I'll admit this part did go a bit over my head.
It's referring to a strategy more commonly called 'triple e' or 'embrace, extend, extinguish' pioneered by Microsoft in the late 90's. The gist of it was that MS would adopt open standards and create proprietary extensions to the standard that were only usable on their platform. This would break the ability of users of non MS software to communicate with those in Microsoft's ecosystem and push users off those platforms.
Njalla is pretty nice.
Battle for Wesnoth is really good.
The bi-cycle is the (involuntary) switch between being attracted to fem people and masc people. Not all bi folks experience it, but it's fairly common. It's called the bi-cycle because it tends to be cyclical.
Good point. Testing would probably be a better choice; I'll edit the parent comment to reflect that
Debian is a stable distro, so software versions will remain pretty much the same over the life cycle. This is good if stability (software not changing out from under you) is desired, but if you want to take advantage of new features as they are added to whatever software you're running, it's less beneficial. So, if you're going to run debian as a desktop os, I would recommend ~~switching your apt sources to point to the unstable branch: sid~~ switching your apt sources to point to testing (see below).
You'll probably see a lot of older tutorials and stackoverflow posts that use apt-get, which predates apt, instead of apt as the package manager. apt is the recommended frontend; apt-get will work, but apt will have a nicer user experience.
Also, on the topic of apt, there are three ways to run updates that you'll probably see online; this stackexchange post provides a pretty good explanation of the differences between them.
Man pages are pretty helpful once you know how to navigate them. Some tips regarding that:
man is, but just in case: man is the command that you use to pull up manual pages for basically everything.apropos or man -k commands. For example, apropos video pulls up a list of all the man pages that have the word video in their names or descriptions.foo in sections 1 and 3, to pull up the one for section 3 you would use the command: man 3 foo. If you want to read more, man has it's own manual page, which you can pull up with man man.man with / and ?. / performs a forward search and ? performs a backwards search. You can jump forward to the next result in the search with n or back to the previous result with p.Another good place to look for documentation is the arch wiki. A lot of the information on there translates to other distros fairly well, and it's got huge amounts of well written information. If you use duckduckgo, the bang for it is !aw.
The shell is pretty intimidating for a lot of new users. While it's not strictly necessary for most things, I do think that you'll have a smoother linux experience if you become at least a little bit comfortable using it. Here is a bash guide aimed at beginners.
Looking back at what I've written, I realize that I have dumped a lot of information on you. So I think the best piece of advice that I can offer is this: Becoming comfortable with linux (or any new operating system) takes time and can feel overwhelming. Don't feel pressured to understand everything immediately and don't be afraid to go slow; Rome wasn't built in a day.
I've been running linux as a daily driver for 6 or 7 years now, and I run debian on my servers, so if you have any questions now or in the future, I am happy to try to answer them.
Oh my God, they're bringing back clippy.