Windows 95, 2000/XP, and 7 were all very nice OSs. DirectX and whatever other APIs helped PC gaming. Windows Phone 8/10 are an interesting paradigm I wish still existed. The Xbox 360 blades dashboard (and later the NXE) ushered in an era we’re arguably still living in. WSL.
Embarrassingly, make a Windows 10-like OS. (More specifically, a window manager, probably.) Or have an affirmative vision for the future (non-Windows 95-derived) like Niri or (fascist-adjacent) Omarchy. 15+ years ago I booted my first distro. I ran Ubuntu with Unity on a side PC for years. Good for single screen use. I daily drove Debian for 3 months in 2018 but never got it to look more modern than Windows 2000. I never “enjoyed” it. This matches my thoughts. https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/10/deduplicating_the_desktops/
Going to try out https://www.anduinos.com/ and Zorin. Have done distro hop roulette for months and a lot of them are unsatisfying. KDE looks close to how I want but runs slow e.g. https://lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz/post/58790510
I’m big on super+arrow to move windows from one screen to another. I rarely need more than 4 active windows per display. But my big problem with tiling is that I like seeing the windows I have open at the bottom of my screen. (this was for my laptop but similar points https://lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz/post/58681232 )
My side OS on my main PC is Mint with MATE, but I also don’t gel with it. Ran it on a family PC for years and it did the job for casual use. Random gripe off the top of my head I think applies in MATE: sorting is in byte order, not in brain order. Many linuxes sort 10, 1, 2 instead of 1, 2, 10. MATE and Xfce (iirc) have terrible file operation handling compared to Windows or (the gold standard?) Teracopy in Windows.
Every default GUI archive/extract program in Linux sucks, that I could find. I prefer Peazip but even 7z-gui (the stock one) is good. Even native windows zip support feels more pleasant. This goes back to a bazzite/omarchy philosophy of shipping software that is good, instead of defaults that suck.
Oddly enough I kind of respect AntiX + IceWM, as well as Lxqt / Lubuntu more than most of the crap modern WMs I’ve used.
SSH key exchange / setup is a fucking nightmare and I don’t know why I’m copy pasting keys into text files or piping multiple commands together for the 50% odds that my OS setup allows it. I still don’t really understand the Linux threat model where passwords on a local account make sense. (Is it to prevent local scripts from escalating to admin?)
I’ve run Linux servers for 5 years and I run WSL, but nothing clicks per se. I’m always more at home in Windows. Niri feels close to what I want, but too high a learning curve. I may make a post about it someday.
Total tangent, but IMO this is the state of the art in data retention: https://superuser.com/questions/374609/what-medium-should-be-used-for-long-term-high-volume-data-storage-archival/873260#873260
Huge win for Linux. Steam Deck was the first volley, but this hardware is an all-out assault on Windows’ gaming dominance. MS is asleep at the wheel and making worse and worse software. I’m a 20 year Windows user and I’m planning my exit. If I were a gaming executive, I would assume 5 years from now that a smaller percentage of Steam users will be on Windows than there are today. I would want a damn good reason for my company’s next game to not have full Linux support.
Microsoft will either:
My money is on #4. Windows will probably be the #1 desktop/laptop OS for the next 20 years, but we could enter a world where Linux and MacOS are each 10% or more of the market. Steam shows 95% Windows but that’s for a gaming-focused market.
Valve isn’t perfect. They’re still a corporation. But if every company was as evil as Valve, we would achieve near world peace. They’ve contributed amazing things to open source through heavy investment.
I like lxqt. What keyboard actions are you using and how did you configure them? On windows I do super+left or right to move windows.
99% is ubuntu lts + ansible playbook that removes snap, disables A TON of update naggings, installs flatpak, coupla apps and systemd timer to autoupdate all flatpaks
Is this public?
Try locally. Facebook marketplace is huge in the USA. It’s a royal pain to sell tech offline, so you get good deals. Selection is worse so just broaden your search or be patient.
Business laptops are more rugged and serviceable. 4chan’s /g/ has a thread for “thinkpad general” which is all the business laptops. (Mind the 4chan racism and transphobia.) I’ve found that Dells are far more common (and thus cheap) than comparable HPs or Thinkpads.
For some price comparison, I sold a 6th gen Intel Dell laptop with a 1080p screen for about $60. On ebay they run $40-$100.
ARM Chromebook running non-chrome is, afaik, barely functional to get to a terminal. Don’t think of running anything Linux on them unless you really like hardware development.
It’s case-by-case. Fascists are going to invade and appropriate every shred of culture they can find. But some of their choice culture is so toxic that they will own it for a long time. “Final Solution” and “Concentration Camp”. But others like “living space” are probably not forever nazi.
Do you have any more info? I see there’s an exploit called “boothole” as well as several Windows bootloaders that are vulnerable. https://eclypsium.com/blog/boothole-how-it-started-how-its-going/
What distro? I was on Kubuntu 25.10. Did you record it? It’s hard to see in real time.