Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.

I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)

On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.

Yep. Although…

Is it safe to use the OK hand signal again?

Words and symbols cannot be divorced from context. Like @SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.de hinted at, putting a date of birth in a username is common and there are so many other meanings for these numbers so it would be ridiculous to jump down someone’s throat for simply using them, or using common gestures. Unless that friend in the story was also saying some reactionary things in their comments, I think it’s silly and careless that someone challenged them on their name.

I been told by some international friends that one of the political flags over in Australia, the Eureka flag, has a similar situation where both trade unions and white nationalists try to claim its legacy, so it’s common to see in both the pro and anti immigration rallies. Context is what makes it either a potential nationalist/racist dogwhistle or a symbol of workers’ rights.

That’s just coincidence, I’ve been using the term for a long time. It’s not new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-fascism

A happy ending!

To take this a step further, wolf-whistles (neo-Nazi dog-whistles) are often intentionally vague, and spotting them is important in recognizing cryptofascists because they will try and claim plausible deniability, “oh leftists call everyone a nazi” is something open nazis say to downplay themselves to other reactionaries. They know that their beliefs are still unspeakably disgusting to most societies, they tend to disguise it, downplay it and rationalize it.

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Sometimes it’s language and phrases itself, you can often see cryptofascists use the same phrases, euphemisms or odd terms as famous fascist speeches or texts, whether as an intentional subtle allusion or just unwittingly echoing what they’ve read. And that’s where they’ll chuck in terms like “Final solution” in memes.

Other times, it’s more direct coded language and symbols. It’s probably less unknown these days, but some common examples of codes are the sonnenrad ‘Black Sun’ symbol, Nazi-era pseudo-runes (not to be confused with legitimate historical Germanic runes!), the numbers 14 and 88, and more.

Yep. And also for bonus points, learn the basics of asking for help. Even simple things like writing a useful subject for a post, being respectful and how to share useful error codes or logs.

You have to understand, it just wouldn’t be fair to put inclusion over exclusion ! You care about equality, don’t you?

“If we allow your flag, then we have to admit also other similar political flags, both supporting and opposing diversity.”

Consider the following: no, they don’t.

To answer the main title question: it definitely can get better, especially if you’re using common hardware with maintainers working to improve the code to handle them.

I’m one of the people with a mostly smooth Linux experience on my devices (I have similar values to other nerdy programmers and naturally purchase more similar or popular computers/parts, and I haven’t really had brand new bleeding-edge computer parts, so that might give me better odds at a smoother experience), no weird audio/WiFi/GPU issues that you often see here. The only issues I have are so inconsequential they’re not worth mentioning. And I’ve used the two OSs you’ve used.

If any of you have a spare laptop, maybe you can run a live OS for people to play around with?

That’s alright, and I’m also a little bit sorry for nitpicking! I just saw it as an opportunity to illustrate how complex this whole software mess is.

I’m not sure if you’ve come across it yet, but there’s a well-known copypasta posted to satirize the way many Linux users will nitpick terms.

Furthermore, Linux (as a whole) is not a for-profit project, or a singular organization.

Desktop Linux is far from it’s only purpose, and many of the devs are far more interested in their own use-cases: servers, embedded systems, supercomputers, phones, special purpose OSs. Wikipedia even has a page for the wide range of use beyond desktops and servers. So we can’t simply treat devs as a unified group with a common goal like we can generally do with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Steam, etc. unless you pick a particular distro!

I don’t care much about the OS people use

On a surface level, same. On the other hand, I do believe that more users, if combined with certain design and documentation choices, can enable more contributions and fixes and software support, and I believe this has already been a huge factor in recent improvements to the Linux experience like Proton.

Can’t possibly be more vulnerable than Windows

The linked article provides many examples where security techniques lag far behind Windows. Vulnerability isn’t as simple as being ‘more vulnerable’ or ‘less vulnerable’, it’s a complex concept, and both GNU/Linux and Windows have design decisions which make each better than the other in various ways. We need to understand security in a more nuanced way than “x is better than y” if we actually want to protect ourselves from threats.

A Linux installation can be set to run root with no password or prompt. A Linux user can choose to never update their software - one could argue that Windows forced OS updates are an improvement here. The argument that the typical user has more technical understanding is a weak defense (as in, we really really really should not rely on that) and also irrelevant when we’re talking about Linux gaining a wider audience.

Yeah, unfortunate to rain in the parade but GNU/Linux definitely needs some attention sooner rather than later. Plenty of design benefits, but also plenty of pitfalls from an OS sec POV.

Average users aren’t installing SELinux or Qubes so I hope no-one was actually going to reply with what Linux can do as opposed to the everyday user experience.

A few years outdated, but relevant: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html

Much better than I’d expected, that’s great to hear! The minor bugs are always annoying, but like you mentioned, the speed boost hopefully outweighs it.

Definitely update us on UE, I’ve haven’t explored the EU or Unity on Linux, and it would be nice to know if they work, because “you can use Godot” doesn’t work for everyone.

Except for one, where suspend instantly wakes up the pc and is therefore unusable. But i will figure that out another day.

Is this just an automatic suspend after inactivity? Because if so, I think it the inactivity timeout can be disabled in the settings menu, as a workaround until you can figure it out.

I actually tried flatpak uninstall --unused and it didn’t remove these ones. So there’s something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That’s a wild guess, I don’t know how it works.

Mint took a while to handle flatpak decently in the update manager, and now it’s a nice experience.

Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn’t cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who’s to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.