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I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

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Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#371
I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).

At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.

A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.

It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.

The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.

Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop. edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?

Fairphone with Graphene

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.

Getting a macbook is cheaper than it has ever been. You can get a new m4 macbook air for around 750 on amazon. The prices of apple laptops have been dropping every year despite inflation in the rest of the economy....

Yes, prices have gone down over the years, but still unaffordable by people who can afford less.

Don't get me wrong, MacOS graphics, aesthetics, GUI, are awesome and I like its consistency but there are cons, too.

They typically have a higher upfront cost, limited upgrades, fewer ports/software options, repair challenges.

For comparisons, I purchased an Acer Helios 300, three or four years with the following specs:

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 Memory: 16 GB RAM Storage: 512 GB SSD Display: 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS ComfyView Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 20xx.

I upgraded the machine's drives, to three, run Windows on the 500GB SSD drive, Linux on a 2TB M.2 drive and have a 4TB storage drive.

This is not something that I could do on a MacOS without a significant price upgrade. As such, I would say that MacOS is restrictive as far as hardware upgrade, and price. It's just Eye Candy for most people.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PR on the way

PR created https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/merg...

Excellent, I will try it straight away. I'll pay out 75% if it works (as it fixes my immediate problem), and the remaining 25% if it gets merged. I'll email you after my test.

I think one possible complaint you might get in the review is that when refreshing is fully disabled in the menu, people won't see new networks come up (e.g. when they had just enabled Wifi, or unsuspended).

Maybe a good solution would be to to have one unclickable menu entry pop up labelled e.g. "Networks changed, re-open this menu" to solve that. Probably in nm-applet's main context menu of which the list is a child, instead of in the list itself, so that its appearance doesn't move around the networks on which the user is currently intending to click.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#375
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Li…

I suspect that's an Nvidia problem. Never been an issue for me using AMD.

I've had wake-from-suspend issues on plenty of non-nvidia machines, and I have had nvidia machines that have no issues.

I think it has nothing to do with the GPU and everything to do with the motherboard chipset.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I tried Linux I was so done with Windows I installed Arch. Couldn't connect to Wifi. I figured it was Arch, so I installed Ubuntu. Literally the same problem. So I got a new USB wifi adaptor that said it supported Linux...same problem. I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol.

Perhaps you could have checked if the firmware was installed? Most distros have non free firmware in their packages, it just needs to be installed.

Or maybe the operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics? Or if it can’t, at least give an indication why?

Blaming a new user like this is one of the cultural reasons why the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ has always been n+1.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been like that for 15 years or more. The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. 15 years ago I was still looking up installation and driver procedures and workarounds to install Linux on my devices. I failed to install arch in college because I didn't have a driver for my SATA drive for example. Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.

Facetiously: Well actually, you didn't need a driver for the SATA drive but the SATA controller.

Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.

26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.

So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#378
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ubuntu and the default remote desktop just stopped working since 24: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rdp-stopped-working-after-upg... With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.

>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime. I'd argue it's the opposite. Windows stuff randomly breaking on forced unattended updates is a common trope by now. If you try to search for solutions, you will find "Trusted Microsoft Computing Expert Gold Level Diamond Star" people on MS forums giving you advice ranging from "reinstall drivers, uninstall drivers, update bios, ru…

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Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#379
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't it just do what I _mean_ if it's a Desktop install and mount it like ntfs, udf, or etc?

no? A file system is the format that the data on the disk is stored as. If you mount an ext4 disk as ntfs, it wouldn't load properly. It's not just the interface for loading the data, it's how the data is actually stored.

What I mean is that it should ignore permissions on external ext4 by default in Desktops.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.

> Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. It has always been.

That unfortunately is true, for the most part. Whether this is due to financial reasons or for lack of engineering best practices, I can't say. All I can say is that, switching to Linux has led to significantly less cost, technical or spyware issues, not counting the issues which I created out of ignorance.
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