Yeah I honestly legit enjoyed my fond time with old Windows machines back when they were fun and user-oriented instead of the user-exploitative SAAS monsters they are now.

Win10 wasn’t even SO bad as everyone says…well, until recently when they started forcing Microsoft Accounts on install and harass you with their ads every 3 forced updates. Ugh.

Now they’re on the Ai bandwagon? Yeah they’re real small in my rearview mirror now.

I think it’s just a different landscape now, and I’m glad Linux was there to jump to after all these companies started losing their collective minds.

“Linux is open source and free! You can do whatever you want with it! It’s our thing!”

Microsoft: “Whatever I want with it?..Free?..Hm…This is my thing .”

XP was totally a wild time, to Dad’s credit though! hahaha

It was that funky era of needing like 4 different anti malware programs, and downloading game patches from various hopefully-trusty file hosts, or nabbing the suspiciously convenient “Linkin-Park-Meteora-FULL_ALBUM.exe” off of Kazaa which would promptly rootkit your whole system.

Routinely running Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG, and CCleaner to combat constantly-reinstalling spyware.

Heck, I consider myself kinda smart but I still had Bonzi Buddy for a while! …I mean, c’mon, funnee purpl monke. Who could resist?

Like wow, now that I think back on it, you really needed a bit of “street smarts” back then. Nowadays security has gotten a lot better and one can get away with just “Not downloading weird Russian Web3 games off the dark web” and they’ll usually be relatively fine. Lol.

TL;DR: Windows XP was compatible with Bonzi Buddy, Mandriva was definitely a more secure choice, seeing as it couldn’t run Bonzi Buddy unless you were determined with WINE maybe?

… It’s cool you got introduced to Linux so early. Cool dad. :)

That’s defo Broadcom’s fault. Unfortunately when Linux is a second class citizen, hardware vendors will make crappy Windows and maybe Mac drivers, but a lot of Linux support seems like it needs to be reverse engineered or something, if the company itself refuses to play ball. :(

This was the case with NVIDIA for a long while. Still kinda is. Hopefully that’s improving though.

Fair disclosure, I personally run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, BUT…

Honestly for this situation I think Linux Mint might be your on-ramp. It’s very familiar from a user experience perspective from someone coming from Windows, and everything can be done with GUI apps.

It updates the entire system smoothly through an “app store” so it stays nice and secure. “Cinnamon” is also a highly attractive and smooth desktop environment.

I’ve switched a few people to it who were sick of Windows on older machines, but NOT computer people at all, and they’ve enjoyed it a lot! The nicest thing is it will feel like your computer again, not like you’re leasing it from Microsoft.

Don’t try and “completely switch over” in one go.

Look up how to try Linux in a virtual machine on your existing setup (so you don’t have to risk anything!) and just try it and play around with installing and using it.

An old laptop or something is also a great way to try it out.

You can always dual-boot if you want. I sure did for a while until Win10 started BSODing for no discernable reason, and refused to let me “refresh this PC” because “Sorry, can’t. Goodbye.”

I still have it, just in case, but it’s been most of the year since I’ve even bothered logging into it.

If you game: you’ll want Heroic Launcher for your GoG/EA stuff, and Steam of course, and maybe Bottles to run your old CD/DVD games maybe. :)

Sometimes things take a little tweaking, but Mint’s community is fantastic and helpful. You really will start to learn a lot about computers just by using Linux a little and trying things, while Windows makes every effort to hide things from you. (“wE’rE gEtTiNg ThInGs ReAdY” who’s “we”?!)

As you start to get comfortable with it, it will grow with you. You can start trying to get the hang of the terminal, or jump to another distro once you learn why you might prefer to.

But you really can’t go wrong just trying Mint out. It’s overall just a pleasant OS.

ProTip: You’ll be asked about a file system when you install any distro. I spent COUNTLESS HOURS on researching this question. BTRFS can be a bit of an advanced file system, but if you just “set it and forget it”, it has the ability to take incremental snapshots without taking a ton of space! So if something really goes south, you can use an app called “Timeshift” to just roll back.

This is great for your root drive / partition, but I wouldn’t suggest it for your home folder. :)

(Just like Windows rollback used to do, but…more reliable lol)

Lol sorry for the ramble but I hope this might help you feel a little less lost at the grocery store. ;)

We’ve had a GE fridge that’s probably older than about 10 years. But you know, it’s complicated enough that it feels like it’s made to fail at some point.

