Thanks for the feedback - currently weighing up disros (was thinking mint, but a few folks have praised fedora KDE based distros now).

How are you finding it?

So, oddly enough, I’m not a complete novice. My background is mostly just lubuntu, puppy, mint and a bit of debian. I’ve shifted away from Ubuntu after the pro service ads in terminal, and the absolute fucking nightmare that is snap.

I’ve done my time in “oh shit I fucked up Linux again” purgatory, and it’s my daily driver for work. Terminal is a place I’m generally ok with; I know enough to find my way around and fix things as needed.

My issue is I’ve never really run dedicated graphics from a Linux distro, and because of the continual updates and proprietary elements I worry about keeping up. I don’t mind breaking things, it comes with the territory.

That said, bazzite sounds interesting - especially the optimisation. The guides on the main page also alerted me to something I’d not considered - going to have to redo my filesystem on every drive. Thanks for the idea of an alt distro, will dig into this a bit more - if it’s built in fedora I might have a bit of a learning curve (never used it as a distro).

So, in the case of my aunt, there were a few teething troubles. That said, a lot of it was just requests to add web page shortcuts to her desktop.

The really big thing is that she’s stopped complaining about how slow her laptop is, and openly says she finds it easier to use.

Most of the troubleshooting is going to be around office software and games. It’s also going to be about replacing windows tools (I am really going to miss my “.bat cave”), and learning new troubleshooting skills (wine is a bit rough to troubleshoot unless you’re willing to get your mining gear out and dig deep into logs).

Thanks for the tips!

Lutris I’ve used with some success, and I’m somewhat ok with wine when it works out if the box (or troubleshooting using the wine wiki).

Do you recommend any other sites/guides for troubleshooting?

It’s going to be purchase a new hard drive and then jump to Linux Mint this August.

It’s not an experience I am looking forward to (5080S, I do a lot of modding, and enjoy fangames/indie games which do not always play nice with linux) but needs must - the Linux community in general is very friendly, so we’ll get through it, even if the first 6 months are rough. I’ll keep the dual boot and push the windows partition to 11 if needed by work, that way I can put off rewriting my elderly access database for another few years.

Honestly, Microsoft are committing suicide when it comes to home users. It won’t be sudden, but the wheels are turning, all the IT savvy folks are switching people over (already did my aunt’s potato, mum’s demi-tato is next week). Eventually, a tipping point will be reached and offices will start switching - I hope that day comes before I die of old age!

Well, there goes another piece of gaming history.

UK digital laws all appear to be thought up to inflict maximum harm on smaller projects, oh and to strip away privacy.

"A trader or third party can upgrade and improve the features of digital content so long as it continues to match any description given by the trader and conforms with any pre-contract information provided by the trader, unless varied by express agreement. "

That’s an odd paragraph to include.

For every mod you add, complexity usually increases exponentially.

Depending on the game, difficulty also varies: modding stardew valley is joy (117 mods in a pack, easy afternoon sipping tea), modding skyrim less so (oh god,these two amazing mods tweak the same tree, time to go patch hunting, 2 weeks later you play it only to spot obscure graphical glitches, all hail wabbajack automation!), trying to make a working multiplayer mod pack for rimworld is pure suffering (why do you hate me, why do two compatible mods generate mass instability?!? 4 months of bug hunting and unsalvageable runs due to strange mod interactions, gave up for now).

A devastating blow!

Darkness closes in, haunting the hearts of men.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74

Moon Channel has a really good breakdown of how bad things are in terms of gender equality in South Korea.

It’s good in a way that isn’t really expected - the only thing I can say without spoiling is it did something really different with things that had been there a long time.

Hah, jokes on them, my university is too poor to afford copilot.

I mean, here is a thought, if an AI tool uses creative commons data, then it’s derivatives fall under creative commons. I.e. stop charging for AI tools and people will stop complaining.

Operation archive the archive?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/

Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.

The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)

5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.

Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.

No support for Linux - steam has it built in and the DRM free nature of gog games means that they’re not too tough to get running via wine.

It’s a (less sexist) variation of the “silence wench” meme aimed at brand marketing. Usually you see it deployed against company owned social media profiles in protest of their invasion of a social space. However, it can also be deployed against newsvertising (advertising disguised as news articles/guides).

Ah, the copyblight strikes again.

I’m no longer really surprised at this - it just makes me sad. We’re literally trying to burn down the library of Alexandria to raise the price of books.

Copyright law is a blight upon the world in its current form, and unless people take a stand it’ll rot the beauty from the net and hold humanity back.

Freedom planet series

La mulana 2 (though it has some adult jokes)

Undertale (frisk is deliberately gender neutral to be imprintable)

Touhou Luna Nights (the original touhou games too, though the translated dialogue doesn’t always make sense).