Or maybe stop treating it like a religion that needs converts and only appeals to conspiracy theorists in the long run when people realize the lies they were fed about it.
I went from not owning a proper computer for nearly a decade to exclusively using mint for work, school, and gaming emulators. Works flawlessly, everything's pretty intuitive, zero issues whatsoever. Maybe my use case isn't crazy but for the average joe, Linux works just fine. What lies was I fed?
Christ a bit of paranoia would do modern internet users good, I still remember when it wasn't normal to have every single piece of identifying information online and readily available for anyone.
Isn't that pretty much a thing of the past? This meme is maybe true for Facebook, but most sub 40 people don't use that anyway and the "public diary" days are also pretty over. Sure, you can stitch together a lot from geolocating Instagram posts and LinkedIn information, but it's not like it's the searchable database Facebook was in 2012.
I made the full switch probably 1.5y ago. Gaming on Linux is great now. The only major issue is modding. Nexus doesn't have an app for Linux yet (it's in development) so you have to install mods manually. That's not too big of an issue, but it is annoying. Other than that it's nearly flawless, excluding a few games that have anti-cheats that haven't added Linux support, like Valorant.
Why would i need to? I tried Linux and it's mental. Took 20 minutes to edit mount settings on my hdd. fstab, gnome disks, and whatnot. Meanwhile Windows is: here's your files bro, whenever you want. And don't even get me started with the countless problems i encountered to install apps, edit hdd permissions, configuring panels and more.
I need to try windows again. I remember it being more complex than Linux. I switched just so things were easier. Cygwin! Registry editing! Getting a Microsoft degree just to edit my desktop menus. I didn't just sit there and install my programs like a good kid and actually wanted to, you know, do things with my computer. And boy did windows hate me for it.
I'm hoping modern IDEs or just having Linux on standby would make Windows simple enough to use.
Yes on Windows I think disks are not mounted, they are just there on the letters
But that works fine on Linux too. I have not used multi-drive systems much, but I use an encrypted SD card that is liked to a folder in my home so that programs dont even need to write to anything custom. Was like a few clicks and even worked on GNOME, on KDE that is easier too.
Panels, yes. KDE had a separate panel config per monitor which is worse than on Windows. But apart from that, they work out of the box and are really customizable.
GNOME... doesnt allow configurations like at all. You need 3rd party apps for everything, then you can do whatever you want, which also works well.
In all fairness paranoia is important in things like finding someone trying to slip a backdoor into xz. Going by the most recent Windows 11 update, Microsoft seems to be "we'll fix it in production".
Well it wasn't so much paranoia as obsession. The person who found it wasn't paranoid, they just went "Why is my connection taking a quarter of a second longer than it used to? This is unacceptable!!!"
Technically they thought they might have introduced a bug that caused the delay / a regression and set about investigating it. Pretty sure it was a Microsoft developer too.
I mean, small things like that add up, you want your stack as optimized as possible
A quarter of a second here, another quarter there, and suddenly it might take 2 seconds longer for a connection to form, which matters a ton. A lot of work in the modern web is going into reducing latency
There are much better kart games out there like Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, or Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. Tuxkart does have a lot of user created tracks and you can make your own, so there is somewhat a draw for that.
Eh, even with track creation, I prefer Modnation Racers and its spiritual successor LittleBigPlanet Karting. Shame both games are stuck on the PS3, but then SuperTuxKart still looks like it came out of the PS2. They run well in RPCS3 and online still works for track sharing through fan servers.
Also, I wasn't that impressed by Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled. It does have tons of content, certainly worth the price. Never played the originals and the remake sure does look pretty, but the track design feels pretty simple, probably because they're from a PS1 game. Simple track layouts, few gimmicks. Some people might prefer that, but not me. I'm sure CTR beat the socks off Mario Kart 64 back in the day, but the tracks in modern Mario Kart are to me far more interesting. I expected more out of it given all the hype. Plus, for some unfathomable reason despite being multiplatform the game was only released on consoles, not PC, so that's another game you have to emulate to play on PC. And if you do have a console to play it on, it's locked at 30fps regardless of platform, which is disappointing for a racing game. There's a 60fps mod if you emulate tho, thankfully.
All-Stars Racing Transformed does have my glowing recommendation, though.
Mario Kart can be fun depending on how your partner is with video games in general and how you are as a couple competitively. Overcooked can also be a good franchise as a coop game but I’ve also heard in some languages it’s referred to as “divorce kitchen” so your mileage may vary.
If you've consistently only bought products from one company rather than buying the best product available, and never even bothered trying something else, then yes, you do seem to.
And then there are the (multiplayer) gamers. It's great that I can play SO many more offline/single player games than I used to on Linux, but I can't help if the ones I like to play are all unsupported (and probably will be for a looong time).
I would have switched to Linux about 20 years ago if it was possible, but unfortunately, developing exploit free, stable anti cheats for competitive multiplayers on multiple OS's is a nightmare, and I get why most developers resort to picking the currently most widely used one. It's just a shame because otherwise I prefer Linux over Windows in many aspects.
More OS competition the better.
As both a windows and Linux user I can tell you 100% Microsoft has been prioritizing data collection over productivity, ease of use and hardware longevity.
Their OS has become more cluttered and awkward than ever
It takes days to clear out all the pop-ups and disable all the things you don't want. I find the ways of configuring networks and hardware is becoming more convoluted yet no more capable than window XP; nor any simpler.
To disable copilot AI assistant it took IT over a day to figure out. In our business we are legally not permitted to share client data with third parties for any reason. It required doing some obscure command line situation not documented outside of a forum post on Microsoft's support forums. Same with installing without a Microsoft account and disabling one drive.
Unfortunately we also need to be able to use commercial software that isn't supported under Linux and sometimes need more obscure software that is Windows only, so we are a bit stuck.
At home I use a couple Linux OSes on my workstation and servers. They are genuinely programmed to operate in as efficient and clean way as possible and I can build from there. It runs just as reliably on 15 year old hardware as it does on my latest rig. I also have a MacBook that runs really well, works seamlessly with my servers, offers the same terminal experience I have on my *nix workstations and never crashes.
*Nixes are more straight-forward, better documented and starts with most addons turned off. If you want, you can install an AI assistant. You certainly won't have to choose to waste a day figuring out how to disable a pre-installed AI assistant or paying someone hundreds of dollars to disable it.
And I shouldn't even start on how much a pain in the ass drive letters and fucking backslashes that need to be escaped/unescaped and translated to/from OS-X/*nix paths in data stores... And what the fuck they can't get a proper sym-link implementation going?
They shoulda done what Apple did with OSX. Recognize OS-9 was saddled with too much complicated under-structure and start over with a clean, mature, standardized, optimized and extensible *nix. NT was a huge improvement over the OG windows, but it's time for another refresh and what they got cooking with power Shell, Linux subsystem and their obsession with data collection and forcefeeding one cloud/copilot/accounts is not good.
Ah hell, you got me going. I'm ramblin again.
Point is, I've daily driven Win, OSX and *nix for decades. Hell, I started with MS-DOS 'cause Windows took too much space on my state-of-the-art 286 with 1 meg of RAM and have been a windows user for the majority of my life. Windows is the most convoluted and bloated and least secure of all the OSes. They've only kept their dominance through educating a generation of engineers on .net/direct-x, locking companies in with Office/outlook and promising corporations to spy on employees...
I don't know man. I was really bored and being silly and sucking at it.
The idea is that there's only one river in Egypt. The Nile and denial was what I was going for, yes obviously, but that's not a river in Egypt. Egypt the denial isn't just play on words and then I kept on going because that's how I communicate