This year, so far, I've moved two older family members over from windows 10 onto Linux. I opted for an ubuntu based distro as I'm familiar enough to troubleshoot it, even remotely.

The first was a laptop, about 10 years old; windows was unusably slow. Luckily, the transition was smooth, Linux Mint took first attempt and no issues were had, everything worked out of the box except swipe scrolling - a quick tutorial sorted that out (terminal intervention was needed). 4 hours total setup (including a pile of desktop shortcuts), dual boot just in case she had issues.

The second was an older machine, a desktop, Frankensteined out of old parts (oldest being the motherboard at 15 years old). It ran windows 10 without a single hitch or slowdown.

2 days to get it "running", I had to repair grub to get the damn thing to boot after an install finally took. In the end I had to go with lubuntu with a manual cinnamon install because I hit my 4th mint install attempt and got a strong case of the"fuck thats". At the end I have a machine that has ghost headphones flickering into existence giving choppy sound that is pretty unusable. There is also horrific graphical glitches when booting (harmless, but I crapped a brick when I first saw it) - though I suspect this is just the fact there is an elderly Nvidia card in there.

A lot of time spent in terminal was unable to even identify what was happening - a first for me! My money is on a bios update, but yeah, not fun on old boards.

All in all, two very different experiences. It's not a warning against Linux (make the change now while the support is there!), just a warning that the road isn't always smooth. The bumps can come in odd places - you'd think the laptop would be the tricky one but nope, desktop rig was the worst.

Good luck out there with the change folks!

Clocks forward folks; off into BST we go.

For the past decade or so I've mostly had a windows rig for gaming, and a dual boot laptop for travel/work (windows for Microsoft Access/PowerPoint, Ubuntu for everything else).

An odd issue I ran across was drive data format; it caused unending issues with steam/lutris when installing games running under wine/proton to drives formatted for windows (they'd just not run, no error messages till one day I tried to force it via terminal and got an error I could search via Google).

In the end I just partitioned off the drive to a native Linux format and that fixed it (had to dump the contents of the drive to a portable which took a while!), but now I am wondering if there was another alternate workaround?

Not all art shows something beautiful - this really does feel like the internet of today without a lot of browser tweaking.

We've received word that we're migrating from the older version of Blackboard to the new, "student approved", Blackboard Ultra.

We'll be migrating our courses by hand over the summer; how bad is this going to be?

A few years ago I stumbled onto this, and it provided a nice afternoon feature film. Figured the folks here would enjoy it!

Truly a test of patience - this is an excellent modpack that unifies 3 classics together into the way I dreamed of playing them as a kid.

Found it by accident a week ago, and it's been my short nightly unwind (trying to do a solo run because I always wanted to).

Thought I'd share this list as it contains many emus I've not heard of before and I'd love to hear people's reviews on any folks have tried.

So, in the past, I used to make a bit of money fixing up comps for folks.

With slightly trickier cases, I used to boot up puppy Linux to check the more essential hardwares (and if it booted, back up essential files for the customer). My students are now asking how to manage similar things.

Alas, puppy is no good for a modern system, as it really does not like UEFI boot. I was wondering if anyone can recommend an alternative.

I'm looking for a very lightweight gui os I that can run some hardware diagnostic tools, runs on a wide range of hardware, that is easy enough to set up on a pen for novice users.

A handy tool for developing vn style games for the Gameboy and Gameboy colour.

Great for people starting a game dev journey.

Thought I'd post this up here since I've not seen it mentioned. For those who want to explore the world of discworld, this is a great MUD.

Very friendly community when I hop on every few months, and with a lot of rich detail from the books.