This is the only take based in reality. Nobody (except us) cares about openness, federation or business models. What matters are ease of use and adoption.

Of course that doesn’t mean that the other takes are missing the mark in terms of history possibly repeating itself in the future. But if it does, that just means that (as is to be expected) the people don’t make momentary decisions with a bigger (collective) picture in mind. Design needs to address individual needs first and foremost especially when it comes to social media.

Nobody joins a platform to beat corporate ownership of people’s digital lives. BlueSky manufactured adoption by starting out as an invite-only cool kids club. Having to pick a fediverse instance is an entry barrier. There will always be a lot less money to throw around when you’re trying to create something under the umbrella of freedom and openness. I don’t see how these movements could ever win, even if they provide an arguably better product.

World hunger can’t be cured for profit. The hunger of the many is directly caused by the greed of the few.

But I’d love to see them try of course. The billions Musk has evaporated with his purchase could’ve also been spent less egotistically.

Windows can definitely be a nuisance these days especially during the setup. But you mention a key aspect at the end. Touch-based devices these days are super intuitive compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to on our desktops for decades. And they aren’t just miniature PCs anymore, they can do all the same stuff, regardless of whether they’re actually being used for the same things we associate with desktop-work.

Linux has a huge userbase in the form of Android and therein virtually no entry-barrier or learning-curve to speak of. I feel that that’s where we need to go. Mac OS is already there. Windows is just living and breathing off the fact that its market share was once virtually 100%. I think a good example of what I mean is how Valve are leveraging Linux on their Steam Deck. It’s still intimidating when you switch over to the KDE desktop, but as a regular user gamer you won’t ever need to. Everything this device has been built to do can be done in a tailor-made UI for its purpose. Or think ChromeOS. I can install a virtual Debian beneath ChromeOS if I want more control over what I can install but other than that the OS is dead simple to use.

Linux deserves mass adoption but it needs to think user experience first just like the big corporations do. I firmly believe that that’s possible even when the big bucks aren’t being thrown around.

I have a middle aged customer who is legitimately using Mint on one of those old Athlons today in 2024 for her day to day. There literally is no reason for her to upgrade hardware unless her usecases evolve into something more demanding.

I agree Linux is a lot more accessible than it used to be, but if I understand you correctly the people you helped transition still needed at least some initial holding of their hands. If for example you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled that initial hurdle could be cleared but I still believe there’s a learning curve at least as steep as it would be for someone learning Windows for the first time. The difference being that everything out there takes Windows into account.

If you just wana surf the web Linux can probably be as easy as ChromeOS these days but that isn’t really a usecase where operating systems can make a difference one way or the other.

Is that an Enterprise version at work? I mean even if you pause updates for as long as they allow you to on consumer versions, at some point you do have to do it. I do get nagged on one of my installations but not on my main one. Both Windows 10.

I was planning to transition to Linux completely by this autumn but laziness strikes as per. I guess autumn 2025 is the new deadline now.

I didn’t understand the “forced upgrade” argument until now. Yea I guess you’re right, at some point you have to do updates (they nag about upgrading to 11 but you can skip that indefinitely). But with how popular Windows is you have options for a lot of problems (including forced updates which to be fair shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to security patches).

If you open up Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility (https://christitus.com/windows-tool/) you basically have a comprehensive list of all the ameliorations one could ever want at their disposal. That’s really the main thing Windows still has going for it, it’s a decades-long mainstay which means there are plenty of knowledgable people out there who know how it can be made to heel even if Microsoft decide to force a Microsoft account on you, telemetry, whatever it may be, there will probably always be a way around it.

For example one of my main gripes with Windows 11 is how you can’t make the taskbar show all tray icons anymore by default. They removed window titles in the taskbar so now everything is basically a square down there meaning there’s all this empty space between my open windows and the tray. But of course someone out there has written a program to automatically unhide all tray icons and thrown it on GitHub.

To me personally it doesn’t matter how crappy the design choices are as long as they can be mitigated. If bad corporate decisionmaking is a dealbreaker (which is also a fair assessment) then you have to ditch the corporation entirely and go Linux or what have you. Not trying to be smart or anything but there really is no reason to stay on Windows left anymore. Maybe if you absolutely need Microsoft Office or something but ever since Proton came out the issue with Windows-only games has pretty much evaporated.

