I too have recently switched to Linux, on multiple machines. It sounds like you’ve already found your solution, but I’ll put some of my own reflections in here anyway, in case it’s helpful and for other people who might be interested.

The first step I’d suggest in installing Linux on hardware not made specifically for it is to test your prospective distribution with a Live CD. Try to use all the hardware that you’d use normally. Linux has made great strides in compatibility, and I’ve had hardware that Windows has abandoned still work on The Penguin, but there are still plenty of hardware manufacturers out there who don’t care about Linux compatibility, especially if they focus on general consumer or creative fields. New devices that come out, that you might want, might not have Linux drivers. (I recently had to deal with this with an iskn “the Slate2+” that I had to take special measures to use with my Linux-running laptops.) I also have an old integrated desktop machine with a built-in touchscreen monitor, and support for the touch part of the screen seems to vary across distributions. Another issue is getting networking working if your machine has Broadcom wireless, still the bane of some prospective Linux users even after all these years. If you’re thinking on installing on a machine whose hardware you’re unsure of, especially, test it out with a Live CD first!

Second, pick a good distribution. There are two general types of distros, those that periodically release whole new versions of themselves that you’ll have to decide if you want to upgrade to, and “rolling distros.” Of the first type there’s Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora; of the second, there’s Arch, Manjaro and Gentoo.

Which you’ll want to use depends on your use case and technical skill and willingness to search for info on problems and fix them yourself. Upgrade distributions tend to be more monolithic, with all the software thoroughly tested, but except for specific software like web browsers, you probably won’t be using the latest versions of the included software, and instead will get multiple programs updated at once when you upgrade your distribution. This may not be a problem for you, but if you like using the latest versions of software you will probably get bored with waiting with an upgrade distro. The best upgrade distro for beginners is probably Mint.

The alternative is a “rolling” release distro. These upgrade software much more frequently (although again, not always immediately). Reduced testing is generally how they can release more often. One of these is Arch Linux, which is Not For Beginners, but Manjaro is based on Arch and is pretty beginner-friendly.

Another issue is software dependencies. When new versions of software are released, ideally they’ll be perfectly compatible with past versions, and will work well with all the other programs on your system that rely on it. But sometimes this won’t be true, it won’t be obvious how the new behavior breaks things, and so doing an update of one package will break something seemingly unrelated. This is why upgrade distos are a bit more stable. It also explains the rise of Flatpaks, a special means of distributing programs that bundle up all their dependencies with them, and run somewhat in isolation from the rest of your system. That part of Flatpaks is good; the problem is when you install one, and you’re informed that little utility you want to run may take a gigabyte or more of disk space. Flatpaks can be EXTREMELY wasteful in terms of used disk space, but because they allow developers to avoid having to worry about compatibility with different library versions, they’re quite popular as a means of releasing software right now, and some software (I’m looking at you in particular, Handbrake) only distribute in Flatpaks. I personally find Flatpaks to be tremendously wasteful and that they negate one of Linux’s biggest virtues, that it can be really compact and leave more space for your own files, but there will be times when they’re a lifesaver.

If all of this seems forbidding to you… I’d say that it’s really not that much different from Windows, but just in its own way? Windows has its own problems, especially with security, and Microsoft tends to overcome these problems by throwing resources at them, not just theirs but your computer’s too. Windows Defender imposes its overhead upon nearly everything your machine does. And they also always are shoehorning whatever crazy tech fad they’re in love with this week, whether it’s AI, voice assistants, widgets or what else. I’ve used computers long enough to remember “Active Desktop” and “Channels,” and I can tell you that Microsoft is CONSTANTLY doing this. And MacOS isn’t immune to it either, although it tends to be better.

There are certainly some Linux distros that do this too (esp Ubuntu, ask someone who remembers Ubiquity), but generally Linux is much much better about it. Ask yourself, how much do you really hate the idea of AI built into your computer’s OS? In my case, it was very much super angry rage, and so here I am on Mint. I hope it works out well for you too!

This poll is for the Mozilla Foundation. They don’t make the browser. The post should probably have made that clear.

I signed up for Loops the first day. I didn’t get an email confirmation until two days after, and I still haven’t been given a way to sign in.

Google constantly puts Youtube ads at the top of searches for information! Countless people put their information on Youtube in the form of videos! Tutorials get put on Youtube as a matter of course! There’s a trove of old media on Youtube that can’t be accessed any other way! Congratulations, you’ve won the award for the most thoughtlessly dismissive person on the internet today.

Strange Adventures in Infinite Space

Zork

Ultima

Even 20 minutes seems like too long, but that would still be wonderful.

They also hate the idea of phone trees. Companies don’t care unless we make them not care.

Warning: this is secretly a Nethack thread!

So, the model was playing on average 2,000 points worse because the player was luckier? The things about werewolves and dogs is a factor but is statistically insignificant.

Nethack has a couple of other gotchas like this. They should be grateful they weren’t playing on Friday the 13th…

The operator for ensuring something appeared in a search used to be “+”, but they stopped using that for some _?^??mYsTeRiOuS rEaSoN^?_??

My response to that is Flatpak. 16MB of software requiring 700MB to download and consuming 2.8GB of disk space. Linux absolutely can be bad, due to cultural issues.

(My example software above is Handbrake. I’m sure someone’s going to “well actually” me about this, and I don’t even care. I don’t see how it can be justified, and I’m kind of curious to see if someone can do it.)

What the heck is Dexerto?

Ed Zitron has a scathing piece about that (in the podcast version he’s seething) entitled “The Man Who Killed Google Search.” Worth checking out, it contains some quality righteous anger.

This isn’t the worst timeline. It was always destined to end up this way. Corporations consider themselves ethically mandated to squeeze as much profit out of customers as they can, to find the exactly monetary line where the number of customers they drive off is balanced by the money they can gain by the things that drove them off. They actually believe that, and that basically means any profit-seeking corporation is going to ruin their user experience in the long run.

Once, I was asked if I wanted a special offer on Microsoft Office on boot up. Explorer freezes so often for me when I right-click a file and select Open With that it’s made me twitchy. Frequently image icons stop displaying. For a long while, every time I’ve installed Windows on a computer, I’ve had to go through and disable all the awful misfeatures Windows tries to put in the taskbar. I also always have to set OneDrive so it doesn’t redirect folders like Desktop and Documents into its cloud storage area. Now Windows 11 is threatening to put CoPilot on my desktop, and I’ll have to disable it too.

I’m positively longing for Linux now.

It has. For the first time, it’s risen to over 4% of market share of desktops: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/linux-continues-growing-market-share-reaches-4-of-desktops/

Of course this doesn’t count Android or Chromebooks, both of which run Linux on some level.

I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.

Note: article puts a rectangle in front of the article when you’ve read half of it.

Why is Microsoft even deciding what programs I can run on my computer in the first place? They’re not malware, they shouldn’t be doing this at all.