But on the other hand, all the reasons that people hate corporate OSes apply much more to Microsoft than Apple. Microsoft is the company that puts ads in their OS and is built entirely out of proprietary tech, and has been more vocal about shoehorning AI into everything.

LOL at Windows being marked as less corporate than MacOS. They should absolutely be at least tied.

Yeah isn’t funny that the joke about Unix/Linux users was they all had bigger beards than lobster fishermen, and now it’s that they’re all transfem.

Any relation to Lucasfilm/Fujitsu Habitat/Habitat II? https://renoproject.org/

It was an early virtual world, running originally on Commodore 64s, later on PCs and (in Japan) Sega Saturn, with a look and style heavily inspired by SCUMM games.

Ah, I just noticed your reply now! I’d say Mint’s about as easy to install as the other major installations. If you don’t care about dual booting, you can just let the installer use the entire hard disk, and that greatly simplifies everything. If you decide to go back to Windows you’ll have to go through that process, of course, but usually you make recovery media early on in your system’s life, and you could boot from that to get back to a factory state.

If you’re new to Linux: Mint. Use Mint, with Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you’re hardware is older. It works just how you’d expect.

There’s many other distros for other purposes. Bazzite has a lot of people who like it for games. If you really want to control EVERYTHING about your machine there’s Arch. If you want bleeding edge software and don’t mind/can fix the occasional problem caused by rolling releases then I suggest Manjaro.

But most Windows refugees will be looking for something familiar that works and stays out of their face, and for that the simple answer is Mint.

There are so many weird things about GIMP, and it feels like they add more over time. I’ve moved a layer and then tried to draw on it and had nothing happen. Why? Because the layer was created as an array of pixels the size of the image, and when I move it there’s now a dead zone where there’s no pixels in the visible image. It turns out there’s a special command to expand moved layers to fill the image: https://docs.gimp.org/3.0/en/gimp-layer-resize-to-image.html

There are times using it that it feels like a maze to navigate to just get my changes reflected in the document.

The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it’s actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don’t need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.

The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there’s no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.

It just seems like it’s a lot of papering over a fairly substantial problem. While the example I gave was Handbrake, which does seem like it should be a unique example, every other piece of software that I check Flatpak versions of also had ludicrously wasteful storage issues.

I’m aware of dependency hell, but it seems to me that most software doesn’t have that as a problem, not if the libraries are sensibly maintained? After all, the fact that upgrading a library can improve all the software that uses it seems like it’s usually a positive thing. And the ballooning storage requirements of Flatpak make it a tool that should be used occasionally, rather as a primary way to release software. Using a filesystem that can detect duplicates would help, but itself also seems like a special-case kind of solution, and not a great solution to turn to just to avoid what seems to me to be a significant issue.

But it appears like we’re in a situation where it’s not used for specific situations, but for lots of different things. Just a few Flatpak programs starts to chew through a significant amount of disk space, and some programs are only being distributed as Flatpaks.

My response to that is Flatpak. 16MB of software requiring 700MB to download and consuming 2.8GB of disk space. Linux absolutely can be bad, due to cultural issues.

(My example software above is Handbrake. I’m sure someone’s going to “well actually” me about this, and I don’t even care. I don’t see how it can be justified, and I’m kind of curious to see if someone can do it.)

I think this may well be the thing that, at long last, eventually leads to the end of the Windows hegemony on PC. Linux compatibility being a prerequisite for running on the default configuration of the Steam Deck. Gaming is the Microsoft OS’s last real stronghold.