Switching to Linux without prior experience will challenge even the most tech-savvy, but it’s an investment worth making many times over.

I used Nextcloud for both files and my PortableApps for years but it always had a hard time managing all those tens of thousands of small files. Lots of sync overhead. So I found Seafile and couldn’t be happier. I don’t just have my PortableApps in there now, I sync my Windows Documents, Pictures, Videos and Downloads folders. Seafile is very good at tracking partial changes in files so it doesn’t always need to sync an entire file when just part of it changed.

Also: It’s just a file sync service without any auxiliary features.

My solution is basically what @mojolobo mentions with Nextcloud behind it and I love the concept. Because Obsidian (via a WebDAV plugin on the phone) just syncs with the “Notes” folder in my Nextcloud root it really is just a bunch of .md (markdown) files. It gives me an added sense of security (on top of the self-hosting aspect) because I can see those files everywhere I have Nextcloud installed, I can edit them manually if I wanted to. On the PC you just point the Obsidian app to the folder, on phones you do it via a WebDAV plugin.

Can’t argue with that flawless logic.

Does that mean you weren’t able to implement those changes or didn’t want to regress back from Wayland?

Point being that OP must’ve installed Windows before and therefore should be able to build a computer hardware-wise?

Absolutely. Anything can be learned and unless things build on top of each other you can’t really compare difficulties.

What downsides though right? “We” object to Ubuntu over matters like Canonical being a for-profit company or their choice of Desktop Environment. At the end of the day, who cares? If it works it works, right?

It’s an interesting angle, the hostility thing. People in the know have largely fallen out of love with Ubuntu but imho that’s not necessarily because Ubuntu fell in quality but just because so many “better” things have come up since Ubuntu 04.10. It is definitely a sound choice for non-techy people, maybe more than ever. Personally I’d prefer (almost) any contemporary desktop over Gnome these days, but I can definitely see the appeal for others in terms of simple design language.

Basically you can turn any old laptop into a Chromebook these days using Linux, and most people just like your parents most definitely do not need more than a functional webbrowser. Basically a smartphone with a larger screen and physical keyboard. Even if you don’t care about your privacy (or freedom from notification-spam) why still pay the Microsoft-tax.

Which are about as related as the knowledge required to mount drywall and the knowledge required to run a ham radio station. You tell me which is more complicated but either way there are most certainly radio amateurs out there that don’t know the first thing about handywork and handymen that could barely find the on-off switch on a broadcast-rig.

Yes @[email protected] please save yourself dozens of future headaches by listening to this person.

oftentimes (and this is more of a general statement) throwing into google exactly what you would otherwise type into your shell of choice should get you on the right track, ie searching for “man systemctl”

as far as the inability to reboot goes, if a regular sudo reboot can’t bring the machine back up either then this is probably a hardware issue outside the sphere of the operating system’s influence. can’t say I experienced something like that myself. I guess the closest I witnessed would be a computer that when rebooted with an old USB-Keyboard plugged in just refused to get past the POST screen. The keyboard worked fine if plugged in later, but the computer couldn’t reliably get through the boot process with the thing present. Maybe there’s a similar variable to your setup.

I bought a used old gen Sonos Connect about a year ago to integrate my Logitech Z906 into an existing pair of Sonos speakers. They made it deliberately tedious to downgrade those speakers (who had gotten the S2 “blessing”) back to S1 to make them work with the Sonos Connect. I’m an IT repair shop guy and I cursed all the way through this downgrade process.

I would have gladly bought current hardware from them again if their prices were anywhere within the realm of plausibility. Credit where it’s due, that Sonos Connect hookup with the 2 wall-mounted 1st party speakers works absolutely reliably. That company just seriously lost its bearings since they engineered those parts.

Guess the share of sane people among the totality was gravely misjudged.

How easy would it be for you to find (natural) laxatives? ChatGPT names Prunes and Kiwis, Broccoli, Almonds and Walnuts, Yogurt (the white non-sweet kind would be best)

Basically the above is just a who’s who of healthy dieting if you ask me lol. If you need high caloric density for the “eating as much as possible” part just go for anything high in fat and or sugar. Nutella would check both boxes but this is really not recommendable from a health perspective obviously.

Competitive eaters like Beard Meats Food would just chug on double cream if they wanted to get as many calories down as possible. The only “problem” there is that it doesn’t make for a very entertaining video.