I can’t be bothered to learn how to build and maintain a kernel though, hence why I stay away from Arch. My “dummy-friendly” distro of choice for KDE Plasma is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It has been rock solid for a year now except for that one time a few weeks ago when NVidia dropped the ball and fucked up their driver update. It was fixed a few days later. My only other complaint is that I wish they didn’t wait for NVidia to put the new 560 drivers in the production branch to trickle it down to us because for some reason that’s what gets supported in tumbleweed. EVERYONE who needs those drivers are impatiently waiting for just that because pre-555 drivers don’t play well with Wayland.

Fedora Plasma Spin is probably another solid choice but for some reason on my computer it just instantly bricked itself upon first update.

It’s good enough to work, but that’s pretty much all you’ll get. In many aspects each monitor isn’t treated separately by the DE. For example you only have one task bar and each screen gets an exact copy of it. Any minimized window will appear on all the task bars on all your screens no matter what screen that window was from. Right there it’s a big turnoff for me. I don’t remember the details but just getting a different desktop background for each screen needed a workaround solution as well. They clearly didn’t allocate any resources for the multiple display user experience. And now that I’ve gotten a taste of the insane customizability of KDE Plasma I don’t think I’ll be able to go back. 6.2 added a layer of polish to the experience that made it perfect for my uses. Which is a shame because Mint was pretty solid otherwise.

I haven’t tried xfce and mate on a multi display setup so I don’t know. But these seemed to be simpler, being made to be lightweight for less powerful setups so I wouldn’t expect them to be as advanced as Plasma for that.

If Mint ever supported KDE plasma 6.2 I’d consider switching back to Mint. I just can’t stand how Cinnamon doesn’t give a crap about multi display users and gives them a “There. Good enough. Fuck you.” solution.

Seriously though. Fuck Nvidia.

Microsoft needs to be broken up.

Any company that can be so blatantly anti consumer and still makes boatloads of money is obviously abusing its dominant position on the market.

The sad part is that all of this is all self-inflicted in the name of “growth” for the shareholders. They absolutely could take 7, modernize it, call it “12” and release it as a lightweight, fast and more privacy-respecting OS. It would probably be far cheaper to make as well.

But that’s not what the Corporate elements of the company want. They see the OS as a platform to force feed to the users features that they can market as “lucrative” to the shareholders. Nobody else wants that. I predict that Windows 12 will have some sort of baked in “AI” that you can’t get rid of as a bare minimum.

But this is none of my concern. They’ve finally pushed me over the hump and now I’m 100% sold to Linux. It has gotten so much more approachable than it used to be. Especially with Mint.

Microsoft is dead to me.

Maybe if after a disastrous enough reception of Windows 11 they might make a Windows 12 that actually cares about being more palatable to the users, like they did with Windows 7 following the disaster that was Vista.

But I think they’ll most probably only move to meet us halfway like they did with Windows 10 following the other disaster that was 8. Where they replaced a major irritant with another and then slowly stacked more and more irritants with updates thereafter. They are too addicted to the revenue from data harvesting to give it up.

I was hesitant for a long while and ended up installing Linux Mint on an old SSD I had laying around this way there was no commitment.

Now I’m realizing I haven’t booted up my regular windows 10 drive ever since and am considering getting rid of it altogether.

On a side note I created a virtual machine on the Linux side that runs Windows 10 LTSC on it for a few other programs I sometimes need that would be very difficult or impossible to make work on Linux like Inventor, Office and Photoshop. It lives trapped in the box and isn’t allowed to connect to the internet. If I need to download something for it I download it on Linux and drag and drop it into the box. It’s like having a little pet Windows that you keep locked in a pen, so it works for you and only for you and it can’t escape to go into your house to spy on you and shit bloatware all over your carpet.

• On Reddit: “Windows is being enshitified. How can we cope with it?”
• On Lemmy: “Windows is being enshitified. Good thing we’ve moved to Linux”

I think I see a pattern here.

This is the norm of what shareholder-driven companies in a situation of monopoly will tend to do. They try to see how much they can abuse their position of dominance on the market to maximize their profits. Microsoft’s primary goal isn’t to make a good user experience, or even a good OS. Their main goal is to milk as much money as possible from its assets for its shareholders. They’ve been playing that game for decades, only backtracking when the consumer backlash is strong enough to threaten their sales or when the government threatens to break them up.

On top of that, Microsoft has a long history of letting arrogant elements of top management take control of projects who will then force their “vision” down the throats of their customers who don’t want any of it. They will only backtrack once the sales numbers become disastrous enough. Then usually the control returns to more competent people and a decent product tends to result from it. Think how Windows Vista lead to Windows 7. And how Windows 8 lead to Windows 10. Or even how the XBox One was originally designed and marketed as some sort of stupid way to watch NFL games on your TV with Kinect controls until they realized they were losing the console war and then started treating it like a gaming console again.

What is your reason to pick Debian over Ubuntu?

Right now my computer isn’t supported by Windows 11 so I have some time. But seeing this crap coming eventually in my future, I started dual booting Linux Mint to see if I could live with it. Turns out I like it better than windows. I haven’t booted my window partition in weeks. When I finally upgrade my computer it will probably be running solely on Linux now and maybe have Windows 7 running in a virtual box for the very few programs I still need it for.

None of this would have happened had Microsoft not pushed their corporate enshitification past my threshold. Thanks Microsoft.

This is something that sneaks up on you as well. And all that started a few years ago when I finally decided to get myself my first smartphone and tried to optimize data usage and battery life. I then realized that not only some apps and “system processes” were using battery and data when not in use, but that there wasn’t even given a way for me to stop it from happening. I also got creeped out when I moved to work in another building and Facebook started giving me friend suggestions of people who worked there. Location wasn’t even enabled on my phone.

And now today I have no mainstream social media account, run GrapheneOS on my phone, Linux on my computer and have migrated to almost entirely FOSS software and apps. I have become the crazy privacy obsessed weirdo.

I have a Lexmark black and white laser printer which I’ve used lightly for years (went through one and a half paper packs so far) and it’s still going strong with the original toner cassette. And when I’ll need to replace it I know there are third party cassettes available on the market for it which are substantially cheaper than OEM. I bought it to replace a Brother inkjet printer which was just an ink/money pit despite being a Brother. Inkjet is absolute crap no matter the brand. HP makes it even worse with a ton of assholeish DRM layered on top.

Ultimately there are two big things to avoid: inkjet and HP. Look up a laser printer and make sure that there is third party cassette support for it before you buy. Brother is apparently good in laser but don’t necessarily limit yourself to that brand.