't think Arch is a difficult distribution to install or use. For example, many of the commands in the official installation guide can be executed without any changes. Or if you want to make it even easier, just use archinstall which has been an official part of the iso file for some time.
As for maintaining Arch, I've been doing exactly two things for years.
Before an update, I check if anything has been released at https://archlinux.org/news/ that affects my installations (this can be automated with tools like informant). It is important to follow these instructions.
And from time to time I synchronize my configuration files with the Pacnew files. There are tools for this as well (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#Managing_.pac*_files).
In other words, just use the distribution that suits you and learn what you need. Learning things on spec that you may never need is useless in my opinion.
but I do not feel comfortable with depending on Microsoft for this service.
Why don't you feel good about it? When Microsoft acquired Github, the worst things were predicted by some users. That was in late 2018 if I'm not mistaken. Now it's 2023, what terrible things have happened so far? From my point of view, Github has actually developed very positively since then.
Sure, Github could delete repositories at any time. But so can any other provider. However, this is not a big problem for the code alone, since you always have at least one current version stored locally. Issues and pull requests can be exported, albeit unofficially. Corresponding scripts for this are even offered directly on Github.
What else could Microsoft do? Use the code that is available in a repository. Microsoft can also do this if the code is stored by another provider. Git clone is already sufficient for this.
So I personally see few problems to use Github. Especially since there are the most users and therefore the probability is higher to find people who participate in a project.
But apart from that, I host a few projects at Codeberg.org. Responsible for this is a non-profit organization in Germany. Except for some technical problems when switching to better hardware a few months ago, I can't complain.
You basically have to decide for yourself what you want to use or not. In my opinion, there is no objective right or wrong.
For my part, I cannot and will not rule out that I will continue to use Reddit in some form. Just like I can't rule out that I might not use Reddit anymore. And no matter what I decide, it's my decision to make and I don't have to justify it.
I now only play the games on Windows which definitely don't run on Linux. In my case, these are only very few (time reasons and I am only interested in a few new games at all) and usually the copy protection or the cheat protection is the reason why.
There is no such thing as the objectively best solution. Each tool has advantages and disadvantages. And every user has different preferences and requirements.
Personally, I am using Borg for years. And I have had to restore data several times, which has worked every time.
In addition to Borg, you can also look at Borgmatic. This wrapper extends the functionality and makes some things easier.
And if you want to use a graphical user interface, you can have a look at Vorta or Pika.
The NFS protocol offers almost nothing that tools like Chezmoi offer.
And Ansible? Yes, you can use it to only manage configuration files. Would I recommend it? Rather not. At least not for private use.
With Chezmoi, for example, you only need to remember a few commands for basic use (chezmoi add, chezmoi apply, chezmoi update). That should be easier for many users than creating an Ansible playbook. The fact that Ansible uses push and not pull in the default configuration might not be so good either for home users who might have just two computers.
Ansible is therefore not a good replacement for tools like Chezmoi in my opinion. These simply fill a gap between manually copying configuration files and tools like Ansible, Salt, etc.
Personally, I prefer Arch or OpenSUSE.
The distributions themselves are usually not the problem, but rather various programs. For example, a current browser nowadays often needs several GB of RAM.
I am using Arch Linux for more than 10 years.
I understand the argument, but in my opinion it is used far too often and is not always true.
Not everyone works with servers on which they have no influence on the installed software.
And in the few cases where I had to work with servers on which I had no influence on the installed software and on which actually only vim was installed, I could always use sshfs or rclone mount without any problems so that the editor I used didn't matter.