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End of Windows 10
(endof10.org)
Reasons to switch:
- It's waaaaay cheaper
- A new laptop costs a lot of money. Repair cafes will often help you for free. Software updates are also free, forever. You can of course show your support for both with donations!
- No ads, no spying
- Windows comes with lots of ads and spyware nowadays, slowing down your computer and increasing your energy bill.
- Good for the planet
- Production of a computer accounts for 75+% of carbon emissions over its lifecycle. Keeping a functioning device longer is a hugely effective way to reduce emissions.
- Community support
- If you have any issues with your computer, the local repair cafe and independent computer shop are there for you. You can find community support in online forums, too.
- User control
- You are in control of the software, not companies. Use your computer how you want, for as long as you want.
Hexbear-related reasons to switch:
- Still can use hexbear
- Hexbear requires a web browser (firefox) to use.
- Don't have to pay for it.
- You'll receive updates and features for your operating system free of any personal charge to you till the end of time. You can donate directly to volunteers and workers to make your computer better (better yet non computer related things)
- using Windows for Windows's sake or Apple for Apple's sake is liberalism and supports USA/piSSrael
- TBH they copied from us (KDE, GNOME) anyway. Their innovation is being a monopoly and advertising to you.
- Makes you smarter (it's like reading theory but with computers)
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you'll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you'd have to waste your soul on.
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you'll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you'd have to waste your soul on.
If you're fine fiddling and tinkering, Lutris for Linux has been able to run a few things from Windows that I wanted to play... so far Transformers: Devastation, Planescape Torment, and Space Rangers have all run like a champ. Its a bit odd to get a game installed. Its like WINE but with less terminal style commands.
Dosbox works like a champ and lots of abandonware dos games have been repackaged in their own dosbox wrapper.
Retroarch is .... a thing that can sometimes work for console games. Its... a chore to use.
Ooof, my general experience with Linux users is that if they say "works flawlessly" they mean 2 weeks of fraught driver installs and using commands taken from the necromomicon.
So I hesitate to think what "a chore" would be
What are you talking about? I haven't had to fuck with drivers on Linux in like a decade, and even then it was because I had one of those weird gaming laptops that had two GPU's. "Works flawlessly" to me means just that: install it from your distro's package manager and it's ready to go, with perhaps a smidge of configuration if necessary. Retroarch is "a chore" in the sense that it took me like an afternoon of tinkering to get working, and most of that was because I simply didn't understand the core concept of how to get controllers working.
"Two weeks of fraught driver installs" my ass. And "commands taken from the necronomicon", really? Are you that afraid of the command line? I'd say you owe it to yourself to give Linux a shot. You've got the wrong idea about it, and about those of us who use it.
I think they were specifically referencing my comment about Retroarch, which is has a very messy interface.
Yeah, I came in too aggressive, definitely.
But I dunno, it pisses me off when people (who have never used Linux) are so, so certain it's impossibly difficult. Because it makes using Linux seem like a scary choice, when it's really not that scary. Horror stories about weeks of driver hell just aren't true, and haven't been in literal decades and yet we still have people who will never try Linux because someone on the internet made a snarky comment about how hard it is.
So that's the emotional place my comment was coming from. It was supposed to be basically a "please don't talk like this about Linux, it's false and you're scaring people away". But I didn't express that well, especially because of my aggressiveness right out of the gate. The internet has been getting to me recently, I think I need to take some time off and touch some grass so I don't immediately jump into every internet conversation with aggression.
This still happens, but it is limited pretty much exclusively to when you buy exotic hardware that was literally released yesterday (not completely impossible if you are choosing a brand new laptop to install Linux on), that no Linux users have had the chance to even test yet. Drivers get tweaked, new device IDs get added to udev so the correct driver can be assigned to the device, and there is a delay before these bleeding edge changes appear in stable distributions.
Sometimes "gimmicky" features like individually addressable keyboard LEDs or treating two wireless video game controllers as one input device (i.e. Nintendo Joycons) take longer or are considered out-of-scope for kernel development (where device drivers are implemented).
I replaced my 12 year old laptop recently. The new one had been on the market for about 6 months, and for the first week or two the amdgpu driver would crash intermittently (though the fact that the GPU driver can crash and just gracefully land me back at the login prompt with no required reboot is pretty awesome, all things considered). The problem fixed itself just by updating. This was on Fedora, where updates get moved along relatively quickly.
That said, I didn't even bother running Windows on it, so who knows? Maybe they have driver problems too :)
Perfectly understandable and never stop advocating for Linux.
A lot of things where pretty straight forward when i moved over to Linux but with the piles of old stuff lying around. It has been a way better experience now (or like a year ago when I moved all the house computers over) than when I tried a Linux box around the 2010's.
But there are a still few things that either don't work with Linux through any means that I could find, behaved wildly differently for reasons that i can only speculate about, or there were so many different and contradictory explanations of installing/troubleshooting that it took way too long to figure things out. So the frustration and anxiety is real.
So I've got Retroarch on one machine and OpenEmu on an ancient miniMac.
Functionally, they do the same thing, an all in one console emulator platform. OpenEmu works in a way that makes sense to my brain. The menus flow in a way that makes sense, getting a game assigned to an emulator makes sense to me. Retroarch... has an incredibly complex (or maybe just messy) series of menus with a whole fuckton of options that can be tinkered with, but I find it difficult to remember how to get to games if I stop using the emulator for a while. So Retroarch's problem is not about getting it to work in the Linux environment but just remembering how to navigate the very cluttered menus to find and play games that I've downloaded.