When I switched over my home desktop to Mint, it was a very short time before I looked at Windows and said “I’m too old for this shit.” I mean, the reason I am a Mint fan in the first place is that I am a FOSS loving nerd but with a family and pets and hobbies and a career and a middle aged energy level. The decades I’ve spent fixing Windows based PCs is enough for a lifetime, thx.

I say consolidate old files you want to keep. Shuffle them between drives as necessary to be able to format everything. Go all ext4 on the drives you already have. (once you’re ready)

This is the way.

I think these days the PC value argument is a lot more about longevity and versatility than price.

Like in my case, I want to have an old fashioned LAN gaming setup in my house. I’ve already managed to find four PCs stored away, and they are all going to work great. Three are already set up and have linux installed and everything. So they cost a decent amount in their day, but now they’re kind of just free extras.

I was up way too late. My comment shows as 4h old and I’m already sitting at my desk at work.

That’s not my usual schedule, but I’m feeling pretty alright!

This is beautiful. Love it. This is the perfect moment for me to be done with the internet for today. On a happy note for once!

Well yeah their business isn’t to “serve users.” It’s to “farm consumers.”

That’s why I’m glad I do embedded systems in a niche industry. I’m not trying to drive engagement across the globe. I’m just making a device that serves the needs of a user who has other important work to worry about.

Just gals being gals and guys being guys.

Gotta do it all the way, right?

This is just how I felt when I first switched, also to Mint. I’ve experienced it a couple other times too when switching from some proprietary application to the FOSS option.

I like to describe it as feeling the different priorities of the teams working on each project. When one is made by passionate users who care about it being good software for its purpose, and the other is designed by a committee to hit as many different corporate metrics as possible, it shows.

And let’s be honest, this is one of those many contexts where giving a shit and putting forth ANY amount of effort puts you ahead of 80% of the population anyway.

Sober is awesome, and I can actually have Roblox LAN parties with my son thanks to it.

Big wisdom in this.

Don’t assume it is “checking out” from society or taking the easy way out. The news will find you, don’t worry. Plus maintaining focus on your thing is something that can take significant effort.

I have noticed that the smaller I make my world, the happier I am. My free time goes into my family, friends, hobbies, and pets (which I guess is a big subset of the hobbies). I think a big part of the benefit is not just focusing on the people who can have the biggest effect on my life, but focusing on the people whose life I can improve the most with my involvement.

Our brains evolved to keep tabs on our clan or our village, not to monitor the events of the entire Earth in near real time, as if we’re going to do anything with that information. In fact, I think that “need” to be informed is often just an addiction manufactured by the need to drive engagement to validate 24/7 news as a business model.

I mean, that’s how most people seem to be about most things.

But when you put them in a context that makes people get tribal like choice of phone, game console, political party, or religion, it goes into turbo-dumb.

Yeah, I’m an old software engineer who uses linux on all of my actual computers, but I still have an old iphone for doing phone shit.

In the real world, most outspoken anti-apple people aren’t super techy and use some nightmare of corporate bloat phone they bought at the Verizon store.

Here on Lemmy though, you have a WAY higher proportion of people who are running devices they actually control.

Well, you can’t say that unless you know what his goals were, lol. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody used their charisma and/or social awareness to hurt society.

Compared with ambitious career politicians, I would expect actors to understand human emotion and empathy better, and I would expect a body builder to understand correlating outputs/results to inputs/tactics.

When snails copulate, two penises enter two vaginal tracts.

That reminds me of this sweet old love song by an old cowboy band.

[Outro]
Criticize what you wreck
We’re fucking you back
Fucking you back

I think it’s silly and wasteful, but I don’t think it’s difficult to understand. Modern aristocrats have so much money that the cost doesn’t matter at all, and they probably get it for free in the hope that they’d be seen wearing it by all the wannabes who can afford it.

But even if they pay full price and pick it for some dumb reason like the color or because it’s soft, with the average net worth growth these people see in a month or year, any time spent buying the thing would be far more valuable (or they would passively make far more money) than the cost of the shirt.

But silly things like transactions and opening packages of free overpriced fashion are for underlings to handle anyway.

You are correct!

But you know what isn’t as easy or basic as that? Convincing Product Managers and others on up the chain that you should be able to take some time to code and test to fix an issue they don’t give a fuck about because it doesn’t affect their metrics.

I’m not sure there is a go-to, which is good. There are some gaming-focused ones to be sure, but i’m using Mint which is super mainstream focused and user friendly (and based on ubuntu and debian) and I’ve had a great experience.

It’s funny you mention the office side of things in addition to gaming, because I have remarked about the same thing.

Using Librewolf(firefox) on Linux, all of the M365 applications work fine in the browser. Probably even better, since I can actually close them when I want to. I use Teams the most, which is obviously a very connected thing. But for a word processor, which seems like the most local thing ever, the web app lets me share in MS format and accept comments and all that.

I could absolutely see Microsoft’s execs planning out the most efficient way to grind every bit of value out of the windows brand on their path to subscription everything.

So, I don’t know off the top of my head, but I need to figure it out as well because I have plenty of game installers that I’ll want to use eventually. Lots in my GOG account, others from 20 years ago with sources lost to time, lol.

I would expect that Steam could be used as a launcher, but I know there is also an app called Lutris for managing games and compatibility layers and such.

I’m thinking about it, and yeah I may have not yet installed a windows version of a game outside of Steam at all. Honestly I have most often installed Linux native versions via steam.