I’ve been almost-ready to ditch Windows for years. Now’s the time.

My new neighbor is an old-school nerd. He hosts install parties at our local leftist third space.
He’s going to help me switch to… not sure yet. Probably Mint. I can’t wait. It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.

Yay.

  • undrwater@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 days ago

    That’s great to hear! Welcome, and have frustrating fun!

    If you don’t mind me asking; in your context, what does “leftist” mean? When I hear the term, it’s usually meant as a pejorative for some nebulous group the utterer doesn’t like.

    • MarieMarion@literature.cafeOP
      0·
      9 days ago

      Thanks !

      Not a native speaker, so don’t put too much faith in my answer, but: for me, it means actual left, faaaar left, not the milquetoast leftf-wing parties that sometimes win elections in Western Europe.

      There’s a good measure of gift economy, for example. We share many resources, grow food for each other (I do squash, a neighbor does leek, and so on–but we don’t trade, we just take what we need.) When we need musclepower we just pass the word around and strangers or friends come build a wall / clean out an old barn / stack firewood. There’s a buy-nothing warehouse were we drop everything from clothes to building materials, toys, kitchenware, and art supplies.
      I volunteer to manage a pay-what-you-want hostel for hikers. There’s a lot of grassroot community politics / activism. It’s nice.

  • imacatnotaman@lemmy.ml
    0·
    7 days ago

    You won’t miss it, I’ve been on Linux since 1998. Fuck Microslop!

    Please tell me what kind of place that you live that you have a local leftist third place!!

    • MarieMarion@literature.cafeOP
      0·
      7 days ago

      Rural France, as far from the 20 biggest cities as geographically possible, a hard-left hotspot for the last few centuries. Tbh we have like 10 local leftist third places (a co-op bar/live shows place, a freecycle place, two boardgame/rpg bars, a pay-what-you-can (good) restaurant with ultra-local food, a community hall for crafts, homework, WFH, and random meetings,two community theaters.)

        • MarieMarion@literature.cafeOP
          0·
          7 days ago

          It really is. Of course, we still live in a wider context of corporate capitalism, and it sucks here as it does in the whole country. They’re gutting public transit, school budgets, and healthcare. Our local representatives are hard-wing assholes, because the old farts vote more than us.

          • imacatnotaman@lemmy.ml
            0·
            6 days ago

            yeah, fucking capitalism. well, at least you guys aren’t out there killing everyone like us. but, the old farts have been a big part in our mess too, for the same reasons.

  • knee@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 days ago

    "It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.

    Yay. " Yay indeed. Just started my Cinnamon journey. Old Win7 laptop - never going back, to Apple either.

    • Joelk111@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 days ago

      Apple, with their M silicon, has been tempting recently, but I really can’t bring myself to pull the trigger when I could have a top of the line Framework for the same price as a middle range MacBook pro. Sure, the MacBook is probably more powerful, but the framework would actually be mine.

      That said, in the current ram/ssd economies I’m not buying a laptop at all if I can help it. Unfortunately, I want one so I can edit on the go, and uploading TBs of video footage to my home PC and then editing remotely isn’t going to work, so I’ll probably have to cough up some dough eventually.

  • witness_me@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 days ago

    Have fun! Whatever you do, if you run into an issue you can’t solve, stick with it. You’ll learn and become better over time.

    I’ve been gaming on Linux for about 3 years now and it’s been great. Had some hiccups here and there but they were solved with some searching.

  • axx@slrpnk.net
    0·
    9 days ago

    Sounds like you’re in good hands. Enjoy the ride, plenty to learn and to feel good about understanding :)

  • James R Kirk@startrek.websiteEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    I know you’re getting a million suggestions and to be clear- nothing is wrong with Mint, but I recommend Fedora Kinoite as a first distro if you’re coming from Windows. KDE is going to be more familiar and the way the backend is designed makes it basically impossible to meaningfully break.

  • JoeMontayna@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    The only thing stopping a mass exodus is that there is no single version of Linux that is just dominating. I know that defeats the purpose of Linux, but that is what the dumb masses (such as myself) want. We want easy, and we don’t want to be special. If I have a problem I want a thousand others with the same problem, not my own little unique problem that I have to take hours away from my day to fix.

    • vort3@lemmy.ml
      0·
      9 days ago

      I’d say the stopping thing is a few multiplayer PvP games with anticheat, also some software that won’t work in Wine (adobe products, corel products, microsoft products).

      Yes, I know alternatives exist (Krita, Inkscape, LibreOffice). No, they are not 100% drop-in replacements. I for myself love working in LibreOffice Writer, but when you work in a place where everyone except you uses MS Word and expects DOCX files, you can’t “just” switch to linux without issue.

  • Hadriscus@jlai.lu
    0·
    9 days ago

    You’re going to start switching on saturday, and keep switching the following week, and… it’s a process 😁 Have fun !

  • anarchaos@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    i quite like the out-of-the-box experience of debian13 running gnome, but i had to do quite a bit of tinkering to get my nvidia card running. it is running now, and i basically feel like i have a brand new computer.