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.

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.

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!

I feel the exact same, and I’ve been hanging around here for almost two years (the great 3rd party app exodus of ‘23).

This place feels more like a community filled with people versus a firehose of internet wrapped in layers of corporate and right wing BS.

Reddit was almost exclusively read-only for me. Here, I am commenting all the time.

It’s important for everybody to not just assume the people on your own team, or the people that look like you, are being truthful and arguing in good faith.

That goes for everybody, but it seems pretty consistent that you need to me more wary of it as you move towards the conservative end of the scale. And conveniently for those politicians, the citizens on that end of the scale are the worst at cutting through the BS. Arguably that’s what landed them there in the first place!

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.

Game development and teaching.

Two industries that would be right up my alley. Two industries that prey on and exploit people who have a strong passion for their work. Two industries that I have stayed far away from. :/