Quazatron

There are alternatives. I bought a Lenovo direct from their site with no OS installed. The saving from not having Windows was enough to afford double the RAM.

I agree, I notice more new blood around Linux compared to the previous “OMG, Micro$oft suxx, let’s all ditch Windoze!1!!” craze (I guess it was Win8.1 -> Win10, maybe?)

Each person knows what it feels more comfortable with.

Linux is not inherently hostile, it just has a very different way of doing things that what you’re accustomed, so you perceive it as hostile. It is sometimes easier for someone who never touched a computer to learn Linux that someone who grew with Windows to unlearn the habits.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling comfortable in Windows, it’s the system you grew up with and know how to work with and maintain.

I’m old enough to have seen this “flocking” several times. Some people stay and are pleasantly surprised. Most people go back a few weeks/months later, and leave a “Linux suxx” post behind them. I don’t expect this time will be any different, and that’s totally fine.

I just want to add that you that you can also setup multiple user accounts for different uses. One for banking, one for gaming, one for downloading random crap. It will not protect against privilege escalation attacks but will help against random scripts exfiltrating your personal documents.

Another nice layer is containers and containerized applications (flatpaks, bubblewrap, etc). Each app will be somewhat limited in what damage it can do.

Running pi-hole as your DNS or using some other filtered DNS provider (Mulvad or others) will also protect you from some shady sites.

Cups is awesome. I have an ancient HP laserjet 1100 connected to an ancient parallel-to-Ethernet adapter, connected to my ancient router. Cups works flawlessly with this setup, Windows never worked.

I have an issue with ReactOS. It’s not technical, I’m sure technically it’s great.

Any software that tries to mimic proprietary technology will always be subject to the whims of said technology owners, be it patents, undocumented APIs, broken legacy APIs maintained for retro compatibility.

This much can be said of Wine, but that is pretty much just a wrapper for games, not a full OS, so it’s not critical.

I hope I’m wrong, and please enlighten me if I’m wrong.

Same here, I heard about the reliability of Unix while enduring Windows 95’s appalling crashes.

Last month I finally moved my wife’s Windows 10 laptop to Endeavor OS. She recognizes that her unusable laptop is now snappy and stable.

My house is now officially Microsoft-free.

It sometimes is, but then sometimes Linux is not to blame.

Yesterday I was installing CachyOS on my son’s laptop, because that’s what he chose to use instead of Windows 10. The desktop came up fine, but no wifi adaptor was detected. I could try another more mainstream distro, but I wanted my kid to have what he chose. So we went troubleshooting. Googled the laptop model, found the adaptor, found the matching kernel module, checked the logs… and there it was, a cryptic error -110. Googled that and there was an answer: disable Windows Fast Boot.

It turns out that Windows locks the wifi adaptor when shutting down in Fast Boot mode. So after disabling it and a couple of reboots later, CachyOS was installing flawlessly.

It served as a lesson for me and an example for my kid to persevere and learn more.

This is the kind of selfless, talented, focused person that I am thankful for when I look at the FOSS ecosystem and how far it has come.

An it really deeply annoys me when these talented persons, who’ve spent countless hours reverse engineering crap, undocumented, proprietary technologies that the original vendor didn’t care enough for its’ users to document or open source, get blasted online by entitled brats that say “Linux sux, my AAA game don’t work!”.

My thank you to all of them that made all the great tools that I use and love today.

I read the first paragraph and saw your prerequisites included working with nvidia.

That is a non-starter, right there. You can blame Linux for a whole lot of little flaws, but most of the blame should go to your hardware vendor for providing shitty support for Linux.