Speaking of books, my only experience with Linux in the 90s was seeing the Red Hat books. I don’t know anyone who actually made it work.

!lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

Windows 11 sleep mode is causing all kinds of issues for me too on one laptop. Especially WiFi.

It shuts down WiFi to save power and never wakes it up regardless of what power save settings say. I’m also using a cellular WiFi and have to disable one of the modes in the netadapter for that to even work, but the driver keeps resetting the choices made in the device manager and such. Complete garbage.

It’s my daughters brand new laptop for school. She needs to open the lid and use the pc for browser applications. My youngest doesn’t have her own laptop, so I gave a beaten up 20 year old laptop and installed Mint, because windows 10 couldn’t even boot properly with only 4 gb of ram. She does the same thing. Open the lid, use the browser. It always works.

This is not a special case. This is not me being to dumb to use it or too smart and demanding. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to expect a laptop to function as intended when opening the lid and using the browser. Windows just doesn’t do that.

There are many posts preaching for the choir, but I wouldn’t call it an echo chamber. It’s more like a dead sound chamber where the ideas dies in agreement. It doesn’t bounce off the walls or resonate. It’s already there so no answer is required.

Lemmy would benefit from more users playing the devil’s lawyer, but I think it’s too small for anyone to use their main profile for that, and alt-accounts would quickly get blocked or banned.

Actual users with opposing views wouldn’t be of much help. Politics isn’t very nuanced these days. It’s not red or blue, left or right or whatever. It’s polarized into a new duality: Those that give a shit and those who are proud idiots. Lemmy is on the good side of this and will not benefit from being more accepting of idiots.

These kits do come with step by step manuals, but one of the reasons to get one in the first place is to modify it. It makes sense to figure out what each part does, instead of following a manual.

I doubt that’s deliberate (it’s probably depending on some other task or shit that you don’t even intend to use), but it’s exactly the kind of bloat that turns people away from Windows.

Windows seems to work alright for my work pc, where I’m constantly logged into their cloud, newer switch users, logged in long enough daily to get all the updates and have IT to roll out stuff, so I hardly ever have issues there.

My personal computer is a different thing. I have several users, use it about once weekly, making it basically unbootable. As soon as I open the lid, Microsoft starts bugging me to do a shit load of things and download gigabytes of crap that Microsoft, and not I, needs me to do before I can even use it. More often than not I simply close the lid again.

It’s not unusual to meet people who don’t even have a pc these days. Most people can solve their daily stuff on any cell phone browser. I find it kinda amusing that Microsoft is pushing people that way.

Perhaps someone could make a business of it then.

Chromebooks sold well enough. Google made $30 billion on that in 2023.

Anyone willing to put together a physical Linux machine, market and support it could take a chunk of that.

It would be nice if it was possible to simply go to a website, check off on the stuff you want and then get a full package.

I liked the idea of AV Linux, because it comes in a bundle of stuff that I need, but it also comes with a lot stuff that I don’t need, and I’m not sure the desktop is my choice. It also didn’t really work at the time I tried it.(Some years ago).

So… if I, a stupid user, could simply go to a website, check mark at the desktop, check off which office package, music apps, browser, etc.etc. and then get a download of that in one go where it’s all set-up and works, it would be a lot easier than having to go through the process of installing the OS and then installing/removing apps, and then making it work…

Like, let’s say I want a PC just for music creation, I should be able to download the the OS with the DAW of my choice, all the VSTis and potentially also the most common free sound banks. In one file.

If I wanted an office PC, I should be able to get the OS, the office suite of choice and all the misc. PDF tools, email client and whatnot of choice. All in one go.

Windows and macOS sort of came with everything before, but these days they’re just as annoying to set up as any Linux distribution. Linux as a whole could take advantage of that situation by offering a prepackaged but custom installation.

Of course it would also help if someone made a Linux installer for windows, so users didn’t have to use windows to create a bootable USB. I think this is the step that normal users hesitate on. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it ought to be possible from software to partion the disc and install dual boot or something.

Yes. Linux Mint works “straight out of the box”.

It comes with a preinstalled browser (Firefox), so if you only use your computer for online stuff, then you dont need to do anything at all. Just use it.

The only technical thing you might want to do is to enter the WiFi password and find the software manager to install any additional apps you need.If you can install apps on your phone, then you can also install apps on Linux Mint.

I actually found that it was a lot easier to install Mint than setting up a new Windows pc. The most difficult part was using a windows pc to download it and making a bootable USB stick. Your friend can help you with that or you can follow a guide.

I have had zero issues and I have never written a single command line. It just works.

“Don’t turn off” is the worst kind of status message.

When it eventually hangs for various reasons, you actually do need to turn off your pc for it to complete or to let it roll back in an error state.

When “just hang in there” is still present on the third day you’ll start wondering why you bought that piece of furniture and won’t mind the consequences of turning it off.

I was at a Chinese restaurant on Rhodes about 15 years ago, where they served food windows update style.

We ordered off some menu written in Chinese and Greek letters and in a probably wrongly translated German too, so we had no idea of what we actually ordered. Just accepting the terms, right?

Then they started serving food.

We ate through 3 dishes and was about being full thinking this was a great deal, but then they just served another meal, and like, okay… let’s have a taste, and then it just kept coming in table servings instead of individual servings. Every time we emptied a plate theyd bring in something else. We never asked them for anything though.

A few servings in we realised how we’d misinterpreted the menu and said, ok enough is enough, and they were like “but you must have the dessert, it’s part of the price, you already paid” (we hadn’t actually paid then, but I suppose they meant"included") and so well we ate another three rounds of ice-cream, sugar-fried dumplings and fruit, to the point where I had to stand up and say “No more food! Please no more!”, and the waiter was “More food yes coming up!”. We stopped her and just stood up, throwing a bunch of money on the table according to our order and hoping it was enough. The waiter then came back with change.

Microsoft wouldn’t return your change.

Anyway… epilogue. I get it now. Chinese custom is to leave food when you’re done and an empty plate is a request for more. I was on Rhodes 2 years ago, and tried to find it again, but the restaurant seemed to be gone. There was a kebab shop instead.

Ok, what OS do I need?