Linux Mint is probably the perfect educational OS to switch to like that. I’m assuming most people are coming from Windows, are mouse+gui only, and are not used to being their own admin and installing all the basics like Firefox and libreoffice.

But it’s still Linux, so the user friendliness doesn’t mean you are locked out from going on tech or customization deep dives. Daily terminal user here, still love me some mint.

Looking at it like a team sport is pretty silly, yeah, but I’m still willing to use Steam just the same. No billionaire or successful corporation is “my” people, but doing business with the ones that are decent to their customers seems fine.

Gaming generally involves paying money for proprietary software anyway, so that’s not a realm where the existence of any DRM is a showstopper for me personally. Any per-game DRM with heinous kernel-level shit such that it won’t run on Linux at all, that stuff is fine to just not exist in my world.

Throw something like Mint on their old laptops and they may not need new ones at all!

Unless they don’t have current ones, then ignore me, lol.

It’s like that is the hippo’s Slayer form from Baldur’s Gate 2.

But they have a Bruce-Banner-esque secret… they are always the Slayer.

I had a Celeron 300A running at 500mhz

Ah, Celerons and the heyday of overclocking. I think I had a 266@400, 300A@500, and a dual socket motherboard with two 350s@550 or something like that. Experimental multithreading in Quake 3! I was in college and constantly working on my computer.

For all you “kids these days,” imagine you got a new high end CPU that had a max boost clock of 6GHz. You go into the BIOS and say “How about we make that 9Ghz instead?” The CPU is just like “bet” and runs at that speed kicking ass for years without issue.

Thanks for tending to your replies so well!

Mint Cinnamon has been great for me.

It is fully featured right out of the box and is a great drop-in replacement for windows. I will without a doubt use it when upgrading family members who are about to lose win10 support.

It is based off the popular Debian -> Ubuntu distros, and is very popular itself. This is good when it comes to quickly finding existing answers to specific questions. And of course they disabled the iffy stuff from ubuntu (snaps) while supporting flatpak.

I’m a software engineer who uses the command line all day, and I use Mint at work and at home. You see, even though the distro is a polished, full featured, and “easy” option, it is still Linux. So it is not locked down and you can still do what you want with your computer.

It won’t teach you to configure your system from the ground up like Arch might, instead it starts you off in a complete well-configured state and you can leave it alone or change it.

What I’m hearing between the lines here is the origin of a legal “argument.”

If a person’s mind is allowed to read copyrighted works, remember them, be inspired by them, and describe them to others, then surely a different type of “person’s” different type of “mind” must be allowed to do the same thing!

After all, corporations are people, right? Especially any worth trillions of dollars! They are more worthy as people than meatbags worth mere billions!

Yeah and it comes with ublock origin as the only pre-installed extension.

I finally switched from Firefox to librewolf, which is a privacy focused fork of it. It’s basically Firefox with some of the iffy stuff ripped out, and with good default settings.

Firefox with proper settings is probably “fine” still, but the transition is super easy since it’s basically the same thing.

Iirc that’s how the porsche taycan works.

Pulled up an article to remind myself: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a28903274/porsche-taycan-transmission/

It’s on the rear axle, and it looks like it can go into neutral for some high efficiency fwd cruising.

The differences in sheer speed and responsiveness is something FOSS alternatives need much more publicity about. When the requirements for one product are “help the user do what they want” and the requirements for another product are “synergize the KPIs of these 53 stakeholders in our trillion dollar conglomerate, monetize our market position in every way possible, and check the minimum viable checkboxes to keep end users engaged with the brand” it shows!

Windows to Linux is of course the most significant and worthwhile. As I like to describe it, even using the most full-featured distros out there (Linux Mint Cinnamon gang represent!) any flavor of Linux is like greased lightning compared with windows. And I mean Windows 10, not even 11.

A few weeks ago I turned on an old secondary desktop PC that had been powered off for a month. It had numerous updates, everything except installing a new named version. Even the kernel. I decided to time it. From the time I opened the software update GUI – including typing in my password, letting it download, letting it install, getting the “yo, reboot when you’re ready,” etc – it was done in 5 minutes. And those were 5 minutes where the computer was totally usable. Running the current version of the full featured Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 on a PC from 2011!

My favorite recent example is the switch from Plex to Jellyfin. Now granted, fully self-hosting means more IT admin type stuff for me so that family members and I can securely connect remotely. But god damn if every single app I have tried doesn’t feel like warp speed compared with the Plex versions. Did you know that watching my media using the WebOS app on my LG TV does not have to be dog shit slow? And don’t even get me started on phone apps like Finamp. (it really whips the jelly’s ass?)

I get that it specifies tech workers, but still my first reaction was that 12% is pretty low. You can find a much higher percentage of people who are confidently wrong about way more important things.

Maybe I missed something. Looking on the website on my phone it looks like windows only, so I’m not sure why that stuck in my head. I’ll have to double check on the PC to see what the heck I thought I saw.

I commented elsewhere that I’ve been trying out some classic PC games in their native Linux form lately.

It is so amazing to see my old saves just show up like nothing ever changed. Plus lots of other little things like time played and friend list and all that.

Even though proton is legitimately amazing, I love turning on the filter in steam that shows Linux native games in my library. There are so many of them!

And it’s not just new stuff. Plenty of old favorites have Linux versions too. All the big valve titles of course (including Alyx) and classics like all the infinity engine RPG Enhanced Editions. Being able to hang out with my family, sitting on the couch, but also playing high res Baldur’s Gate with a trackball is some real gaming comfort food.

For what it’s worth, I have switched three machines of mine from Win10 to Mint in the last year, and in each case it was much easier and faster to install than Windows. And of course, daily use is much faster and smoother than Windows, but that is true of all distros. It’s just worth mentioning because mint is made to be the full featured user friendly experience (some might even call it bloated) out of the box, yet it’s still a rocket in comparison.

One was a typical work-issued Dell laptop w/ port replicator + M365, one was an old PC at home I built several years ago, and the last was an even older PC I built like 14 years ago.

Just yesterday at work I installed Win10 in VirtualBox so I could test a Windows app that gets built alongside our main embedded Linux software (used the VM since a certain popup window secondary to the main app wasn’t immediately working in Wine). Holy crap was it painful after being used to the Mint installer.

Then when I got home I decided to turn on that 14 year old system that’s been off for a month (when I installed the latest point release 22.1) to let it update. Even using the GUI updater, and even though it had to update the updater itself before updating however many dozen packages AND the kernel, I timed the entire process at five minutes flat. On the computer from 2011, with a pretty old & small SATA SSD system drive. And you can use the PC like normal until it’s done, when it shows a banner suggesting you reboot when you can because of the kernel update.

Again, nothing special in the Linux world where software is actually created with users put first. But still noteworthy for being the “easy” distro that looks a lot like Windows when you first boot it up.

I’m not posting this to say anything negative about Arch, either. That kind of distro is very important to begin with, and Arch in particular seems it’s good enough that it might be the new Debian. Especially with SteamOS switching to it.

Brilliant! Girl’s a legend.

Hey girl! Would you like to become the mascot of Lemmy? The pay is $0 and people will mis-species you, but you are probably immune to doxing so it’s all good. None would stand against you.

That first reply highlights a major difference in how people approach the world.

Speaking very generally, conservatism and right wing politics seen to attract those who see everything as a competition and that dominating other people is what it means to be a good person. Funny that it also leads to frustrated, angry, isolated people.

So if we want to switch to using a website that doesn’t promote hurting/killing 2% of the population, we are now BOWING DOWN to the minority some of us would not rather murder.

It’s the same reason they hate DEI so much.