Well, stuff stopped cooling but all the lights were on and everything else worked. It was really weird. We were thinking it might be a dead compressor or something. Crap, do we need a new fridge?

Nope! What basically amounts to a glorified computer fan with a fancier proprietary plug does all the work of distributing that cold air through the rest of the unit.

The proprietary plug is totally so they can sell it for $45, of course. Lol anyway, works like new!

Also get a dust mask and vacuum + blow out the back of your refrigerators, people. They get grooooss!!!

You’ve hear of fever dreams but this here buddy had a freezer dream.

HOW DID I KNOW 😂

This is definitely a thing!!

We’re using Linux so we just assume it’s some highly technical issue right off the bat lol. This has caught me a few times. 😂

Once I manually deleted a snapshot folder because I didn’t see it listed, and thought it was “orphaned” and just taking up space. :D

“SUDO THAT SUCKER!!” 👉

OS says “Okie dokie boss.”

Suddenly none of my commands are working.

Turns out I deleted the currently mounted active snapshot . Safe to say it was reinstall time.

Don’t go manually touching system files, folks. 😂

I used to dual-boot and use my Win10 for gaming.

But in the middle of Vermintide 2 I kept getting BAD BSoDs seemingly at random! None of the typical steps seemed to help. Probably something NVIDIA related I dunno.

I was gonna “refresh this system” and all Windows told me after “We’re getting this ready.” was: “Can’t. Dunno why. Sorry.”

But hey, switching over to my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install made the game play really smooth, and no crashes! And soon, I discovered it ran all my other games just fine or even better as well!

I haven’t touched that Win10 install in ages, and will probably drop it in favor of VMing it really soon.

The only real holdout is that my VR headset is WMR. That really sucks. :(

That is painful. It’ll work SO WELL on a bunch of systems but sometimes someone has a particular config that’ll throw monkey-wrenches all over. It always feels like the most rotten luck being on the other end of that huh? :(

“Linux users are elitist jerks”

Elitist jerks are elitist jerks. Ever talked to a stuck-up Windows I.T admin? The constant scoffing is unreal.

What about people rich (or financially goofy) enough to obsess with Apple products?

I think most community people regardless of OS just wanna be helpful and enthusiastic. (I like the word “enthusiast” haha) You’ll always find elitists around topics that involve learning skills and mastery.

I dunno, I’m just happy sometimes people care here when I enthusiastically ramble to them about all their Linux-y choices they can solve problems with lol. We’re not all like that.

Jerks just stick out more. Don’t let them tint your opinion of an entire community. I managed to even enjoy ranked League of Legends for a short while because I didn’t assume everyone was out to attack my ego with theirs.

Hope you have an awesome one and let us know if we can help you with anything. :)

Really bummed your experience has been like that! :(

In my humble experience, I’ve gotten almost everything new and old to run via Steam, or my GoG games to run via Heroic. Vermintide 2, Metro: Exodus, Enter the Gungeon, X-COM 2, BattleTech, MechWarrior 5, I even got old stuff like Sims 2 working flawlessly via Bottles.

Trying to install stuff like you would on Windows by running installers manually seems to not be so great though…could that have been it perhaps?

Using front-ends that manage Proton / WINE for you makes the process so much easier.

I ditched Windows entirely because Vermintide kept BSODing my Win10 install, and it wouldn’t even let me “refresh” the OS. Fully doing work and play on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed these days and the only thing I’m REALLY missing is VR.

I’ve actually considered starting a Friendica or other instance exclusively for friends and family to share pictures and communicate, invite only…

… But even if I managed the insane technical aspects and convinced people to try it, I only fear the mainstream social media giants have already trained them to be their worst selves at this point. I can see the bickering drama threads now, eating up my gigabytes…

I just hate how fragmented and walled the most connected Internet ever is…I felt more connection when I had everyone between Yahoo and MSN Messengers, or took the time to check out friends’ MySpace pages.

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Me, a long time KeyPass enjoyer:

“Y’know people keep talking about BitWarden, maybe it’s more accessible and I should give it a tr…(sees this) PFFFFFTTTT! DODGED THAT BULLET.”

Exactly. Everyone’s a revolutionary in the boardroom but you’re lucky if anybody’s got your back stomping up to the manager’s office.

Exactly. If there’s a line companies love saying it’s “In these uncertain times…” The more you’re worried about unpredictability, the more predictable their little lines get…

You’d think the working class would be a part of society “too big to fail.” =\