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.

Yeah of course, it is by definition coping. Zero disagreement from me. But from my perspective of trying to find practical ways to achieve a fulfilling existence, good coping strategies can be a very positive thing. Bad shit will always be there, and we all have our own unique collections of it and unique internal reactions to it.

And the spirit of this from me is to encourage others to explore what’s possible, not to say “you should X.” We all have unique minds going through unique life experiences, so it would be silly for me to try to lay out some kind of roadmap to happiness like I know you (or any other people who might read this).

It took me several years to get my head to where it is now, and that includes ongoing medication. My goal is to help others however I can, so whether that is by providing possible techniques or just convincing them that a better existence might be possible, I will take whatever I can get. Incremental improvements are a good thing, even if tiny.

And indeed a big part of that is to explore what restrictions and burdens we place upon ourselves. If people in way worse conditions than us are happy, and people in way better positions than us are miserable, there must be some wiggle room where we can find a better outcome given our own unique inputs.

I found a lot of inspiration in the philosophy of the stoics and Buddhists, plus Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. That doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you to be stoic and control your emotions, because that would be some ignorant shit. But I think there’s a general idea there that’s worth encouraging others to consider, that you may be able to pilot your brain through the craziness of life in a way that suits you better.

And like I think I said before, the “decide to be happy” platitude is important but it is only the first baby step of a long journey. Genuinely changing your emotional state is not just a simple decision, but it may be possible over an extended period of time if you are consciously working towards it and making small beneficial decisions over and over.

If I may end with another platitude that is way easier said than done, we have to play the hand we’re dealt. Not because there’s anything good about that plan, and not because that is fair, but because that is reality. I found it difficult to find contentment with my life while also wishing my life was something else. And I know that probably sounds negative and discouraging as text on a screen, but think of it more like putting your effort towards practical improvements and not wasting your energy dwelling on things you cannot change or on the inherent unfairness of life. That includes acknowledging your privilege along with accepting your burdens.

I hope something in there made sense to somebody!

That’s one reason I threw in “to the extent that you can control it” because sometimes bad shit just happens.

But for what it’s worth, between 2019 and now I’ve had three financial disasters and my financial picture is way worse than it was. Debt free with emergency savings, used that up on a mess with the house, then lost my job twice over the Covid years after having been at the same place 15 years. But I’m also on the other side of it all where I have a job I like and I can start to rebuild.

But I also have a family and a ton of animals, so I’ve been holding all of that close. I wish you well!

Insert “that’s the neat part” meme.

I think of it like a positive nihilism. Nothing inherently matters, but existing and being self-aware is such a crazy thing that just being able to consider the question is an extremely lucky state to find yourself in. So to the extent that you can control it, why not actively choose to live a positive and fulfilling existence and be a source of positivity in the experiences of others?

After working through my personal shit for several years, the stereotypical circular platitudes you might expect to hear from a monk like “to be happy, choose to be happy” make sense in a whole new way. That kind of thing isn’t the single magic step to finding fulfillment like it might sound in the surface, but it is a critical first step that informs a million future small decisions.

As I get older I have found that making my world smaller and focusing on the things I genuinely care about (and not the things I’m “supposed to” care about as a “good” man/American/worker etc) results in me being happier and more satisfied with life.

Lemmy is my close little corner of the internet. I hope that the fediverse grows ands takes over for the good of other people, but if it stays in this niche for another decade I’ll be happy because I already love it for what it is.

If you are the “computer person” in your family, you probably have experience screwing with, breaking, and fixing whatever OSes you have used over the years.

The refreshing difference with Linux is that the software and the people who created it are not trying to prevent you from doing what you want with your computer.

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 use mint on two different machines with Nvidia GPUs. One is a several year old desktop with a 1080 and the other is a two year old Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia GPU in addition to the Intel one on the processor.

Now granted I don’t play a ton of games right now, and when I do they usually aren’t cutting edge, but I don’t recall many problems so far. I use NVENC for Jellyfin and editing videos more often, and that has been pretty smooth. The one issue I had was related to that though. Kdenlive (flatpak) updated and could no longer export videos because it was looking for a newer version of something my mint-supplied nvidia driver wasn’t yet updated to have.

Trying to install a newer driver manually was a whole damn thing though, so I rolled back the kdenlive flatpak to the one that worked.

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.

I learned the command line on Sun Solaris Unix in the 90s, after messing with DOS first. At work I have a terminal open all the time, though I’ll use GUI versions of some things too.

I use mint btw.

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.”

Every developer I’ve met who uses Windows always had a tongue in cheek sort of “well it kind of sucks in some ways but it’s what I’m used to, one day maybe I’ll get off my ass and change OS”.

This used to be me, kind of. I’ve been an engineer for over 20 years, with the last couple being full time “developer.”

But I finally made that switch at work over a year ago (booting into Linux instead of using a VM) and at home a few months ago. This probably goes without saying, but I am never going back! It’s one thing to know there are options out there that people like you prefer, but it’s another entirely to get used to the better option then try the enshittified one again.

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.

My company is your standard Dell + M365 outfit, but we on the dev team can install linux because our product is an embedded linux system. It is so damn nice.

It is so tempting to wipe my Windows partition and add that space to my home directory. It just feels like there must be SOME reason they wouldn’t want me to. I don’t ever actually use it. I will occasionally fire up a windows VM to check the windows version of one of our build artifacts.

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.

“well ill switch when that extra 0.000001% works”.

I am well past the point in my personal life where if it doesn’t work on Linux, or in many cases isn’t FOSS itself, it just doesn’t exist to me. I can be motivated to learn new programs when it feels like there’s a good purpose behind it.

I’m in my 40s so maybe it’s combination of “I’m too old for Windows’ shit” and “I’m not too old to learn a few new tricks.”

The fact is when Windows users come to Linux they dont want Linux, they want Windows but not made by Microsoft and the fact is Linux is not that.

Linux Mint Cinnamon may not be that, but it is very close.

My parents mentioned the windows end of life message to me a few weeks ago, and I think I’m going to try mint for them. As far as I know they basically need a file explorer to copy photos from SD cards, and of course a web browser.