I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.

Many people are illiterate. How many of them are trying to run Linux, I don’t know.

Update: installed mint. Seems work. Had a problem where it couldn’t see the HD. Had to change an option in grub

Pasting what I found online to fix it:

“”" thank you so much! what was the solution!

for anyone might read this in the future: in the bootmenu where u can select which version of linux u wanna boot u can press “e” and then u need to add intel_iommu=off at the end of the line of the “linux” row - i had some double dashes at the end for me it did the job when I add them before the double dashes.

Then I could see the harddrive and install mint mate on my old macbook air

also needed later on to set the parameter permantent by opening a terminal and used this command sudo nano /etc/default/grub

edited this line like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash intel_iommu=off” then save and exit nano and this command for updating the boot thingy

sudo update-grub “”"

So far most things have worked fine.

It’s a little annoying when steam wants to redo the vulkan compilation thing every time, but it seems to work fine if I skip that.

Modding I’m not sure how it’ll work yet. Some stuff probably just works, if it’s like “edit this file” or “replace that file” but I haven’t tried yet.

Only recommendation: some wifi cards (with certain chips, I forget which) in my experience have required me to go hunt down a driver, so check reviews for any card you’re looking at to see if people report it working out of the box.

With Linux mint, with one machine, I had to explicitly open the driver manager and tell it to use the drivers for the wifi. It wasn’t obvious but I’d read it on some random forum and remembered. Once I knew that was a thing, it was easy. Opened the driver manager, plugged in the install media (USB stick) when it asked, and then told it to use the proprietary drivers.

Good to know. I had some trouble a couple months back getting wifi and Ethernet working, and learned my phone can provide Internet over USB.

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

Windows sure is bad, though I haven’t seen an actual blue-screen in years. That’s some foul luck.

I turn it off every night when I’m done. It boots quickly and I mostly just use it for the web browser and steam.

My work computer (Mac) I put to sleep because I don’t always want to open all the terminals and IDE and such every time.

Nvidia 4070 super.

I don’t remember the other details off the top of my head. Discord had me run sudo apt install linux-image-oem-24.04b and that fixed the Ethernet. They didn’t really explain details, though. Maybe there were more things to do, but I didn’t get more responses so I was on my own.

I think people over value emotions, but I realize I’m part of people too and it happens to me. Emotions are a fast heuristic but they’re not very inaccurate. They’re good for when speed is important, or when more information isn’t available. Neither is true on an async post about Linux. But yes, I can be dismissive of emotions but it’s something I’m working on.

I’ve seen too many people make strange, unhelpful, decisions because like “someone told me to do something and now I won’t” or “that guy was rude so I’m not going to listen”. That’s what your post felt like to me. (Note the emotional dimension there, heh)

Like, imagine a friend who always forgets their plans, is late, and double books themselves. You probably can’t just be like “use a calendar, dude”. You probably have to gently massage them and incept the idea. If you just tell them, they’ll feel bad, reject the idea, and continue having problems. (In real life, some months later the friend did come around to using a calendar, but only after uselessly wrestling with feeling bad)

So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done.

Envy. I tried to install mint last night on a new computer, and it was a shit show.

• Ethernet and WiFi wouldn’t work.
• Bluetooth wouldn’t work
• the HDMI out stopped working at some point

I did learn you can tether your phone via USB, so I got Internet that way. That was cool.

But after I got Internet working, with help from discord, elden ring and Baldur’s gate 3 both failed to launch in different ways.

I gave up. Windows11 is horrible, but at least those things work.

I’m on Mint. It only offered up to version 550 and veilguard needed 565, if I recall

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=433321 was more or less my problem.

I could only find “beta” drivers that were new enough to run Veilguard, which was annoying. I had to add some other ppa thing. Not a big deal, but would scare off some users.

You did come off as someone who reacts only on emotion, since that’s all that was visible in your previous post.

Being put off by the delivery of information is not typically a good reason to dismiss it. If someone says to you “3 is a prime number you donkey” you’re hopefully not going to reject that because they were rude. I mean, we all do that to some extent, but it’s a pretty sloppy shortcut.