My advice: Don’t wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you’re under pressure to figure it out all at once.

Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.

Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.

Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.

It’s really solid.

KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.

Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don’t need to look sexy.

My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.

Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.

Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I’ve tried to like it for years, but I just don’t care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.

I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I’ve watched.

My current company is being absorbed into a much larger company right now, got bought out earlier this year.

I was the only IT for the smaller company, and I was using 100% Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my laptop to administrate everything in our environment, which is mostly Windows.

• Our DC with AD on it, I used Remmina to RDP into it for admin tasks.
• O365 and Azure/Entra stuff was all in the browser.
• Our ERP system is cloud-based, so browser was fine for that too.
• Our access control system was cloud-based and the RFID card reader/writer was plug-n-play on Linux.
• Our company SMB share worked fine with Linux in Plasma using my AD credentials.
• I set up my company OneDrive sync using rclone, it also worked flawlessly.
• Our Fortigate firewall VPN has a native Linux app which, although ugly as sin, works without issue.
• I used OnlyOffice for a while, then switched back to LibreOffice. Both worked basically perfect, a few very minor font bugs, (bullet lists having a slightly different style for the bullets, etc.)
• Teams, I used a wrapper flatpak for a while, which worked fine, then switched to the browser version of Teams. No major issues, I had a bunch of meetings, screen shares, webcam, presentations all on Teams in Linux, pretty seamless.
• Email, Outlook in the browser is fine. I also used Thunderbird for a bit, but didn’t like how buggy it was in the Flatpak version, and the Debian package was way too out of date for my taste.

Now that we got bought out, I am being forced off my Linux laptop and onto the new company’s Windows laptop, which really sucks. I am planning on quitting soon, as I hate using Windows and I am very underpaid at my current job as it is. Only real perk was not having to report to any IT manager/CTO, and being able to use Linux.

I mean, if you have the money and inclination, sounds like a nerdy but pretty cool project!

Your hardware is nearly identical to mine. On my gaming PC, I use Nobara.

It’s a distro created and maintained by the developer who works on the Glorious Eggroll version of Proton, so very well known in the Linux gaming community.

It’s based on Fedora, but has a ton of Linux gaming tweaks for extra performance and compatibility patched into it and pre-installed.

It’s very easy to download the ISO and install, and requires basically zero configuration out of the box to start gaming and using the PC.

The only thing I would caution you about, is the only use the built-in Nobara updater app to update your system. Don’t use Fedora commands like DNF to update stuff, it will cause conflicts.

As long as you do that though, you should be fine. I’ve been using Nobara on my gaming PC for about 2 years now, and it’s been awesome.

Fair points, yeah.

I actually like it mostly, but fall and late summer are my favorite seasons.

It sounds like you may have seasonal depression, lots of folks do, including one of my siblings. Have you checked out the special lamps they have? They mimic the suns light, Idk about the research, but I know a lot of people who’ve said they help.

Been vegetarian now for about 4 years, haven’t regretted it yet. I thought I would miss meat more, but I really don’t.

I totally have experienced the random anger and judgment from other people. They hear I am vegetarian and all of a sudden they start either attacking vegetarianism/veganism, or they start trying to defend meat-eating.

On the positive, I’ve never been healthier, and there are more and more restaurants that offer veg/vegan food, or at least options to make it meatless. And I have met quite a few young people that are going veg/vegan, or at least are flex/pescatarian.

I have an XMPP app on my phone and I am so sad it isn’t more popular, because it is sooo responsive and clean.

Super easy to use, looks fairly modern, and it’s freaking fast.

Brotato…so much Brotato…

Just got Dome Keeper a little while ago, hopefully that helps me break the cycle…

Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.

And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.

I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.

My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.

I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.

One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”

I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.

After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.

He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.

My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.

I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.

Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.

I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?

Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.

Combinatorics scares me, the immense size of seemingly trivial things.

For example: If you take a simple 52 card poker deck, shuffle it well, some combination of 4-5 riffles and 4-5 cuts, it is basically 100% certain that the order of all the cards has never been seen before and will never been seen again unless you intentionally order them like that.

52 factorial is an unimaginable number, the amount of unique combinations is so immense it really freaks me out. And all from a simple deck of playing cards.

Chess is another example. Assuming you aren’t deliberately trying to copy a specific game, and assuming the game goes longer than around a dozen moves, you will never play the same game ever again, and nobody else for the rest of our civilization ever will either. The amount of possible unique chess games with 40 moves is far far larger than the number of stars in the entire observable universe.

You could play 100 complete chess games with around 40 moves every single second for the rest of your life and you would never replay a game and no other people on earth would ever replay any of your games, they all would be unique.

One last freaky one: There are different sizes of infinity, like literally, there are entire categories of infinities that are larger than other ones.

I won’t get into the math here, you can find lots of great vids online explaining it. But here is the freaky fact: There are infinitely more numbers between 1 and 2 than the entire infinite set of natural numbers 1, 2, 3…

In fact, there are infinitely more numbers between any fraction of natural numbers, than the entire infinite natural numbers, no matter how small you make the fraction…

Totally agree. If I was an experienced Dev, I would love to work on that as a feature/plugin.

Permanent kiosk is the use case I am looking for. I am aware of cage, it looks pretty interesting and I am planning on trying it sometime soon.

I should clarify, I don’t think that Windows kiosks are better than Linux kiosks in their general functions, I would say Linux kiosks take that crown too.

I’m referring specifically to the ease of setup in Windows vs Linux. With Windows, I can convert any machine to a kiosk in less than 5 minutes. No scripting, no changes to login credentials or permissions, no extra packages installed.

I just wish Linux had something that easy. I would even be happy if it was tied to a specific distro or desktop environment, like a special mode in Plasma or Cinnamon.

3, maybe a 3.5.

I was reasonably productive today, but still have a lot to get done and I am procrastinating.

Dang, that sounds good, I’ll have to try that lol.

…🤢