Already done. I dual boot at work (translated: I have a dormant win10 partition just in case, but I’m more likely to use my win10 VM in Linux) and at home I’m Linux only, having wiped my windows partition to reclaim the space within weeks of installing Linux.

I use Mint Cinnamon in both places. It’s a very polished, all in one, install and go OS. But it’s still Linux so I have the terminal available and I can find out how to fiddle with and change whatever I want.

For all manner of 2D desktop use, I find it superior to windows. Even being a very full-featured distro, when the software is made to serve the user and not 50 competing corporate priorities, you can tell. It’s so much more responsive and nice to use. (It is not flawless of course)

For gaming, I don’t play the newest stuff or multiplayer games with crazy anti-cheat, but I have not had any regrets so far. Many games have native Linux versions, probably thanks to valve and the Steam deck, but windows games running in proton have been smooth sailing for me.

I think I’ve just dealt with enough computer crap in my life that I prefer using not just Linux apps but FOSS software for as much as I can. If some game or some photo editing suite will absolutely not work in Linux or work acceptably in a VM, I am fine with it not existing in my world. I used to not find that acceptable, but now I’m over it. In a chill way though, not an angry anti-Microsoft way.

I’m the dude in that meme looking at the other girl, and she is my icon collections in Steam, GOG, even Epic, etc. Icons with native Linux versions get slight preference.

Jellyfin was more work on my end so that family could connect with https, but for me to set them up it’s literally just “here is the URL, login, and password.”

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.

Alternate second frame:

Car salesman in ambulance headed to the hospital because a giant piece of steel that’s GLUED to the car came loose and sliced him.

Thanks for tending to your replies so well!

It’s the Baldur’s Gate saga for me right now, and I’m still in the BG1 campaign.

It is such a great game to play on the couch with a trackball while chilling with the family.

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.

Why yes I have! Did you see my own example of Chinese censorship I added to the discussion in this very thread you are commenting on?

Yeah, unfortunately for anything run by a US-based corporation, I think it’s not a question of whether there will be censorship but how bad it will get and how closely the tech industry we’ll continue to go along with the fascist flow.

Yeah, it’s pretty blatant. A bit after it hit the scene I got curious and started asking it about how many people various governments have killed. The answer for my own US of A was as long as it was horrifying.

Then I get to China and it starts laying out a detailed description for a few seconds, then the answer disappears and is replaced by the “out of scope” or “can’t do that right now” or whatever it was at the time.

It makes me think their model might be fine, but then they have some kind of watchdog layered on top of it to detect the verboten subjects and interfere. I guess that feels better from a technical standpoint, even if it is equally bad from a personal/political one.

This one always spoke to me. But I work on embedded systems so I get to fiddle with physical equipment to really make sure the code works.

I don’t write very small shell scripts because I am not a job destroyer.

#TrumpTardigrades

They will finally inherit the earth once humanity and 3/4 of animals burn away.

I just opened my app and saw your post, because 3 hours ago I saw it and closed the app!

It was good timing moreso than me changing my plans (was just about to move on to something else) but putting the thought in my head was enough at the time.

Ah, but that’s the beauty of employers that are wrapped up in M365: it is always Teams’ fault!

Even if it isn’t actually a problem with Teams, you can just blame it and not a single person will ever second guess you.

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 do mostly c/c++ for an embedded product, but one of the modules in the system uses an FPGA programmed w/ VHDL. So I’ve gotten to do a few deep dives into that code in the past couple years.

It’s been decades since I’ve had to write new VHDL or Verilog though.

As I have been transitioning more and more of my stuff to FOSS, it has become clear that the infrastructure to push shit on you is a huge problem in itself, even if you block and avoid it all.

The user experience benefit in performance alone makes it worth it for me. Even if we ignore eeeeeverything else, it’s so nice to have your computer just do what you ask it to do, and not triage your request with 50 other corporate priorities.

My favorite two recent examples are replacing Windows with Linux, and replacing Plex with Jellyfin.

Excellent post! Any time I see one of these from you I’m going to upvote and comment just in case it gets it onto more screens.

I still haven’t tried the steam deck, but it seems like such an awesome system. I won’t be in the market for one any time soon but maybe by the time I am, there will be a Deck 2.