I practically never need to. I’ll find a way to make things work one way or another.

Depends on the degree of coreboot support. If the vendor or a firm like 3mdeb officially supports coreboot on your model of choice, it’ll have first-class support and you won’t miss out on anything compared to your typical proprietary BIOS.

If you plan on installing it yourself, do read carefully through the coreboot docs since some systems will have a few quirks (e.g. audio jack issues on T480/T470). But once coreboot is up and running on your computer, it’s smooth sailing on Linux. Compiling and flashing can be a bit of a rabbit hole, but I’m happy to give some pointers if you go this route.

I daily drive a ThinkPad X230 with Libreboot and haven’t had any issues. The only significant differences I’ve noticed are

• Faster boot times (1 to 2 seconds to reach LUKS prompt)
• Config menu (nvramcui payload) has very few options
• (Libreboot exclusive) Full-disk encryption by having GRUB with LUKS2 support directly on the BIOS
• I left out UEFI support since it’s complicated on the X230 and it’s not necessary for Linux to boot

Lost my mind a few years ago over this quirk. Now I always change both files when I want to change the hostname.

I’ve been daily driving Debian Stable for the past 5 years and I am more than happy to continue for the next five. It’s also on nearly all of my machines and the majority of my VMs.

I’m honestly not very keen on the latest features or hardware, but I am very keen on my software being predictable and consistent, so the Debian release cycle is perfect for me.

Fellow Debian user ricing my daily driver here. Other people may call me crazy too, but I can see where you’re coming from. I’ve mostly come to terms with it by reminding myself that most people are either blissfully ignorant or too busy to care.

Have you considered making a sort of install script or even just a public repository for your tweaks? Makes it all a bit more accessible for those interested to adopt elements of your system. I’ve personally wanted to put together an automated install script once I perfect my Chicago95 rice since I’d imagine there’s quite a few people who want a one-click, retro, but functional system.

Got Debian with MATE on a couple of my computers. It’s easy on the eyes and easy on system resources. I like that its file manager lets you expand folders so I have that installed on my XFCE machines too.

I will admit, I miss the smooth graphics of Virtualbox. It’s quite evident with dragging windows around or playing a video inside a VM. Don’t want to touch Oracle stuff anymore though. Anyone here manage to get that working on virt-manager?

Functionally, not really. I can get my work done on anything from FVWM to GNOME without a hitch.

Aesthetically, very much. The Chicago95 theme sparks joy and makes work just a bit more enjoyable. KDE and GNOME might have more creature comforts, but I will happily tolerate XFCE because it works well with Chicago95. I don’t even do fresh installs anymore because of the time it takes for me to configure the visual style just right. I’ll instead image from an install I’ve prepared on a VM.

Between 2 and 3. I’ll show off my Linux setup to friends and preach to the choir, but I won’t rub my choices in the faces of people who use other distros or operating systems.

Certainly. I’ve had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE’s xfce4-terminal, MATE’s Caja file browser, and GNOME’s Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won’t get in the way either.

Display manager won’t matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.

The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.

Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you’re interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.

No idea about macOS, but this is something the typical Windows user should notice when switching over to Linux. That is, Windows OOBE gives you a user with administrative privileges by default and therefore won’t prompt you for the password again after logging in, just yes/no dialogs when exercising those admin privileges.

Typing in the password whenever you need root privileges is just part of the security model of Linux and unless for some reason you’re using sudo for everything, people get used to it. Your default user account doesn’t automatically have root privileges, sudo or su mediates that for you. Back when I used Windows, I even had my accounts set up that way, separate admin, daily user account without admin privileges, and prompt for the admin password every time I installed stuff, etc.

Granted, it does leave me with a couple compromises like a login password that is shorter than my disk encryption password so I’m not asked for the full thing every time I sudo and sometimes leaving a terminal with sudo -i hanging around.

Because hamburger menus do not belong on any screen larger than a tablet

It isn’t a dedicated font viewer, but I’ve used ImageMagick’s display utility to preview fonts.

Linux Mint is your best bet. Intuitive for new users without any flashy features to get in the way.

All said, temper your expectations. I did this for a couple of my folks and the Linux partition just sat untouched until I next visited (and presumably thereafter). Despite updates for their existing Windows 10 ending. For an unfortunate majority of people, they don’t really care until their browser stops rendering pages, no matter how you proselytize Linux.

If you are passionate enough and have some money to spare, get a used laptop (240 GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, 3rd Gen i5 at a minimum), preferably enterprise-grade (Latitude, ProBook, ThinkPad), clean it up, and pop Linux Mint onto it. Your folks can then experience Linux at their leisure, side-by-side with their existing machine at no risk. No fussing with boot order menus, which I have seen confuse computer science graduates.

RX 480, thinking of upgrading since ROCm support for it ended a while ago and working around it has become very painful

Reinstalling GRUB in chroot so it ‘registers’ with the BIOS when cloning an install of Linux

Same, too many clocks, all getting out of sync, and some on power strips that get turned off periodically.

I was thinking something on those lines the other day. We like to say that Linux revives old computers, and I wouldn’t for a second consider putting Windows back on them, but I also have a case of hardware support so close, yet so far. I’ve two old laptops with nvidia chips from before the days of Optimus switiching, so you are forced to use the dGPU. Believe me, I wasted a whole weekend trying to make them use only integrated graphics. It was fine while they were supported under the proprietary nvidia driver, but as soon as support ended, nouveau became the only option and it absolutely crippled 3D performance, even on very old titles. Meanwhile, Windows still supports the old 340 driver needed for those graphics chips.

Mostly comes down to hardware vendors not bothering with Linux support and open-source in general. Which leaves support for affected devices down to volunteers having time to reverse-engineer a driver from scratch. To be clear, I don’t blame nouveau at all. It must have been a ton of work to even get the nouveau driver to its current state.

Back in the early 2010s, I bought a new PC with Windows 8 on it. Hated the way it looked and the way it worked. I wanted my Start menu and Aero and Classic themes back. Led me to learning about Linux. But uxTheme and Classic Shell kept me happy for a couple more years.

Then I got a laptop with Windows 10. Felt my heart rate spike as I went through the settings and found out how much more hostile to user choice and privacy Microsoft had become. When the semi-annual updates kept undoing all my hard work debloating Windows, I decided it was time to begin using Linux in earnest.

At first, I had a dual-boot setup and jumped around between Ubuntu, Deepin, Arch, etc. Found myself booting into the Windows partition less than once a month, at which point I moved it out onto its own drive. Distro-hopping went on for about a year, after which I decided that Debian met all of my needs. Continued DE-hopping for about another year until settling on XFCE with Chicago95. Brought me enough joy to make a standardized setup in a VM, which I have since cloned to all of my computers except for the Windows laptop I keep around for work.

Mixed bag. I’m lucky enough that most of my work can be done on a Linux machine. Workplace does require us to bring our own devices, but the policy is extremely lax, no need to install any monitoring software or the like. Which lets me have a Linux desktop chilling on my desk.

But I do have to keep a laptop with Windows around. We sometimes have to work with overcomplicated Office documents that break on alternatives like LibreOffice or the occasional piece of proprietary software that needs direct USB access, which Wine cannot yet provide.