• AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 days ago

      I do some e-wasting for a number of big companies and have piles of old laptops. I’ve taken to giving the laptops to people that need computers and the ones with Linux don’t taken. I literally can’t give away Linux computers. They can buy their own windows licenses.

  • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Like if people actually cared that a Windows version goes EoL. That literally means nothing to most people and typical PC user won’t even notice anything until something will functionally break, which will take YEARS after it’s EoL.

  • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
    152·
    2 days ago
    • Plasma is more similar to Windows
    • Plasma is more customizable
    • Plasma is just as beginner-friendly
    • Plasma has more features
    • Plasma is more actively developed
    • Plasma looks better

    Don’t get me wrong, Cinnamon is fine, but it gets recommended religiously to beginners for some reason. It just doesn’t make sense, so I will keep repeating this, not least to keep alive the ancient linux tradition of Desktop wars.

    Still, any Windows to Linux transition is a step forward and I support this, upvoted.

    • Karu 🐲@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 days ago

      As someone who has extensively used both Cinnamon and Plasma: I find Plasma a lot less polished, by a huge margin. Not only do settings have unusual defaults and are located in places you wouldn’t expect, it also often has desktop-breaking bugs out of nowhere even in stable versions, and this has only gotten worse with Wayland. Even as someone who has been using Arch for years now, I still struggle with getting Plasma to not shit itself every once in a while.

      Cinnamon on the other hand does have a lot less features out of the box, but the few things it does, it does them well, and every setting is where a sane person would search for them.

      I would not recommend Plasma to a Linux beginner at all. It’s the kind of unpolished mess that would make anyone who doesn’t care enough about computers to just give up and go back to Windows.

      • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Hm thanks for sharing your experience, it’s very different from mine though. Have you used Plasma recently (Version 6+) ? And have you used it on a distro where it came pre-packaged? In my (limited) experience any DE installed on Arch is janky out of the box.

        • Karu 🐲@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          I am running Plasma 6.2.1 as we speak. Admittedly, yes, using Arch has certainly made it less stable. But more often than not, when I search the web for some strange behavior/bug/limitation in my desktop, I often find dozens of threads with lots of people reporting the same misbehavior or limitation from all over the distro space, and I have come to the conclussion that it’s not entirely Arch’s fault at that point.

          Have you done literally any customization to panels? I swear that shit keeps crashing whenever I do so much as unpinning a simple app launcher plasmoid, and even if it didn’t crash, it still takes patience to navigate through all the menus. They completely overhauled the way panel settings look and behave, and I still find the experience annoying as hell. In contrast, customizing panels is pretty straightforward in Cinnamon, and works as expected. It merely doesn’t look as good.

          I don’t hate Plasma, or else I would have switched to another DE by now, but this is mostly because I have learned to tame it, and that took a lot of effort that no beginner should have to go through. Cinnamon is like, the polar opposite of that, which is why I’m okay with it being religiously recommended to beginners.

          KDE’s priorities are just kinda weird. I have the similar issues with Krita, an otherwise excellent drawing program.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    11·
    2 days ago

    Remember when Windows XP reached EoL the first time in 2009 and people abandoned it? Yeah, me neither, but I remember Microsoft groaning and extending some support for a few more years, until the final EoL in 2014. I expect the same to happen to 10.

  • Zink@programming.dev
    24·
    2 days ago

    Oh is this an excuse to hop on the Mint praise train? Don’t mind if I do!

    For me it was smoother than windows to install, it runs much better moment to moment (it’s like the people that made it were worried about making nice software rather than the business goals being pushed by their managers), and most importantly the fact that it is the “beginner” distro doesn’t compromise its capabilities. I am in the terminal all day every day and I use the machine to work on software for embedded Linux systems.

    • BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 days ago

      Mint was so easy to install. I’m pretty new to Linux. Not afraid of having to do things in the terminal, but I don’t really know many commands yet. So, I appreciate the graphical managers for updates and drivers. You can definitely tell they really worked to make a polished OS. And I really like Cinnamon. It’s a very clean looking DE that has been super easy to transition to from Windows.

      Unlike Kubuntu, I didn’t have to do any tricks or install anything from github to get stuff from my Steam library to work, everything just worked. And Kubuntu (or perhaps just Wayland) would crash upon waking my PC from sleep and wouldn’t recover.

