Reasons to switch:
- It’s waaaaay cheaper
- A new laptop costs a lot of money. Repair cafes will often help you for free. Software updates are also free, forever. You can of course show your support for both with donations!
- No ads, no spying
- Windows comes with lots of ads and spyware nowadays, slowing down your computer and increasing your energy bill.
- Good for the planet
- Production of a computer accounts for 75+% of carbon emissions over its lifecycle. Keeping a functioning device longer is a hugely effective way to reduce emissions.
- Community support
- If you have any issues with your computer, the local repair cafe and independent computer shop are there for you. You can find community support in online forums, too.
- User control
- You are in control of the software, not companies. Use your computer how you want, for as long as you want.
Hexbear-related reasons to switch:
- Still can use hexbear
- Hexbear requires a web browser (firefox) to use.
- Don’t have to pay for it.
- You’ll receive updates and features for your operating system free of any personal charge to you till the end of time. You can donate directly to volunteers and workers to make your computer better.
- using Windows for Windows or Apple for Apple is liberalism and supports USA/piSSrael
- TBH they copied from us (KDE, GNOME) anyway. Their innovation is being a monopoly and advertising to you.
- Makes you smarter (it’s like reading theory but with computers)
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you’ll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you’d have to waste your soul on.
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you’ll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you’d have to waste your soul on.
Ooof, my general experience with Linux users is that if they say “works flawlessly” they mean 2 weeks of fraught driver installs and using commands taken from the necromomicon.
So I hesitate to think what “a chore” would be
What are you talking about? I haven’t had to fuck with drivers on Linux in like a decade, and even then it was because I had one of those weird gaming laptops that had two GPU’s. “Works flawlessly” to me means just that: install it from your distro’s package manager and it’s ready to go, with perhaps a smidge of configuration if necessary. Retroarch is “a chore” in the sense that it took me like an afternoon of tinkering to get working, and most of that was because I simply didn’t understand the core concept of how to get controllers working.
“Two weeks of fraught driver installs” my ass. And “commands taken from the necronomicon”, really? Are you that afraid of the command line? I’d say you owe it to yourself to give Linux a shot. You’ve got the wrong idea about it, and about those of us who use it.
I think they were specifically referencing my comment about Retroarch, which is has a very messy interface.
Yeah, I came in too aggressive, definitely.
But I dunno, it pisses me off when people (who have never used Linux) are so, so certain it’s impossibly difficult. Because it makes using Linux seem like a scary choice, when it’s really not that scary. Horror stories about weeks of driver hell just aren’t true, and haven’t been in literal decades and yet we still have people who will never try Linux because someone on the internet made a snarky comment about how hard it is.
So that’s the emotional place my comment was coming from. It was supposed to be basically a “please don’t talk like this about Linux, it’s false and you’re scaring people away”. But I didn’t express that well, especially because of my aggressiveness right out of the gate. The internet has been getting to me recently, I think I need to take some time off and touch some grass so I don’t immediately jump into every internet conversation with aggression.
This still happens, but it is limited pretty much exclusively to when you buy exotic hardware that was literally released yesterday (not completely impossible if you are choosing a brand new laptop to install Linux on), that no Linux users have had the chance to even test yet. Drivers get tweaked, new device IDs get added to udev so the correct driver can be assigned to the device, and there is a delay before these bleeding edge changes appear in stable distributions.
Or if you buy hardware which requires a huge gimmicky proprietary software component to work (along the lines of a Razer keyboard which can only be programmed using the Razer app). These usually get reverse engineered, but when it is a high effort - low reward situation it can take a while.