That’s capitalism for you. The owners get all the profits. The people doing the actual labor get a salary, which is as low as possible.

There’s that bit in Baldur’s gate 2 where some NPCs decide they can take you on, die, and then reload the game.

How new is your computer?

I found Pop!_OS worked out of the box fine on my new desktop.

Mint had problems, but worked fine on my older computers.

Back up any important software (like, on a separate drive or online). Get a couple flash drives. Try out mint, popos, bazzite. They’re all free so it doesn’t matter that much if you don’t like one.

I don’t recommend trying to dual boot on one drive because windows is a rude room mate.

I think it would be pretty funny if jesus did return and cast all these rich assholes into the lake of fire. Because they fucking deserve it.

Setting up a windows VM at my old job took like a few minutes, but I already had virtual box (I think that’s what I used)

And I needed to see some software running in a Windows box while editing the code that talked to it.

Depends on what you need to do. You could mount a folder to get files in or out, for some cases.

Have you used virtual machines before? Done software development?

You think making a VM takes two weeks? I’m pretty sure Microsoft provides images you can just pop into virtualbox, but it’s been a while since I used VMs.

Also if you need to use the windows software alongside your regular workflow (eg: reading info out of the windows software with your eyes and then typing into your IDE or terminal), rebooting the whole thing is going to suck.

Yes but if you dual boot there’s no VM needed LOL

You want to reboot the entire system when you need to use a Windows only application? Instead of just opening up a VM?

…what? How are you going to do any modern day work on the host machine with no Internet access? Are you going to air gap your windows machine?

Still happy I switched to Linux. Been playing divinity original sin 2 without any problems. (It’s one of those games I’ve started a hundred times but only finished once.)

You can restrict network access to the VM and still do normal network stuff on the host machine, for one thing.

Still happy here in Linux.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.

When I have to use discord, I use it in the browser. I don’t trust the app not to get up to no good.

I’ve recently started to have to use Teams at work and wow it’s awful. In subtle and overt ways.

Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.

Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.

I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.

Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.

But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

It’s striking how little many people know about history and politics, but more concerning is how little they care. My old coworkers just don’t seem to care much. And they won’t even feel shame because their only priority seems to be protecting their ego.

Reminds me of Brent from The Good Place, honestly. “No. No. I’m a good person. I’m a good person!!”