My fellow americans and I look at this concept and tilt our heads to the side like confused puppies.

Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don’t sound like the “I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement” folks with very specific needs.

And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.

Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you’re ready to install it, there’s usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.

I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.

I don’t have any issues with KDE, and I admire their work beyond the DE/UI. Kdenlive is my chosen video editor, for instance. I believe it’s the flatpak version too, so it no doubt loads a bunch of stuff into ram.

I’m not sure what you mean by “restricting” with the DE since I have a terminal at my fingertips at all times. I assume you mean some design decisions or lack of some customization options that KDE has?

But the weird selection of apps has me lost. It comes with stuff installed that you might expect, like firefox and libre office. It uses mostly the Ubuntu repositories so you can apt or apt-get install most things you’re looking for. And since it’s linux you can add repositories and all that fun stuff.

I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.

I’d expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 (“start” button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.

I’m a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It’s still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn’t take away from that. It just meant that it wasn’t the learning experience you’d get with something like Arch.

The naming is one thing I legitimately like about the whole Linux/GNU/FOSS world.

Things are still named by nerds/enthusiasts who have some spark of joy and fun left in their hearts. Could you imagine a sanitized corporate software product released today with a name that directly refers to the established product it is meant to displace?

For example, things like GNU’s Not Unix or my favorite remotely accessible text/terminal based email client I used around the turn of the century, PINE Is Not Elm.

Then you get fun second-order software names like GIMP, too.

It’s all so preferable to the commercial software branding world where even though the visual presentation is extremely samey (everybody switching to the same popular boring fonts and removing logos/artwork), the actual brands are often made up silly words that are easy to get the domain name and the social handles for.

Be sure to follow BONTO! on all your favorite trillion dollar propaganda and surveillance platforms!

Haha yeah, I think SpiceDealer’s comment inadvertently supports the notion it’s meant to dispel.

But to be fair, the media world has been using the word “digital” to mean “electronic delivery” for a long time.

Here’s my hot take to offer:

The Krunch 106.66 from Saints Row 2 is the best radio station in any city sandbox GTA-style game.

I like metal and there are a couple bands I started listening to because of that radio station.

I completely understand the sentiment!

I am still into some tech and “new computer” type stuff. I am about to install a bigger/faster drive in my PC and set up my Home Assistant server. That PC is already my Jellyfin server. I am also in the middle of building a brand new PC for my kid, which will also run Mint, lol.

But I spend time only on the things that I’ve learned really matter to me, and not on all the things you’re “supposed to” mess with in your home lab that you obviously have.

You know the meme (or meme category) where it’s a resume or linkedin profile where the recent work history goes something like Senior Network Architect, then Goose Farmer?

I may literally have a 3D printer still in the box, and PC & networking parts all over the house, but my daily routine is embedded linux C/C++ sr developer by day and animal tender on the evenings and weekends, lol.

I never left!

I think I’m just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think “that’s a youngster’s game.”

Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn’t broken!

I was coming to the comments to make some kind of comment about how the chill vibe of this meme is the reason I brought nature to me and built a pond in my yard and etc…

But your comment was at the very top. My “keep those damn fish alive” sense kicked in. So my train of thought took a hard turn towards “holy shit is that a mink?? RUN!!!”

Or replace mink with a similar cute little murder machine species. I haven’t dealt with them, fortunately, but I’ve heard the stories.

It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU

Cries in red white and blue American tears

The owner class, their paid shills, and their useful idiots had half the population convinced decades ago that all regulation is bad and that government entities literally cannot do anything correctly.

I started believing some of that stuff when I was young and thought that people in the media argued in good faith. Plus I was more accepting of the cornerstone conservative axiom that money and “progress” are the marks of good people and good societies rather than silly nebulous concepts like “being alive is a positive experience for as many people as possible.”

Yep! The most expensive equipment they might need is a magic smoke compressor, if that.

I can imagine a future device with an e-ink page that’s so thin and flexible that it looks and feels like a paper book with magic changing text. I don’t know how many consumers would pay a premium for that, but I would definitely buy my wife one.

I’m just here to point out that the fact you genuinely care about your carbon footprint probably puts you ahead of 80% of the population, and the fact that it has materially affected your device choices probably puts you ahead of 80% of the remainder.

There’s definitely a unique satisfaction that comes from filling tech needs with hardware that already exists, and which does a great job at it too.

That goes across hobbies and mediums too. I just finished a big outdoor carpentry project where I was able to find perfect long-term uses for pieces of wood from The Initial Build in the construction of The New Hotness.

I think it’s pretty heavily implied that people are talking about a given tech giant’s entire ecosystem when they say de-google, delete Facebook, Fuck Nestle- I mean, fuck Apple, etc. lol

Nope I don’t have experience installing older distros. I used some Unix systems in the late 90s (Sun Solaris) and really liked them even though I wasn’t yet the Linux/FOSS enthusiast I am now.

Your comment does not surprise me at all, though. For any rough edges Linux has had over the years, at least the motivations of the developers creating it have been in the right place all along. That is, making software for themselves and users, as opposed to the innumerable forces of enshittification within tech giants like Microsoft.

I don’t think I ever messed with the Windows 3.1 OS on my family’s 486, but from Windows 95 and onwards I’ve done multiple installs of all the consumer versions of windows and was an avid user of win2k at the time. And for Windows 11 I have only ever installed it in a VM on a Linux machine to test Windows tools that are part of our builds at work.

I’ve also installed the last couple versions of Linux Mint a few times on some newer and older PCs. And some other distros in VMs for various reasons.

ALL of my recent Linux installs have gone far more smoothly and quickly than ANY Windows installs I remember.

Old windows? Better.

New Linux? Best!

I think that’s still a valid argument since perfection will probably never happen.

For me it’s more like, remember when the expectation was that Tesla would ever produce a version that didn’t suck ass?

I have multiple relatives who only seem to be able communicate ideas to other people in the form of complaints and gossip.

There’s a very strong correlation between that and being more negative, more conservative/Trumpy, more bigoted, and definitely more miserable to be around.

I grew up in that kind of environment, and I swear there are pathways buried deep in my brain that still try to generate the “look at that stupid asshole doing a thing I wouldn’t choose to do, or that I’m jealous over” emotion. However, it only strengthens my resolve to not carry that bullshit forward into the next generation.

Yeah, LLMs are interesting tech products to play with and find some niche uses for.

But for the love of god they are not “prop up the entire stock market and numerous multi-trillion-dollar companies indefinitely” good!