  • Killer57@lemmy.ca
    13·
    2 days ago

    The Steam Deck and it’s desktop mode is why I decided to try jumping head first into a single boot of Bazzite on my main computer, it’s basically like using a Steam deck, just across four monitors, a year in and I haven’t looked back.

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    The average user cares less about their OS being EoL, than that they have to learn a whole new OS that works “completely” different to what they are used to.

    • dingdong@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      This just objectively isn’t true. The XP EOL date actually forced users hands. There WAS refresh cycle in 2014, the only reason it didn’t turn in to the uprising it is seemingly turned into, is because Microsoft kinda got lucky, and this refresh cycle purged Pentim 4-s and Celeron M-s and Pentium D-s, and old Athlons, all of which were ewaste from new.

  • dance_ninja@lemmy.world
    13·
    2 days ago

    I’m experimenting with Pop!_OS on my aging laptop running it on a USB drive. Was happy to see it supports 2-in-1 functionality.

  • Lad@reddthat.com
    31·
    3 days ago

    I’m a Linux noob so I put Mint on my PC. I like it a lot, very smooth and clean looking.

    • kusivittula@sopuli.xyz
      12·
      3 days ago

      i have been using mint (cinnamon) too for like a year and a half. every now and then i try another distro and a few more, but i always land back where i started. it even looks pretty with the “sweet dark v40” gtk theme.

  • Switorik@lemmy.zip
    221·
    3 days ago

    I will likely go back to mint once Windows 10 is done. 11 is pure trash.

    The major hang up I have is gaming. I have an Nvidia card and it’s never behaved well with Linux. I also like GTAO but I will no longer be able to play it. Most of my other titles work fine.

    I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.

    • NutWrench@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      I switched to Linux Mint several months ago. Thanks to Proton, All my Steam games that I bought for Windows run great. (I’m using an nVidia RTX 3060). And any older games like “Deus Ex” or “Giants: Citizen Kabuto” run under Wine, using the default settings.

    • nublug@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      6·
      3 days ago

      pop!os reportedly packs in and handles the proprietary nvidia drivers for you, which can be a pain to handle yourself. i haven’t tried it nor do i have nvidia but i see it highly recommended a lot.

      • methodicalaspect@midwest.socialEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Am using Pop!_OS for video editing (DaVinci Resolve Studio) and gaming with nvidia GPU. I don’t have to think much about the operating system or GPU drivers, they work perfectly fine and get out of the way when I need to do some work.

        Also have it installed on both kids’ PCs (both with nvidia GPUs) and my wife’s laptop (AMD iGPU). My son has installed a few GNOME extensions to customize; my wife and daughter have left it pretty much stock. It’s about as unobtrusive as an OS can get.

        I will always have a special place in my heart for EndeavourOS, but right now, I feel like I have a more solid foundation with Pop!_OS.

        • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          have you tried Kdenlive and Olive? i heard those are very advanced and open-source. I will also switch to those from InShot

          • methodicalaspect@midwest.socialEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            I got my start with kdenlive and still pull up some of my old project files in it, yeah. It’s really good, has a much better feature set than one would expect.

            I got into the Blackmagic ecosystem with an Intensity Pro 4k capture card and was pretty happy to see that they offer native Linux support, even if it is for Rocky 8, so I snagged one of their Resolve Speed Editors, which came with a Resolve Studio license, and I’ve been using that ever since.

    • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world
      5·
      3 days ago

      I too am in a conundrum. I like the idea of Linux a lot, but pretty much all I use my laptop for is a) Excel and b) very rarely games, neither of which make sense to use Linux for.

      I’ll build a home server at some point and I think that’ll be my start.

      • daggermoon@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        Have you tried Libre Office? It’s an open source Microsoft Office alternative that works pretty great. You can try it on Windows.

        • anomnom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          In my experience people who really use excel are always going to need excel.

          Also in my experience excel runs great on Mac Laptops, which are so much better than any other laptop I’ve touched in the last 20 years. If you’ve tried their touchpads you’ll know what I mean. Total game changers for truly mobile computing working without a desk.

          • dufkm@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            In my experience people who really use excel are always going to need excel

            That’s my experience too, unfortunately. LibreOffice is lagging too far behind O365 on features that you can reliably cooperate on spreadsheets across applications. Something like e.g. XLOOKUP is a fairly recent addition in Calc.

    • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      2 days ago

      If your system supports windows 11 then dual boot for the games you want windows support for.

      Then you have a bare metal option for those games and you can run whatever distro you want along side it.