I… Don’t? But I’ve used it since 3.11. It’s incredibly usable software, when it works. Switched recently because even I have my limits - that win11 recall even made it as an idea at the table is enough to make me jump ship. The ads in win10 pushed me to the limit, but recall is insane unless they’re literally gonna give away free hardware and software. I paid for that damn computer and bought a license - wtf. It’s not Microsofts hardware to datamine or put ads on. Paid for things with ads in them that also keylog and screen scrape and datamine can fuck all the way off.

Saw the netbsd video posted on lemmy recently and dude said he was offended at the lack autonomy he had over his own hardware in ms and I kind of get it now.

I’ve been a lifelong ms admin, and always stuck to their desktop environments because they “just worked”. Often use Linux on containers, devices (handhelds, rpi etc) and webapp servers.

That win11 recall stuff though is a step too far. So I looked at which distro was likely to be easiest to use and just as you say - mint is the overwhelming consensus. And now it’s my daily driver. I needed to learn a few new tricks, but the mint forums are filled with windows refugees so finding forum posts is easy (e.g. I thought had a problem with my “task bar” not my “panel” but since others called it the same thing I found what I was looking for).

My biggest reason for staying on windows was that I could search for something and almost always find an answer - that’s become worse over the years IMO (often get these useless forums posts when they’re basically advising the user to reinstall with five paragraphs of pasted/generated text). The mint forums are genuinely friendly and helpful, and searching them is as useful as searching for win stuff used to be.

I don’t know if “this is the year” but I can’t imagine I’m the only one who has had enough of the MS ecosystem. My experience has been great so far, and I hope there are others who give it a go.

I’ve seen many articles, comments and videos praising mint for being friendly to users coming from windows. It looks nice and I’ve been impressed by the friendliness and helpfulness of their forums - if I switched on my laptop I would try mint first.

I think a small linode is 12 bucks a month, and putting cloud flare in front it is free. Can add some s3 storage for a few more bucks too. They also have a free firewall you can use outside of the VMs.

I learned by using django cookie cutter and reading their compose, env, docker and start files. I guess there are easier ways than that though (YouTube, coursera, etc)

Me too I guess. I can see it if I really try, but it seems a stretch.

On linode i can run a half dozen docker images on a little vm for ten bucks a month. And their s3 is a few bucks a month for 250 gigabytes. The vast majority of projects I deal with have a predictable compute requirement - I don’t get the need to pay the ridiculous premiums associated with elasticity. But I’m not exactly running uber or Netflix over here.

Hah. I like that the same experience led us down different paths.

As someone who has needed to use random PPAs and inevitably wound up needing to reinstall many times, I think this is good advice. I’ll do this if I ever get the nerve to try again.

I had a bad time with ubuntu 18 lts and Bluetooth. Neither bluez nor the other one (forget which) would recognise the controller in my mobo. Tried the man pages. Searched high and low. Asked for help on the forums - got nothing. Decided to never again try using Linux for my workstation. I’m perfectly happy to use it to run my scripts, daemons and containers on a dedicated box, but there’s just no upside for my games and work machine.

Screen, vim, python

It’s pretty cool, Rick.

I tried really hard to see the point of twitter but couldn’t figure it out. Sports journalism was about the only one that made sense to me. Like following trade deadline rumours. But that’s a pretty specific use case.