Yes, I’m several years into my de-googling process and a solid email client is not something I’m worried about. K9 is great and, as Thunderbird, we can only hope that it gets better.

I bought my first handheld anything, the Palm Zire 31 in high school. Everyone thought I was weird, but I was also organized. :P

I think this is mostly because people who know about it have a mental block that it’s only for nerds. Millions have been using Android on their phones for years, though we’ll limit ourselves to desktop GNU/Linux type distributions for this discussion.

Actual usage of Linux has gotten much easier since 2006ish when I first tried it out. With all the popups and ads in Windows nowadays, its rapidly becoming harder to use than Linux, something I did not expect. I don’t see a combined Linux User Group/ Bingo Club/ Bridge Group forming anytime soon, but Linux Mint isn’t any harder to use than Windows, even for normies with an average level of tech skills.

You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.

With MS enremovedifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won’t be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.

“You mean its free and doesn’t try to sell me other products the whole time I’m using it?”

First if all, welcome to Linux. I also found it in my high school/college years and am so glad I did. Things will be weird. I remember thinking “what kind of Fisher Price OS is this?” because Ubuntu was so simple looking back then and I was used to the unnecessary clutter of Windows. There is so much to explore, but I think you are on a good path with Mint. I have also run Mint for a few years and love some of the things it does.

A helpful note: If you plan on sharing files between the two OSes, be aware that Windows won’t typically access a Linux file system like ext4 or btrfs and Linux can handle NTFS (windows) in a lot of cases, but if you have bitlocker running you may have additional hurdles.

I highly recommend getting a big external drive ans backing up regularly (like at least once a week). At some point you will screw up and be glad you did it. I only overwrote a disk partition on accident once, and I recovered the data, but I also learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t be like me!

Nextcloud Calendar is where I’m blocking out my time. I use a proprietary task app with a Linux client because tasks.org/former Astrid/nextcloud tasks isn’t quite there yet… for me. If I was creating a system to keep me on track today, I would center the whole thing on Nextcloud. The one thing I despise about nextcloud is how it handled locales and formats. There is no easy way to move to YYYY-MM-DD and HH-DD without messing up other stuff like day of the week captions language. The thing I love about nextcloud is how it doesn’t spam you with garbage recommendations and clutter and such like Outlook.

I’m a KDE user, but had a great experience using Budgie. I’m glad this software is an option for people.

Also, don’t be surprised if that urge never goes away. :-D

I’m not sure I understand. Do you mean hearing codewords triggering actions as opposed to trying to understand the users intent through language? Or is are there a few more layers to this whole thing than my moderate nerd cred will allow me to understand?

Same, I think I might give the System76 Darter a try when I eventually have to replace my Xps 9370. It’s bad enough that my computer comes with a windows logo on the super-key and often windows preinstalled. Shipping with a non-ANSI/ISO layout is a no-buy for me.

I bought a xps 13 9370 and several years and two self-replaced batteries later, I’m not noticing even a hint of age related slowdown. I thought the lack of USB-A ports would be a problem, but it wasn’t. I have run Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Arch, EndeavorOS, Solus, MXLinux, Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and many others on this machine with minimal issues. I don’t know about the models after mine, but the 9370 was a solid choice.

Bought an eeePC on WinXP that ran like trash and barely could handle simple tasks. Dropped numerous flavors of GNU/Linux on it in a few months. I remember thinking “wtf is this” because the settings and interface felt so bare without the WinXP clutter but things ran much better. Fell in love with the repository model of updating everything with a single command, found the UI was actually simple looking on the surface with a ton of depth available to me when my tinkering became more comfortable and experienced. Stayed because I don’t think everything in our lives needs to be stuffed full of micro transactions and ads.

When I left the church, I started directing what was my tithes to nonprofits of my choice including FOSS projects instead.

Here I am a decade and a half later and if I didn’t have Linux, I probably wouldn’t use computers except in the rarest of circumstances. Its just a high quality experience that commercial software can’t measure up to because they have different goals.

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My xps13 9370 is also still going strong. No major issues running Linux, even on weird distros. Bought the windows version because the highest spec didn’t come with preinstalled Ubuntu. I hear everything xps is soldered and unserviceable now. If that’s true, I will be looking at system76 and framework the next time around. The lack of USB A ports was never an issue and it was my biggest concern going in.

Somewhat, I’d estimate once every week or two. It’s my daily driver and I’ll usually update if a few conditions are met: the update icon let me know something is out there & I’m plugged into external power at home & I’m not going anywhere for a while.

I only have 2-3 AUR packages which is where the trouble seems to start for a lot of folks.

Now that I think about it, I did once end up with a mess where ceph was dropped from the repos and subsequently compiled itself from the AUR over the course of a few hours. Must have been a dependency for something.

No distro is perfect, but for me, Manjaro was a good fit. I’m moderately tech-y but with little formal training, but have used some form of GNU/Linux since at least Warty Warthog in ~2005.

I’ve used Manjaro for a few years now and it’s the longest I’ve gone without formatting and reinstalling. Then again, to each his own. Run what works for you!

I remember running lxde and xfce on my eee at various points. If lxqt still supports 32 bit machines, I bet it would still work okay.

XFCE and LXDE are nice in their own right. I used to run xfce and lxde on my laptops and netbooks. Those bottom of the barrel, underpowered, bargain bin machines hummed. At the time though HiDPI support was weak still (at least for xfce) so they never made it to my desktop. Didn’t like many multi-sized monitors. I assume this is a problem of the past now.

Not sure if I’m using the same package or just a similar one. I’ve been annoyed at all the snaps, flatpacks, appimages, etc. for a while now. I just want to update from the repo and not end up with a bunch of slow, broken, poorly integrated alternatives on my computer. Being able to properly manage app images with a tool like this made the alternate distribution formats so much more tolerable. Now when I install something I pray that I’ll find an app image if it’s not in the repos!